I was running on semiautomaticpilot yesterday. I was late for an hour and a half for my lunch with Nathan, and I had to appease him with some Chocolate Kiss dessert. But as always, I enjoyed hanging out with him. He has discovered that being poster boy doesn't make everything easy. We had so many ideas before, how we could change a lot things. He could teach kids, show them how to be a real iskolar ng bayan. I could write for television and try to get rid of such formulaic, trashy copycats. Then came disillusionment. Or perhaps reality. So next semester he'll be teaching at the Ateneo -- land of the young and coño. As for me, the new season of the new and improved Kasangga will begin. I just hope that there will be enough stories of courage, survival and heroism to keep us going. Each to his own happiness, I guess.

There was still a lot of time left before my interview with a gutsy kidnapping victim. I wanted to ready for that. I knew that if I got at least twenty minutes of sleep I could be up and about and not ask stupid questions. So I thought I'd go to the mall and sit inside a theatre and sleep and watch my workshop buddy Sig's acting debut. Sig is a huge guy with a shaved head and two curly patches of hair that looked like horns. He makes a good scary goon and is very useful when walking in dark crowded places. Sig adores Erik Matti but he still got killed midway through Dos Ekis.

I realized that one couldn't sleep inside a theatre, not when there's gorgeous scoring provided by Lourd de Veyra of Radioactive Sago, and there are soft blinking neon lights and Rica Peralejo is shimmying her butt out in front of you. But the real attraction of Dos Ekis is not Rica Peralejo, Raven Villanueva or the four silicones between them. It is Benito, played by Mark Anthony Fernandez with enough naivete and hopefulness, sincerity and a belief that everything can be all right. Benito lives at the flipside of a dilapidated theatre's screen. Robin Padilla movies are continually shown, flipside, and he knows all the words to it. When Rica's Charisse says that guys like Benito aren't real, they only exist in movies, she is only half right. Benito is real. He earnestly purchases a gold watch and offers it to Charisse, because he adores her. He willingly goes to the Master Goon himself to settle the score in her behalf. He knows he's going to get blown, but tells her he will go and do it, and when he comes out of it alive, he will meet her at the docks so they can build a new life. He wills himself to survive. Bloodied and weak, he even purchases her a bouquet and trudges back to the pier. There is no Rica in sight. When he collapses spread eagled amid the container vans, despair is written all over him. He wants the happy ending, he wants to get the girl, but he's there dying alone. It makes you want to die with him.

There is this last moment in the end while Charisse is being taken away, and we can hear the police officer talking with his wife on the phone, and we see Raven's Libay waking up at the police station, hopeful but knowing that everything is lost, and Benito is dying. That was wonderful if not for the fact that Rica comes off as a blank. In Sa Huling Paghihintay, the Bernard Palanca character walked away with the movie. The characters she is given to play are supposed to be mysterious and strong and are imbued with a sense of fate, but even if her life depended on it, and not just a movie, Rica Peralejo cannot act. And so the burden and strength of the Rica movies lie on the men: that despite of it, in spite it, Benito et al realize that she has affected their lives to the point of disillusionment, and death.