Teenagers in Australia feel practically
dismembered without their mobile phones:

Today's youth store more than just birthdays,
phone numbers, bank account details and tax
file numbers in their phones. "'My mobile
is my life, I'd be lost without it."

I don't care about your freaking dogma!

Thus cried The Duke in Baz Luhrman's Moulin
Rouge. The movie is so lush, it practically
breathes hot air around your neck and down
your blouse. For all I care, it is the director's
way of saying that he doesn't give a flying hoot
about the movement started by Lars von Trier,
director of Breaking the Waves and
Dancer in the Dark.

Dogma95 espouses simplicity, natural lighting,
no fancy mise-en-scene and flashy camera
movements. If the dogma people were the
Spanish Inquisition, then Luhrman's head
would be on a plate by now.

Everyone knows that you should never
sleep with your teacher.

PNP chief Director Gen. Leandro Mendoza wants
to ban the film Red Diaries, claiming that the
film decries what he called the brutal portrayal of
policemen in the film.

"We are not wife beaters and rapists.
People might think we are like that.
But we are not."

We forgot. They are more brutal than that.

Will the real Sappho please stand up?

Throughout history, Sappho has been
labeled a genius, a pervert, a lovely
blushing maiden, a homely bluestocking,
a nymphomaniac, an uptight schoolmistress,
a solitary, a diva, a cult leader, an
abandoned lover, an irresistible seducer,
the "Tenth Muse," a mother, a feminist,
a victim, a masochist and a sadist.

I just hate it when it rains.

Even before it formally opens in theaters
next week, a lot of people would have seen
Yam Laranas's film Radyo in the ten
thousand free advance screenings in various
malls and Metro Manila campuses.

Radyo is an exploration in the
slasher genre, and makes use of indie tricks
and nonsequiturs to supply the laughs.
There are moments of inspiration derived
from sources as diverse as Chinatown,
the carriage thing from the Odessa steps sequence
in Battleship Potemkin, or Brian de Palma.
Jeffrey Quizon makes an interesting serial killer,
though I am not completely convinced that there
is enough method in his madness. Bits of him
seem borrowed from previous screen slashers, like
that nodding dog-in-a-car from The Bone Collector.

But more than anything, this particular slasher
can be summed up in these few words:

Attack of the killer jologs.

Does anyone know if the Film Center at
UP Diliman regularly shows trailers now
before each screening? Guffaws echoed at
the trailer of an Indian film called
Yaadein. There were boyband wannabes
doing their song-and-dance under the pouring
rain routine, screamfests, Bollywood in all
its gawdiness. Yet come to think of it, it's
not much different from any of our own
hysterical melodramas. They were all speaking
in Hindi, but soap in any other language
still bubbles?

There was also a trailer for Dario Argento's
Phantom of the Opera starring Julian
Sands of such classics as Warlock.
Dario Argento directed Suspiria, a
dark but campy movie about various killings
set in a ballet school. It has all the elements
of a good thriller, complete with creative
dismemberments, lesbian overtones, and
probably the inspiration for Princess Leia's
ensaymada hairdo. Suspiria
came out in 1976, a year before Star Wars.

On second thought, I don't think I can live on
frankfurters and beer.

That's it, I'm moving to Germany.

A friend of mine has been lounging in the
hospital for a week now. She had very puffy
eyes that made her look like somebody
with down syndrome. Then they told her it
might be tuberculosis.

This is the year 2001, she's 21 years old,
and I know it's not impossible in a third
world country, in Manila with all its
pollutants. But, hello? Tuberculosis?


Then you take into consideration that the
girl in the bed next to her is nineteen and
put her hands in the oven. Very Sylvia Plath.
Now all we need are the Rosenbergs and we're
rolling into Prozac city.