Behind the Scenes with Direk Monski Elagra

So what if people are saying that Pinoy movies are dead or dying? Mechajol knows how important teeny bopper movies are to the development of Filipino culture: "Gaano man ka-cheesy ang mga projects ni direk Monski, medyo weird pa rin sa part ko, na interbyuhin ang taong responsable sa mga pelikulang nagpayaman sa mga stockholders ng Candida Notebooks. Ahhh... ang masasayang taon ng dekada '80... kapag sinabi ng teaher mong pass your notebooks, aalon sa classroom ang makikinang na mga ngiti ni Nikki Therese na naka-japorms pa ng acid wash na maong..."

Here's an excerpt from his talk with Direk Monski Elagra, director of the upcoming teen movie "Labs Kita! O Di Ba? Okey Ka Lang? Wakekekekekeke!!!" and how it's going to save the Filipino film industry:

Mechajol: Pero teka, sufficient ba na mag-rely sa kilig factor at sa artista lang? Most of the foreign movies kasi, have them, plus better quality and production...

Direk Monski: Mech, I've been doing this for how many years na..? Haay... Hahaha... Ang tanda ko na pala... Anyway, I've been doing this for a long time na! And the formula still works!

M: Formula over creativity... ang essence ng Tagalog movie production...

DM: Hey, if it ain't broke, why fix it? If it sells, why experiment? Di ba?

Monski Elagra is an oldtimer in the Pinoy film industry. He started as an editor in '80s Tagalog movies, and debuted as a director in the late '80s with his first teen love story, "Love, Never Say Goodbye, My Love..." produced by Harmony Films. This was also the launching movie of Luis Baylon, and the tragic "Starlet of the New Year" Nikki Therese.

Meanwhile, Mechajol blogs with Team Angas, and is also known as The TIN Boy.

Chuck P's Haunted Interview

In this interview with Chuck Palahniuk about his new novel Haunted, he analyzes his fascination with narration, both in literature and in culture, and the relationship between the two. He points out the power of the storyteller in our times: "..[W]hoever the final narrator of our times, our culture, may prove to be, that person or entity wields a power that is central but hidden. It is the power to define our times and our culture, the power to define our lives."

The interview is available in both mp3 and Real Audio, although be warned that they're quite hefty and raunchy. So if you're no big fan of strong words (all the usual cusswords) and you don't have a strong computer (file is 32mb), maybe this is not for you.

lets us see the view from the camera behind the camera.

This Just In...News from The Agony Column

Letting it fly

The Non-Experts at TMN presents 45 additional alternatives to Paul Simon's "50 Ways to Leave Your Lover."

Singer-songwriter Paul Simon originally gave us just 5 ways, actually, if you follow the song's chorus: “slip out the back, Jack; make a new plan, Stan; you don’t need to be coy, Roy; hop on the bus, Gus; just drop off the key, Lee, and get yourself free."

Of the new list, I like:

44. Feed her to a shark, Mark
43. Harvest his kidney, Cindy

The rhyming gets a little stale afterwards, but still fun. Although if what you're after is the unmistakeable madness of your intent to break up, I think nothing still beats Weird Al Yankovic. Just consider the following lines from "You Don't Love Me Anymore":

You know, I even think it's kinda cute the way
You poison my coffee just a little each day
I still remember the way that you laughed
When you pushed me down that elevator shaft

Oh, if you don't mind me asking, what's this poisonous cobra
Doing in my underwear drawer?
Sometime I get to thinking you don't love me any more

Also, while I was doing my laundry and my music player was at random, The Corrs came up with that back to back anthem leading to the inevitable--"What Can I Do" followed by "I Never Loved You Anyway." I always thought that the placement of those two songs in the Talk on Corners album was just perfect. It moves from tired but still hopeful to dripping sarcasm. And I always did like sarcasm when it comes to burning bridges.

Gwen Punks a Prankster

Gwen of saturated text machine works for a big bad Western capitalist and spends her days and nights answering weird calls. But she pulls a fast one on this prankster who would only talk Shakespeare.

PC : No.I just want to read Shakespeare. Is that okay with you?
Me : I'm not really a fan of the classics. And if you're not making any reservation, I'd have to release the call now.
PC : Why, what's your high school GPA?
Me : (With a touch of confidence) 3.75!
PC : Ya kiddin' me. Whattya doin' on a telemarketer job with a 3.75 GPA?!!
Me : It's not telemarketing, It's Hotel.
PC : Where did you go to college?
Me : Columbia.
PC : Ya lyin' to me. You ain't goin to Columbia with a 3.75! No way!
Me : I did went to Columbia.
PC : So wanna hear Shakespeare?
ME : Nah, forget it. Come back when you hit Whitman. Have a nice day. Bye.

Whitman! Whitman's been getting a lot of bad rap already. Maybe you should go quote Mayer. Or beeter yet, Moore. Mandy Moore. Hehehe.

With Mouth and Pants Wide Open

This really isn't the sort of news you want to hear especially when you're seeing a lot of your dentist these days: A former dentist accused of using syringes to
squirt his semen into the mouths of female patients was sentenced to probation on seven assault charges Wednesday though he refused to say he was guilty.

Given that my dentist is prone to singing Side A, I just hope we don't get to Side B.

In other perv news, a man gets 20 jail days for stuffing a toy banana in his pants and flashing it to strangers. But get this--his banana had a smiley face on it. I guess the police did not appreciate that the man only wanted to say "have a nice day" in a different way.

Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes sing "Candy Shop"

I promise this will be the last post on this topic. And this pretty much sums up all the hoopla anyhow. Presenting
Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes singing "Candy Shop" The Liquid Generation people should get lots of Tootsie Pops for that bit of Katie Holmes in her padlocked panties.

Want to say "weblog" in French ? Say Note Pad.

Loic le Meur informs us that we should stop saying "le blog" because the council has spoken.

Or rather, the Journal Officiel has given the official translation for the word "weblog": In French, it is "bloc notes," or literally, "note pad." The shortened version blog then translates to "bloc," meaning "pad."

Which also means that since everything in French is assigned a sexual dimension, the blog is masculine, i.e., "le bloc," the same way that the pen is masculine, i.e., "le stylo." Why is the blog a guy when it obviously can't hump anyone? I know, I know. It's all very confusing. So when you can't remember whether the blog is a guy or a girl, make like David Sedaris and go plural. Les blocs is just a notch up than a confused blog.

Oh well. You know how the French are. A bas des Freedom Fries. via.

Got any spare body parts to go?

If you have spare body parts you want to share, send them over to The Corpse Project, "a collection of visitor submitted images of the body."

I came across this site while padding around craigslist manila's "artists" category. The ad's subject line was "body parts sought" and the site itself did not really specify if the images have to be from a dead body. Besides, all the photos seem like warm flesh and blood to me. But I don't know. What do you think? Got any spare body parts to share? Hehe.

So far, that's the only interesting entry I've come across craigslist's manila presence although it's been up since this February, more or less ten years after Craig Newmark started his list in San Francisco in 1995. What started as a community based online classifieds expanded to 120 cities in 25 countries. You can read more about the site's history here.

In other cities, craigslists have been the source of very, very entertaining crusades, the place to go for hooking up or a chance to reconnect with that hot guy you were eyeing on the train. In the recent NYT article "Saw You, Want You," several missed connections postings have been turned into found poetry, wherein "[e]xcept for line and stanza breaks, they have been reproduced as they first appeared, and the titles were taken verbatim from the listings' subject headings."

In a lot of ways, The Corpse Project is like craigslist (or urban living for that matter) in a nutshell. I like the anonymity and the fact that this sort of thing can only happen in big, bad cities everywhere. It's like reading through all the graffiti written behind the doors of public restrooms or the pleas on bus seat covers of lonely people for "wanted sx/txtm8s."

Below is one of the found poems from the New York Times article.

SUBWAY LOVE

you blue eyes and truck tee; me brown hair, flowered coat

last friday (april 22)
7ish
i was heading to dinner
with my sis
and val on
the A-C-E Uptown.

you stepped onto
the train
and were
with your semi-truck art tee
and corduroy blazer.

after some
intense eye contact
you whispered
goodbye
and stepped off the train,
only to watch it pull away.

are you still out there?

Joey Potter Does Cruise

Romance, according to Leo Braudy, author of "The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and Its History" and a professor of film history at the University of Southern California, is a "kind of exclusive focus on one person to the exclusion of the outside world." The tendency for couples is to have their own world, existing only for each other.

I suppose that's true for regular people, but even more so if the persons involved in the coupling are celebrities. "We hide, don't seek us please" is the motto, and when caught in the act, the mantra turns to "Deny everything."

That's why it's comforting to know that I'm not the only one feeling iffy about the entire Katie Holmes-Tom Cruise connection. Simply incredulous. Aside from the improbability that they have enough commonalities to date, they seem to be courting, and not avoiding, the media. There are more cynics than believers, as evidenced in a survey released by People magazine recently, in which 62% of those polled pronounced the romance as a publicity stunt.

In Mireya Navarro's article in the New York Times, she pointed out that the practice of inventing screen romances is already old hat, an industry staple. "The coupling of stars to create ballyhoo for a movie, burnish an actor's image, create a name or distract attention from other relationships may not be as common as when the movie studios tightly controlled stars' careers through the 1950's." Fake romances were arranged as a matter of course to hide secret affairs, or in the case of Rock Hudson, homosexuality.

It's mostly smokes and mirrors, as a romance is an almost foolproof way to land publicity. It's not a uniquely Hollywood practice, as the same marketing strategy is employed here in the Philippines, where movies as sold on the basis of the kilig factor and the loudness of shrieking emitted by fans. (I mean, just think Juday-Piolo, okay?)

But Peter Sealey, a former president for marketing and distribution for Columbia Pictures, who is an adjunct professor at the University of California, Berkeley, said that while stars may personally benefit from the higher profile a new love may bring - staged or otherwise - movies live or die on word of mouth, and "you want the focus on the movie."

Further more, he claimed that love relationships do not directly affect ticket sales. But on the other hand, it can also interfere with the suspension of disbelief that is still the goal for most movies. At this point, Sealey cited the monstrosity that was Bennifer. Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez's affair was so overplayed that their cinematic pairing, Gigli, suffered at the box office.

In the toggle between reality and fantasy, in the age of oversaturated media, fantasy loses. Unless the celebrity couple are involved in separate projects, as in the case of Tom Cruise's War of the Worlds or Katie Holmes' participation in the new Batman film.

I don't know about you, but Joey Potter lusted after the guy who danced in his underwear in Risky Business while she was still in diapers? Or is Katie worried that she has to trump Michelle Williams' lovechild? I can also imagine Tom Cruise's manager sternly admonishing him, "Next time you date, please go all American." Oh yes, something's rotten in Hollywood.

Plate Teachtonics

In a teaching seminar I attended in our college, the Arts Studies people used paper plates in their teaching demo. It wasn't just a single paper plate, actually--they used the entire fast food dining experience to teach the students. They gave out paper place mats, plates, a menu, spoon and forks, napkins with a dopey "Pandesal House" logo.

In our heads we were screaming, "This guy is a loon genius! He knows how to split his measly salary and still give out stuff to thirty people in a G.E. class! Kill him!" It depressed the hell out of us and started sneaking out for really extended coffee breaks in the lobby.

Then I came across this site that promises to "serve education in a paper plate." The educators behind Paper Plate Education support the "initiative to reduce complex notions to simple paper plate explanations." Their activities page cover simple stuff like creating moon masks for kids to wear. You can also make a model to show how two shadows--the umbra and the penumbra--can fall on the moon during a lunar eclipse. Or maybe measure altitude and longitude or maybe plot the paths of meteor showers.

My favorite is the one where they direct students to play an asteroid impact game, wherein you can flip rocks on a string into planets orbiting the sun to simulate the mass destruction once a giant rocks hurls itself towards our measly planet.

Now if only they have lessons applicable to my classes. Like maybe a paper plate with detachable slices and strings to show how one remedies an essay riddled with dangling modifiers. Or perhaps make a model to explain paragraph patterns but with a matching dial so you can choose which pattern of development is good for you and your topic. Heck, I'll even pay someone who can make a paper plate model which can teach people how to use the proper preposition.

I can see it now: The entire department will launch a paper plate drive. Instructors will be asked to beg for recyclable plates to turn into hand held projectors which can find run on sentences and string them into their proper order in the universe. There will be lectures on paper plates as metaphors for consumerist culture. Spoons and forks will soon be used as pointers of objective correlatives. Ah yes, everyone will join the interactive seminars on how to develop grammar fitness skills in the language lab using colored plates.

Somebody should propose this on our next faculty development meeting.