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Ricki and the Flash, an Oscars reunion, is maudlin, belabored, hollow, and features the second worst Meryl Streep performance in our memory (“Worsted” only by her Witch in the altogether horrible bowdlerized film adaptation of Into the Woods; her title role in Mamma Mia is third). We didn’t believe a moment of this Jonathan Demme-helmed, Diablo Cody-written vehicle, and only our faith that Meryl would do something amazing at the last minute kept us in our seats. At the last minute we concluded that she could not technique her way out of this. Rick Springfield is more believable than Meryl is—a sentence we never thought we would type. Casting beats technique in this round. (Her cover of Bruce Springsteen: Aieeeeeee.)

For a rockstar/horrible mother we can believe in, check out Julianne Moore in What Maisie Knew.

Rick Springfield reminds us of Jesse’s Girl which reminds us of this scene from Boogie Nights. Between a bonkers Alfred Molina, that coked-up look on Mark Wahlberg’s face, and the Asian boy setting off firecrackers: perfection.

Dino Ignacio, creator of the proto-meme Bert Is Evil (and designer of our first website twisted.com.ph), has left Electronic Arts, where he was User Interface Director at Visceral Games (developer of the survival horror game Dead Space).

Photo from vrfocus.com.

He has joined Oculus VR, maker of the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset. Facebook bought Oculus last year for 2 billion dollars.

Oculus Rift photo from The Guardian

This is a shocking development because Electronic Arts is doing the new Star Wars games and Dino loves Star Wars so much he used to go around in an imperial stormtrooper uniform. For all we know he still wears it to do the groceries, because we haven’t seen him in over a decade.

While watching the very gray trailer for the Batman vs Superman movie, we remembered Rex Navarette’s stand-up routine, Maritess vs the Superfriends, which Dino illustrated and animated.

Since we only do antisocial media (i.e. actual conversation over a meal), we only heard of Dino’s career movements two weeks ago when we saw Budjette and Joey.

The revolution is being televised, in the form of a cyber-thriller on the previously unheralded USA Network. Written and produced by Sam Esmail, Mr Robot is so plugged into the zeitgeist that you could watch it instead of the nightly news. In the series premiere, an anarchist group called fsociety hacks into a conglomerate’s systems and makes confidential information available to the public. In the real world, a website for cheaters was hacked and sensitive personal information made available to the public.

The airing of Mr Robot’s season one finale was postponed because of its distressing similarity to an actual event: the on-air murder of two journalists in Virginia. This is not the first time that the real world has borrowed its script from television. Sixteen years ago, an episode of Buffy The Vampire Slayer was pulled from the air because it featured a student who was apparently planning mass murder. The episode had been shot before the Columbine massacre, but was delayed due to concerns about school violence.

Read our TV column The Binge at BusinessWorld.

Uh-oh.

First the monkeys and now this.

Thanks to Juan for the alert.

Last week we found these vintage sunglasses at a store in Greenbelt. They look like they should be worn while driving to Biarritz in a convertible. We took the frames to our optometrist Nella Sarabia to have the lenses replaced with our own prescription lenses.

In Nella’s shop window we saw these Kate Spade frames, black outside, purple inside, Php1500. We had those glasses made, too.

We picked up our new glasses this morning. It takes just two days to have prescription lenses made, one day if you’re really in a hurry.

Nella Sarabia’s store is at the UP Shopping Center in Diliman. To make an appointment, call (02)435.5685.

Thirstily swallowed by a humiliated France, the dominant narrative of the French Resistance was cooked up by General de Gaulle – “Joan of Arc in trousers”, Churchill testily called him – when he addressed the crowds outside the Hôtel de Ville on August 25, 1944. “Paris liberated! Liberated by its own efforts, liberated by its people with the help of the armies of France, with the help of all of France.”

Yet, as Robert Gildea exposes in this comprehensive survey of the French Resistance, the myth that the French freed themselves is largely poppycock, like de Gaulle’s boast that only “a handful of scoundrels” behaved badly under four years of Nazi occupation. (One example: by October 1943, 85,000 French women had children fathered by Germans.) Most of the population didn’t engage with their revolutionary past until the last moment, when the chief thing they recaptured was their pride. The first French soldier into Paris was part of a regiment “called ‘la Nueve’ because it was composed mainly of Spanish republicans”.

Read it. Thanks to Tina for the alert.

We love Paris, but we know the whole Resistance story is merde. Please, cheese-eating surrender monkeys, you know what you did. You are not Marguerite Duras.