Boogey man

So this morning at the Pulis Pangkalawakan headquarters, the monster was this annoying mascot with bongo boobs. I thought he was going to beat Shaider. We just had to laugh because you could see the monster was a huge fake projection on the wall and Shaider still couldn't beat him. Also, since all the discussion on Annie seemed to center on her panty-flashing tendencies, my brother and I really watched closely. Alas, no flashings today.

So in the late 80s, Puma Lay-ar figured that media was the way to world domination. He got a bunch of guys, pre-F4 to roll out this ditty:

Tayo nang mag boogey, mag-boogey-woogey
Wag munang mag-aral, maglakwatsa
Korni ang eskuwela, maghappening na lang muna.

It sounds so distressingly close to Freddie Aguilar's Estudyante Blues. Hm, and Manong Freddie had the hair to go with it. Do you think the guy who made Anak was a Puma Lay-ar disciple? Hehehe.

Cross country blogging

So over at ButasNaChucks, a t has her own "industry epiphanies" for which she didn't have to pay fifty bucks. Nyar. I'm still thinking whether I really want to spend 5 more Wednesday afternoons listening to directors go yaddah. Not especially excited about sitting still for Mr-Homage-Not-A-Ripoff. But maybe I'd go and willingly pay if If I could heckle him.

Yeah, I'm a sucker.

Also a postscript to this previous post. I was at the Reading Room the other afternoon when the sudden blast of "100% so beautiful" filled the room. Apparently one of the girls there was a superfan. She bought the Cream Silk compilation album. My bad. I wouldn't want to pay for that. Then she showed me this printed out captured image of her and Manang Lea from the Songs from Home concert.

Feeling ko minumulto ako ni Manang Lea. Scary.

Shaider xxx?

Okay, as a result of last Sunday's Shaider post, this blog is now the top result for shaider+annie+naked. Just how twisted is that?

Multimedia monster

I allowed myself to get duped and paid fifty bucks for the first installment of the Take 6: Directors Lecture Series at the UP Film Center. Institute this afternoon. Jose Javier Reyes gave a talk on "Directing and Scriptwriting."

Nothing really mindblowing except that he affirmed several things that I already knew somehow. He shattered the myth going around that he only directs his own scripts. He said that not many people offer him scripts to read, so he writes his own projects. Plus he said that the greatest gift he probably has is his ability to write very very fast. Damn. Wish I had that. And oh, he said that if you wanted to make a lot of money, you should write for tv, but only if you could really hack it and don't mind at all. Damn.

He also has this observation: That film making is no longer the director's medium, but that of the "creative committee." Everyone has a say now on how to make a movie and how to sell it. There are a lot of things to be considered--product positioning, marketable ideas, creating your own hype. Film is a product that has to be sold, and film making is a business blah blah blah, so the producer has to make money so s/he would make more movies. But for movies to sell, it's no longer wise to be just a stand-alone movie outfit. You have to be a multimedia conglomerate. It's not just a movie after all--there's the soundtrack, the t-shirts, the mugs and calendars, posters plus all the cute artistas, the product placements, the video release, and the dvd release among the pirates of Quiapo.

He also says that it's no accident that the most successful "conglomerates" now are also the tv stations. Television jolts the necessary machinery into a film franchise for it to be sold. We are bombarded with all the ads proclaiming the thing to be the "best movie ever, and if you don't believe that you're stoned!" So we are conditioned that it must be a good movie, and we watch it. In the end, we are being fed our own tails and we eagerly chew on it.

Yeah, multimedia is the way to go. I'd say more things about the lecture, and that Joey Reyes is an entertaining guy, but I'm sleepy na. Maybe we should all go out and slay the multimedia monster or maybe learn how to ride it? But damn, do I wish I have his gift.

Manang Lea got married, yey!

I'm not going to say much except that this post is about the Salonga-Chien nuptials.

Mano Po 2: My Homecoming

Super delayed reaction post, because it's just too funny (at least for me) to pass up:

So last Christmas Day, one of my friends wanted to watch Mano Po 2. Girl goes to the cineplex and sees the snaking line of kids and parents. There were so many people lining up for the superhero movies. All her nephews wanted to watch flying guys in tights, so she thought she'd watch MP2 first before taking them. So she lines up but all the wailing kids got her confused. When the takilyera asked her what movie she was going to watch, she saw the poster with Alessandra de Rossi in it, but some kids were hanging out in front of it and she could only see the part where it says "home." So she pointed to the poster and said "yung My home." Takilyera gave her the ticket and girl went inside theater. There were like twenty of them inside, and as my friend sat down the credits started rolling. She was convinced that she was going to watch the movie Chinese movie with the dead father and which also stars Alessandra de Rossi.

Ten minutes into the film and Ms de Rossi disappears from it. Elizabeth Oropesa is there on screen and my friend starts to wonder when Kris Aquino will come up. She waits and waits and then finally realizes that she's in the wrong movie.

She had the actress right, Alessandra de Rossi. But in the flux of too many wailing kids, all she remembered was that MP2 had a subtitle called "My Home," and seeing Ms de Rossi on the poster and the "home" on it, sent her into the theater with the strangest movie showing during the Metro Manila Film Festival 2003.

Mano Po 2: My Homecoming is about a Chinese girl who works as an OFW. She returns to her small idyllic town only to realize that she's come down with SARS and along the way she acquires three wives who squabble over multi-billion peso estate. Susan Roces stars as the first wife and she mutates years later into Elizabeth Oropesa and nobody notices the difference. Then Eric Quizon hires mourners for the dead girl and they all put Vicks Vaporub (touch-therapy) on their eyes to make it look like they're Chinese. The film is a science fiction indie, which is also an homage to some obscure Chinese film.

Well, go figure.

Geeky reading

If Frank Moretti had his way, we'd be studying literature without reading. How the hell is that possible? Critics would stop writing about the same old, same old writings by dead white guys and start counting. That's right--study it the way statisticians do the population and everything else--literature by the numbers.

Of course they had to ask Harold Bloom, the guy who wrote an Elegy for the Canon among other stuff, what he thought of the suggestion. It could only be pronounced "absurd." Mr Bloom is interested in reading. "That's all I'm interested in."

On the other hand, more and more teens writing. It's like an online My so-called Blog.

Both articles from the New York Times.

Shaider Sunday



Woke up early enough to join my brothers at breakfast in front of the tv. We answered questions during the Digital LG quiz. The winning kid was from a school whose gym uniform was very droopy down the waist hiphop. Then came Shaider. I didn't know it was having another run, same as Astroboy. As the starting theme to Shaider came on, it was like I was seven years old all over again. Since the colored tv died, we're back to a black and white world where Alexis and Annie jumped and kicked at Fuma Lay-Ar's monsters. Talk about reliving your memories.

Today's episode was called "Wika ng Kaisipan." Lay-ar figured the way to universal domination is to enslave the mind of young children and teach them their language. The kids in 1980s Tokyo were roused from bed at the strike of 1 a.m. and playthings came alive. The kids swayed their arms and danced and followed the toys, while they chanted "yada-yada!" It's sort of like the Pied Piper of Hamlin.

I told my brother that the actor who played Shaider was dead, and we don't know whatever the hell happened to Annie. Maybe she's a pornstar now, and I'm really sad because when I tried searching for Alexis and Annie pictures, all I get are naked pictures of her. I don't want to see naked pictures of Annie. I want her to stay in my mind in those white leather mini-skirts. We still have the same questions: If Shaider's power is solar driven, then wouldn't he be vulnerable when placed in darkness? Did Fuma Lay-Ar's cohorts ever find out about this vulnerability?

But it was fun seeing them in all their 80s glory, beating the hell out of those foot soldiers--or are foot soldiers from BioMan or the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles? Anyhow, it was all we could do. This particular episode didn't have much of the women in Fuma Lay-ar's court. It's always fun when they do that dance with the arms thing.

What I want right now is to have that "Shigi-shigi" song as my ringtone. Does anyone know where I can get that?

Low Wall

Something happened about half an hour ago that makes me want to really get serious about finding a place of my own. It really pisses me off that it had to happen to me, this late in the night, and that whoever the culprit was is just on that other side of the wall and just calmly turned around and walked away. This is the same neighbor who caused a commotion and a near riot, a rain of stones threatening to break all the glass windows of our house, resulting in calls to the police and a blotter at the police station. Call me a bad neighbor, I hate them, and I don't care whether they have a place to stay or not. I just want them out of my backyard. I have endured enough loud karaoke mornings and evenings and brushes with violence. I'm just plain furious. If I see that shirt, the person attached to it will get a bruising. I swear. Whether they're staying or not, I am definitely leaving.

So people, if you know of a relatively safe, quiet place within or near the Diliman campus, please please let me know. The sooner I get out of this place, appointment papers and savings not withstanding, the better. Thank you.

I am undecided: In the same way I don't want my students to find me, do I really want to find out what's really going on in my students' minds?