My So-Called Shopgirl's Life

Mediamelt updates us on the latest happenings in Steve Martin's fabulous career:

What happened / is happening to Steve Martin? One day he's all Parenthood, the next he's all Bringing Down the House. And let's not even mention the almost buried Pink Panther. Now he's all Shopgirl? An indie film, directed by a virtual nobody (yet), co-starring Claire Danes and Jason Schwartzman, based on his own book of the same name, with shades of Murray-in-Rushmore-like potential? Wha?

Well, I say you can't blame the guy. There's even talk that Shopgirl is getting early Oscar buzz. Maybe he's on his Tom Hanks phase, like you know, every movie is an Oscar material now.

What bothers me though is the announcement that Claire Danes is in, like, the movie version of Shopgirl, which is like, you know, my favorite read from last year. Okay, I liked Claire Danes during his Angela Chase era, but that's long long gone. And paired with Jason Schwartzman of Rushmore, I can see a very Wes Anderson-esque. Then add this little write up in which the Shopgirl movie is described as "Steve Martin's Rushmore." I'm also afraid that maybe Steve Martin overdosed on Sofia Coppola and it'll the like Bubble Boy Lost in the LA Freeway. So should I be, like, really bothered, like, you know?

Fiction by Albert E. Martinez

Lookie here! Nerve features "Goatboy," a short story by Albert E. Martinez.

If you read the author write up at the end of the story, you'll know that it's not *that* Albert. Not the National Hero and Swain. Pero aliw lang. If only. Hehe.

Talking Funny

A.O. Scott tells us that comedy is really just the many variations of one filthy joke told over and over again. The comedians try to outdo one another at telling the dirtiest, most extreme, most shocking and longest veresion.

Scott doesn't say what the joke is all about, except that the punchline is the title of the film, The Aristocrats, and that sometimes people have fainted at the end of the telling. The film itself is like a walk through comedy history, dissecting the same joke being told differently by generations and all sorts of comedians, including line drawned cartoon boys. The delivery and inflections change, but only this is assured: "The first is that what is funny cannot be explained, the second that it dies by repetition. Indeed, the more you hear the joke - and you hear it, in bits and pieces and all the way through, at least 60 or 70 times - the deeper you appreciate its peculiar fascination. And as various comedians reflect on its meaning and history...you come to understand the codes and customs of that peculiar guild that makes a living by trying to make the rest of us laugh."

Hell is Having Stubborn Teeth

Just got home from a dental appointment. This time to take out the real culprit of all my troubles, a sorely impacted first molar. Dentist S had a hard time taking it out because she said I have unusually large teeth roots--or whatever it is you call them. She had to give me four doses of anesthesia (I think): two each of the t(r)opical pineapple tasting one and the mean injected one. Lotsa metal instruments. Dentist used something called a #45 and #44. They looked like pliers, but they might as well use a gun on me.

It hurt like hell. I think it took all of 15 or 20 minutes, but it still was hell to me. Gaping hole still bleeds even if I've changed gauze pads like 5 times already.

I am now descending the tenth circle. No amount of ice cream can cure this.

See Heath Run

Here's Heath Ledger on the set of the forthcoming Brokeback Mountain, based on the short story (and novel?) by Annie Proulx.



Linkie points to the unspoiled yummyness of Heath Ledger. Honestly, the only piece of news that made me want to stand up, clap and shout, "Thank you, Lord! Ang swirti ku talaga!" ala Yummy G. Brokeback Mountain is part of my reading list for my creative writing class. I wonder if they'd appreciate something, er, as interactive as this? Hehe.

The Owen Wilson Effect

Slate writer fields a question that must have been brewing in people's minds ever since The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou turned out to be something from the Saturday Fun Machine: Was Owen Wilson the key to the Wes Anderson phenomenon?

I liked Anderson's movies, especially The Royal Tenenbaums. Anderson has what can be approximated as "voice" in literary fiction: All his movies have a distinct feel to them, "a coherent and distinct cinematic language and sensibility." Granted that this "cinematic language" translates to auteurs--Goddard, Truffaut, Renoir--everything with subtitles, everyone is a Promil Kid, and most notably, everyone gets to wear Lacoste and/or shiny new Adidas tracksuits. This precociousness--a kind of man-boy who refuses to grow up, a Smurf Boy who affects affectlessness but is actually sentimental--is what characterizes his movies. Together with the novelist Jonathan Safran Foer and bright eyed musician Conor Oberst, Wes Anderson has championed the new male infantilism in America and they probably have the mean age of eleven and a half.

In the last five or six years, Anderson has been successful with movies with this too-fragile-to-live attitude. But those movies, Bottle Rocket, Rushmore and Tenenbaums, have been co-written with Owen Wilson, that butterscotch haired and broken nosed guy who then occasionally starred in movies featuring Ben Stiller. If Anderson's references are always subtitled, Wilson knew and didn't bother to hide his middlebrow sensibilities.

This is more evident in the Criterion Collection DVD commentaries for Rushmore, wherein the film makers explain a group montage shot. Anderson offers that "There's a storybook feeling, something about trying to create these insular worlds in these movies. I don't know exactly why we're doing this, but …" He cannot put his finger to it, and then lets it float, shrugs his shoulders, "Wala lang." Then, cut to the classroom scene, where we hear Owen Wilson in the background. "In Bottle Rocket and Rushmore there's an innocence to the characters," Wilson says. "This scene feels very real in a movie that in a lot of places seems sort of dreamy. This scene has a cringe factor to it because the movie has an innocent feel and this sort of breaks through that. It makes you uncomfortable, which is appropriate because it has to puncture Max's make-believe world."

That sort of commentary isn't something people expect from Owen Wilson, who trades kicks and laughs with Jackie Chan or Vince Vaughn. The most silliest man who is also willing to get into the brawl as opposed to the bubble boy, multi-allergic affects of Mr. Anderson. But when his movie career took off, Wilson had less time to spend screenwriting. The Life Aquatic actually found Anderson with a new writing partner, Noah Baumbach. The result can best be described as "cinematic autism"--no offense to those actually afflicted by the condition--or in Filipino, "may sariling mundo."

Although nobody really knows just how much of the penning responsibilities belongs to Wilson or Anderson, it may be safe to assume that it was Owen Wilson who balanced the equation, who pulled Anderson back from the allure of Neverland. In the recent Wedding Crashers, there's one line there that was said to be 100% Wilson: "Scientists say we only use 10 percent of our brains, but I think we only use 10 percent of our hearts." You don't need subtitles for that.

The real state of the nation, according to Conrad de Quiros

This probably sums up everything about what's going on in this country.

Ladies and gentlemen of the Philippines, Conrad de Quiros on the real state of the Filipino nation.

Wala lang. Ang astig lang ni de Quiros. Sana nga naging totoo na. Pero ang kapal lang din talaga. Grabeh, wala akong masabi.

Great First Lines

Michael Berube points us to an effort by some people are putting together 100 Great First Lines from novels, a sort of counterpart to the American Film Institute's 100 Years, 100 Movies list. While this is decidedly American centered, it'll still be interesting to see which ones will make the cut. Here are some of the contenders:

Call me Ishmael.

riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.

As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.

Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.

All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins.

You don’t know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain’t no matter.

It was a pleasure to burn.

So far, they already have around 150 nominations. Can you guess where they're from?

Slumming with Sig

This week, kantogirlblues is four.

While I still have no idea what to do with this blog anniversary, I looked at the archives and discovered an interesting post in that first week that somehow brings things to a full circle:

After the Pinoy short film screening at the Alliance Francaise, and having nothing better to do, I hung out with some friends at a house in Vito Cruz.

It's hard being a bum surrounded by other bums: Instead of just lying about and ignoring pangs of hunger in favor of dozing off or staring at that cable movie you've seen a zillion times, you are forced to take into consideration other people's growling stomachs. You have to ask if they want to eat breakfast at 2pm.

In the mid-90s, the preferred pickup line for guys used to be "I'm in a band." Around 1998-99, this evolved into: "Hey, I have a website." In the first few years of the new millenium, it's now "I am a short filmmaker."

The house in question is Sig's, and together with him, my friend Carlyn, and batchmate Job, we thought of ideas for a scriptwriting contest whose deadline was looming like four days later. In between cooking extra spicey mackerel stew and sinangag, I pitched to them my idea about a girl working in a paging company, and while my Cinderella act did not win anything, it still felt like an accomplishment at the time. To actually finish something.

Fast forward to 2005 and that last statement about film is still true. Of course, it can now be modified as "I am an indie filmmaker." I watched Sig's Cinemalaya entry Lasponggols last Friday night at the UP Film Institute. It played to a full house. I got my ticket at the booth, lined up, learned that my friends won't be able to make it. I saw Sig amidst the crowd, waved, walked up to him and offered my congratulations. Then the gates were opened and I susddenly found myself being ushered in early along with our workshop master Ricky Lee. Groupie pa rin pala ako hanggang ngayon. Hehehe. I don't mind though.

The first few minutes of the film featured various teasers, all along the line of "Pasisikatin kita." We were told the film was two and a half hours long, and Sir Ricky joked, "Kaya naman pala two and a half hours."

But it was all worth it. I'll offer my airhead comment here: The film was funny and I liked it! Since both Lasponggols and Pinoy/Blonde featured Epy Quizon and had characters who were either film buffs or worked in the movie industry, I can't help but compare them. P/B was witty and glossy and fun, but Paolo offers that what P/B doesn't have you can find it in Lasponggols. The movie had a heart larger than the man who made it.

There's this scene in Lasponggols wherein the village idiot guy tells the audience that an indie film isn't complete without a time lapse. If I could do a blog time lapse, it would definitely carry that moment of me and friends hanging around that house, of Sig literally pushing back mounds of cassettes, cds, books, magazines, sheets of paper with his hands to reveal some floor space, sitting around and me wearing his really oversized red Coca-Cola shirt, drawing that little la ronde of characters, cooking on an unfamiliar stove and crushing red chili. I'm still not an indie filmmaker, but this one will do.

Congrats, Direk Sig. I still owe you that Coke shirt. :)

Ian McEwan on a Sunday Morning

The Morning News's Robert Birbaum talks with Ian McEwan, author of Atonement and recently of Saturday. McEwan tells us that fiction is education, in the sense that when you write a novel, you "set yourself on a journey of investigation of our condition, where we stand at this particular time in history" or any time in history.

We've come to a point that there are now many Englishes and writing novels has become like a badge for growing up. Everyone can write a novel, but there aren't enough people to ead it.

Ah yes. Bring on the onslaught. But at the same time, he also warns us about cultural chauvinism:

[T]here is a view—and I used to believe in it in my late teens and early 20s—if you weren’t familiar with the canon and if you didn’t live by literature, you weren’t fully human. You weren’t all there. But we all know full well that most people don’t read novels at all and they are perfectly capable of rich sentient lives in which they make moral decisions. So we must be careful of a kind of arrogance about literary culture. That it’s the only way or only form.

There's also music, television, EDSA billboards, and maybe even fishball (stand) philosophies. If being human is defined by a knowledge of the literary canon alone, what does that make me then? A pop cultural Frankenstein's bride?