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Daniel Kaluuya and Allison Williams (Marnie from Girls) star in Jordan Peele’s Get Out

You need to see this movie. It’s genuinely scary and funny AND it tackles oppression without once mentioning oppression. It’s consciousness-raising without the lecture. People who fancy themselves broad-minded think that because they voted for Obama, idolize black athletes and have black friends, they can’t possibly be racist, but benign racism is particularly insidious. (And the movie is produced by the studio that made Insidious.) Some of the horror comes from the shock of recognition.

Director Jordan Peele takes your expectations and turns them on their heads. Unrelentingly clever and expertly orchestrated, Get Out is required viewing for the year 2017. Bravo.

It’s heartwarming, discovering that clever people whose work we admire can be just as stupid about money as we are.

Richard Linklater, the director of Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, Before Midnight and many other movies we love, explains why he’s glad he got downsized.

Anthony Bourdain seems to have all the answers, but when he was 44 he had never had a savings account, hadn’t filed taxes in 10 years, and was AWOL on his AmEx bill.

Watch TRIPPIES online at PhilStar TV. (Thanks, jaypee, for sending the revised link.)

Answers to questions you might ask:

1. Yes, it is completely unscripted and spontaneous.
2. Yes, Pepe and I were acquainted but we never hung out until we started filming Trippies.
3. Yes, we have no make-up or styling because we have enough to do without worrying about how we look. Yes, we could do with make-up and styling. (After I viewed the first two episodes I realized I should go back to wearing black because I look even weirder in color.)
4. No, I have the easiest job on the show because I just stand there and yak while everyone has to plan and execute shots, etc.
5. No, the age difference is an advantage to me because I can use it as an excuse. Example: Naah, I won’t go down the loooong stairs to the underground tunnel, I might re-injure my knee.

TRIPPIES airs on Sundays at 730pm on CNN Philippines, with replays Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays at lunchtime. Pepe and I guest on Real Talk with Christine Jacob Sandejas and Rachel Alejandro this week.

Possibly because the arrogant and obnoxious have no problem doing what most people would not allow themselves to do.

Most Urapmin spend their lives trying to find balance between wilfulness and lawfulness. Moving back and forth between their two values, most people never realise either one completely, but at the same time, they never fail to fulfil each of them in partial ways. I think Kinimnok captivated other Urapmin because he showed them what wilfulness in its fullest form looks like. Most of them would never follow him in realising wilfulness so absolutely, but in Kinimnok they saw what wilfulness looked like when it was given free expression.

Read the article in Aeon.

Meanwhile, in other political matters

Movie: Kong: Skull Island

Jordan Vogt-Roberts’ reboot of King Kong is not bad—it’s an entertaining way to pass two hours plus, and the monsters are properly monstrous. Samuel Jackson is just parodying himself now—I guess he’ll only bring it for Quentin Tarantino—but the extended hommage to Apocalypse Now is amusing, down to the name of the ex-SAS tracker played by Tom Hiddleston (Conrad). The Marlon Brando-Kurtz character is divided between Jackson who does menacing bonkers and John C. Reilly, who lives with the locals and does benign bonkers. All fine actors, as is Oscar-winning Brie Larson, but the best actor in the movie is Kong, motion capture work by Toby Kebbell. He wins the macho power pose-off paws down. (Kebbell, a memorable Koba in Rise of the Planet of the Apes, is the heir apparent to Andy Serkis’s mocap throne.)

But as those of us who dutifully sat through the end credits were reminded, Kong: Skull Island is the beginning of yet another franchise—I gather Mothra and King Ghidorah are in our moviegoing future. This upteenth reboot was not necessary, it’s just business. The 1933 original by Cooper and Schoedsack is still the essential version, though I have a special fondness for the King Kong remake of my childhood starring Jessica Lange and Jeff Bridges. Lange was so fabulous, as my friend Raul puts it: “Sana ako na lang ang kinidnap ng unggoy.”

Book: Autumn by Ali Smith

A very old man wakes up, thinks he is in the afterlife, finds his body is young again. A woman tries to get her passport renewed, is told her head in the photo is the wrong size. When she was a child she was great friends with the old man, who lived next door and collected “arty art”. Now he lives in a hospice, where he is expected to die, and she visits him regularly and reads to him. The Brexit vote has just happened, and a pall has descended over the land.

These are some of the elements of Ali Smith’s latest novel, part of a series on the seasons. It’s been called the first great Brexit novel, and it captures the queasy aftermath of that event but is so much more. Like her previous novel How To Be Both, Autumn is about time itself. It’s astounding. Every other page there’s a paragraph, a turn of phrase that seems to open up a portal to another place, another era. It’s time travel disguised as a novel. I love it. I would work for free as Ali Smith’s typist, just to read her work before everyone else does.

If you caught the first episode of Trippies (Thank you! Replays on CNN Philippines today at 1230pm and Saturday at 11am), you may recall how Pepe and I, two non-athletic people, wondered what Olympic-level skills we have. Mine is sleeping. I can sleep through anything. Sometimes on long-haul flights I’m asleep before take-off. I seriously believe that writing gets done during sleep, when the brain is resting and free to work out the details.

Given today’s 24-hour work schedules and omnipresent gadgetry, more and more people are having trouble sleeping. I’ve noticed that the rare occasions I cannot fall asleep are when my brain won’t shut up (After I’ve seen an excellent movie and cannot stop thinking about it, or after I’ve finished a piece of writing and cannot stop criticizing it). Sleep experts tell us to turn off our screens, but I find that playing videos I’ve already seen helps me to zone out and eventually lose consciousness. Agatha Christie’s Poirot and Seinfeld, which by now I have memorized, help me to fall asleep. Also BBC documentaries.

Sometimes I really cannot fall asleep, so I accept that sleep has eluded me, pick up a book, and resolve to go to bed early the following day.

Clinicians have long known that there is a strong link between sleep, sunlight and mood. Problems sleeping are often a warning sign or a cause of impending depression, and can make people with bipolar disorder manic. Some 15 years ago, Dr. Francesco Benedetti, a psychiatrist in Milan, and colleagues noticed that hospitalized bipolar patients who were assigned to rooms with views of the east were discharged earlier than those with rooms facing the west — presumably because the early morning light had an antidepressant effect.

The notion that we can manipulate sleep to treat mental illness has also been around for many years. Back in the late 1960s, a German psychiatrist heard about a woman in Tübingen who was hospitalized for depression and claimed that she normally kept her symptoms in check by taking all-night bike rides. He subsequently demonstrated in a group of depressed patients that a night of complete sleep deprivation produced an immediate, significant improvement in mood in about 60 percent of the group.

Read Yes, Your Sleep Schedule Is Making You Sick