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From juror RickyV: If you were Miss Colombia, what would you do?

We know what we’d do if we were the host: Enter the witness protection program.

Proof that in the Philippines you don’t have to watch the news to know the news.

At 1124hrs we wake up (we slept late because we’re binge-watching Fargo) and check our messages. Our sister said: “Proof that I live in the bakla capital—the collective scream in my neighbourhood as Miss Philippines was declared Miss Universe.”

Then Ricky’s text: “omg you have to watch Miss Universe kahit last 15 minutes. nakalimutan ko ang star wars.”

Then my sister explained what had transpired. Note: She didn’t watch the pageant, either, she just got an update from her Viber group.

Back to Ricky: “I hope you avoid spoilers for this one!”

Too late. But this is even better than a straightforward win because it has so much drama. Telenovela! Oppression (though unintentional) quickly followed by justice!

We remembered to text our congratulations to Jeffrey, who works with Jonas Gaffud at beauty queen training camp. He said: “Both Colombia and the Phils were gunning for their third title. Kung pinagawa na naman ni Stella Marquez kay Barazza, who is Colombian, yung national costume and evening gown natin and Colombia won over the Phils, she’d be massacred.”

Gunning? Natin? And can one person be massacred? But such is the Pinoy obsession with beauty pageants.

Superpowers are one of the less interesting elements in Marvel’s Jessica Jones. They’re very useful, and they account for the heroine’s ability to sleep soundly despite having a broken front door, but they don’t protect her from life itself. No wonder she’s so pissed off.

She certainly doesn’t need superpowers to intimidate people. As played by Krysten Ritter, Jones looks like a model, dresses like a roadie in a metal band, takes no shit from anyone, and has a hard stare that can freeze your insides. She’s Humphrey Bogart as Sam Spade, with a resemblance to Filipino movie queen Gloria Romero. “New York may be the city that never sleeps,” she says over the moody jazzy score, “but it sure does sleep around.” As a private investigator, she specializes in unearthing illicit sex and deceit, and if that wasn’t enough to turn her into a hard-drinking cynic, she’s also dealing with a personal trauma. That trauma provides the plot for season one of the Netflix series created by Melissa Rosenberg, based on one of the lesser-known Marvel comic books.

Continue reading.

The Binge is on a break till 8 January, giving us time to catch up on the new shows. And there’s the Sherlock special coming up.

…and retrieves our childhood from the garbage bin where it has languished since those prequels that we never have to mention ever again because it’s like they never happened. If you’ve been curbing your enthusiasm until the reviews come in, this is all you need to know: It doesn’t suck!! We want to see it again! Thank you, J.J. Abrams, and we’re sorry we had no faith. Now run to the cinema because you have exactly one week to see it before the MMFF opens (though I suppose it will continue to screen at IMAX theatres).

Read our review at InterAksyon.

The truth is, we went to the Uniqlo-sponsored premiere for the free T-shirt.

When it was announced a couple of years ago that a new set of Star Wars movies would be made and J.J. Abrams would be in charge, we refused to get excited. Fool us once, shame on you, fool us twice, shame on us, fool us thrice, freeze us in carbonite. Four times: that’s not going to happen. So we claimed our excellent Uniqlo T-shirts and chose the ones with no Star Wars logo so we had deniability. (“Oh, this is a Star Wars T-shirt? We just liked the design.”) Listen, after those prequels the bar was so low that if we didn’t feel like bludgeoning the filmmakers unconscious with a miniature of the Millennium Falcon, we would count it a success. So to find that The Force Awakens is actually pretty good—wow. As Ricky put it, today we are 11.

Congratulations to our friends Dennis Lustico and Noel Orosa, creators of On The Go! Their project for Campaigns & Grey has won a global award for excellence in public relations.

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Introducing On-The-Go, the cargo pants with a secret, created by Dennis Lustico, Mon Pineda, James Reyes and Noel Orosa.

The feature at InterAksyon is no longer available, but you can read our article from 2015 at BusinessWorld.

On-The-Go retails at PHP 800.00 and comes in three colors: navy blue, black, and khaki. There are five waist sizes for men: Extra Small (29 inches), Small (30-31 inches), Medium (32-33 inches), Large (34-35 inches) and Extra Large (36 inches). To order, please contact Alyssa Lustico at 0926-7560494 or (02)8460915, email d_lustico@yahoo.com, or leave a comment.

Sylvester Stallone as Rocky Balboa again, and Michael B. Jordan as Adonis Creed.

Creed goes back to the things that made the original Rocky work: the intimate human drama of a sweet loser who suddenly gets the chance to be somebody, plus that musical score by Bill Conti, anchored by Stallone playing a human being and not an action figure. Of course it’s corn. Don’t knock corn, it’s one of the reasons we go to the movies. There’s bad corn—manipulative schmaltz that makes you feel cheap afterwards, like your brain has been violated. There’s bland corn—movies like In the Heart of the Sea which may be well-made and even impressive but make you feel nothing. And there’s good corn, which earns your emotional responses and allows you to cry or cheer without embarrassment. Put Creed in this category.

Usually naming kids after mythically beautiful men is a bad idea, but not in this case.

Rating: Highly recommended.

Read our column at InterAksyon.com.

According to his colleague Coeli Barry, Ben was in Jakarta on December 10 for the launch of the translation of his book, Under Three Flags (where he traces the influence of anarchism on the work of Jose Rizal and Isabelo de los Reyes). Afterwards, he went to Surabaya in the eastern part of Java, then to Batu, Malang. He was asleep in his hotel room on Friday night when his breathing became very loud and uneven. Ben had severe sleep apnea, which may have caused his heart to stop.

As of today, 13 December, his body is lying at a funeral home in Surabaya where people will be able to pay their respects.

It was Ben’s wish that his ashes be scattered in Java. Ben had been barred from Indonesia in 1973 after he and Ruth McVey produced a paper arguing that the 30 September Movement in 1965 was not the work of the Indonesian communists as claimed by the Suharto government, but an internal army affair. (Early last year we asked Ben about Joshua Oppenheimer’s acclaimed film on the mass executions of accused communists in Indonesia, The Act of Killing. Ben didn’t like it. He explained why, but we couldn’t hear him because the mall was noisy and Ben had a very soft voice. Even in a quiet place we had to strain to hear him.)

His books Imagined Communities, The Spectre of Comparisons, and Under Three Flags are necessary reading for people who wish to understand the roots of the Filipino nation. The last time we saw Ben was after the launch of El Diablo en Filipinas, his translation of Isabelo de los Reyes’s comic story. The world is dumber for his passing.