Friday, May 23, 2008

5:17 PM | The Look of Being Punched in the Stomach

Although I have seen the YouTube clip of the announcement itself, I have never really seen the last 30 minutes of American Idol's 2-hour finale for real. There were appointments to keep. Last night, for example, I had to go to the last poetry reading for the Dumaguete National Writers Workshop over at Kitty Taniguchi's Mariyah Gallery -- although I purposely made myself late by 1 and a half hours. But eventually I had to go, and right before Carrie Underwood sang, too. Couldn't even see the midnight replay, because I went out drinking with the poet Lito Zulueta. We've promised ourselves coffee or a late-night drink forever, since 2005, and could never keep the date (last year, when he arrived in Dumaguete to panel for the last week of the workshop, I had to go to India, and on and on, just like that...). And today, I couldn't see the noontime replay because I had to keep my lunch date with fictionist Bing Sitoy. What can I say, writerly commitments galore.

But I've seen the jubilation in Kansas City when David Cook was announced as the new Idol. I've always wondered though: whatever happens in that other city where the losing candidate comes from? Imagine the stadium-full of people. Imagine the heightened expectation for a win. Imagine the shock of the letdown. I could never imagine it.

Until I saw how exactly that goes in this video...



Like what the newscaster says, like being punched in the stomach all at the same time.

And now, I have to go to Hayahay, for the Fellow's Night, and their graduation...

Labels: dumaguete writers workshop, life, music, television

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Thursday, May 22, 2008

6:43 PM | Raves Daw

Raves? Where did PEP's Bibsy Carballo get her "raves" for Serbis? Come on, being proud for our country is one thing, but peddling falsehood to save face is quite another. This is why we don't grow -- there's too much patting ourselves and each other on the back, even when unwarranted.

Le film francaise is charting the reception of the films in Cannes. Compare the critical mass on Serbis alongside the other films, and see if it got raves. [Click to enlarge.]



Cahiers Cinema, the most-respected film magazine in the world, considers the film as a kind of "madness," and four major critics gave it the biggest snub of all: a pas du tout, meaning "not at all." That's a rave?

Labels: criticism, festivals, film, movies

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5:05 PM | The Eye in the Sky

Finally, Dumaguete gets the Google Earth treatment! For the longest time, my city was a merely pixelized blur when you scan the globe -- but since May 13, Google has updated their data with many new and updated satellite imagery for the Philippines. Here's a shot of Dumaguete...



... and that's where I live. (It's both exciting and disturbing all at the same time.) No street level view yet, but that would be scary. Don't want anybody catching me in strange get-up.

[via vaes9]

Labels: dumaguete, web and tech

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11:03 AM | There is Justice in the AI World! (And Some Grumbling Against Pinoy Idol)

Totally did not expect this. The Word Nerd (Simon's term) won by 12 million votes! Naiyak ako when I saw the video -- first time an AI finale moved me. I liked Cook's story: you go accompany your brother for much-needed moral support to audition for the world's biggest talent show, and then you end up winning the title yourself. Nice. This story felt warmer than the story of an ambitious father pushing a very young son to fulfill his own unrealized ambitions. But I hated the final showdown last night. I must admit the little guy really went for the win with a wonderful set of songs last night, but still it was all predictable fluff. It was a performance that was guaranteed easy-listening, but like all simple sugars, it's not really good for your health. I must also admit that David Cook kinda held back -- but he did go to the hospital for hypertension and anxiety earlier (so like me), and wouldn't you go anxious when the judges practically try to slaughter you because they so obviously want Mickey Mouse to win? The judges tried so hard to hand American Idol victory to David Archuleta. It got me so incensed. But take this reality, Randy, Paula, and Simon! David Cook wins American Idol over Gaspy! Oh, my God! I so love being proved wrong this time. Gaspy can finally go home and finish puberty. I can almost imagine Gaspy saying demurely, "That was not pretty at all. Daddy! I want to go home." Take that, Archtards!

.
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Whew. Now that I've taken the bile out of my system, I'd like to wish everybody World Peace.

Thus ends this season. But like what The Coffee Goddess declares in her blog, "I promise, I will never watch American Idol. No more. Nada. Ayoko na. Enough said." Ako rin. Ayoko na. Parang it's something to outgrow na.

[thanks to jun and mich for the heads-up]

P.S. There is a reason why I'm more excited about American Idol than Pinoy Idol currently showing in GMA. It's not colonial mentality, silly. But watching Pinoy Idol is like watching a Frankensteinish hybrid of Wish Ko Lang + Wowowee + Ang Bagong Kampeon. Vince de Jesus calls it a shameless romanticizing of poverty in what should be a singing show. I agree. I remember this singing contest in ABS-CBN from a few years back, Search for a Star in a Million. That horrible, horrible singer from Bohol, Jerome Sala, won the title hands down with his woeful tale: in one crucial episode, he broke down in tears admitting he only had one pair of underwear to wear. (And by the way, what's with the Mau Marcelo snub, GMA? Kapuso daw, heartless pala.)

[via gibbs cadiz]

Labels: contests, music, television

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1:23 AM | A Work in Progress

I've been really sick almost the entire first half of May. Didn't get out of the house much, couldn't find my cellphone [it might as well be lost], slept most of the time, watched TV almost all day, blogged a little too much (just to keep my consciousness running) -- and only now do I feel a little better. So I feel utterly useless and depressive right now, because I hate not being active. Here's a project to call it a good month before it's too late. See, I'm very bad at some things. Like emailing. (I hate emailing.) But I've decided, right now, that it's never too late to change. Thus, I'm presenting to you this working list of backlogged things, which I hope to accomplish before the summer grinds to a halt. Here's wishing me luck.

(√) Clean the house.
(√) Do some much-needed shopping.
(√) Answer back Friendster messages, 73 in all, lagging almost a year.
(√) Answer back Facebook messages, 14 in all, lagging almost a month.
(√) Manage barely used Hotmail accounts. (One unanswered email comes from 2005!)
(_) Working through my Gmail backlog. This will take at least two days, hehehe.

[more coming...]

Labels: life

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Wednesday, May 21, 2008

11:57 PM | Is Serbis Really That Bad?

I want to give Brillante Mendoza's film the benefit of doubt until I see it, but the reviews coming in from Cannes are really, really horrible.



Here are the latest reviews. Kino-Zeit, a German paper, declares it has no chance for the Palme d'Or. Spiegel's Lars-Olav Beier calls it exploitative. And Kim Voynar, blogging for Cinematical, walked out of the theater, utterly disgusted. Best to put in everything, verbatim:

The other night, James and I walked out of our first film at Cannes, Brilliante Mendoza's Serbis. Actually, this is the first time I've ever walked out before the end of a film at a festival; generally, I feel it's my job to watch films here, the good, the bad and the ugly, and so I sit through them, however wretched they may be. But not this time. It's too bad, really, because Serbis is the first Filipino film to ever play in competition in Cannes and I was hoping to like it, but ... ugh.

The film opens with a scene of total gratuitous nudity -- a young Filipino girl, just out of the shower, preening in front of a mirror and practicing saying "I love you" in what she thinks is a sexy way. And that scene would have been just fine like that, without the voyeuristic panning down to breasts and pubic hair. I'm not a prude by any stretch, I have no problem with nudity and sex in films if it serves an actual purpose, but watching that scene all I could think of was, well, there's a shot that exists only to please the guys who have the hots for young, naked Asian girls. Which for me, just made it feel exploitive.

The film is set in a family-run adult theater with a little cafe at the bottom that's open to the street, and the ambient noise in the first 15 or so minutes of the film was so loud and disconcerting that I almost walked out then. I was seriously getting crowd anxiety just from the level of noise. I get that it's supposed to set the place, but when it's so overwhelming that you can't appreciate what dialog there is -- even with subtitles -- it's just too much.

From there we're treated to a graphic oral sex scene between a man and a male prostitute that would be more appropriate for a gay porn film, and another graphic sex scene between a young man and woman that looked pretty darn real. Why? I guess because those are the things Mendoza felt were important to show us about those people.

Mendoza likes to follow people around in their natural setting, and that's pretty much what he does in this film; unfortunately, it's just not that interesting, because he doesn't give us enough about any of the characters to make us care about why we should want to spend 90 minutes or so of our lives watching them.

It's supposed to be, I guess, about the various relationships: the family matriarch is suing her husband for bigamy and wants him to go to jail, while her children want to see their father acquitted so as not to have his out-of-wedlock offspring legally recognized; the older daughter is trapped in a loveless relationship with her husband, who she married only because she was pregnant; the younger daughter wants to emulate the transitive prostitutes; the nephew, who has a boil on his ass, has gotten his girlfriend pregnant, adding to the family's poverty. And so on. It should have (and probably could have) been interesting, but it just wasn't.

The end of it for me and James was a disgustingly graphic scene of the nephew popping the boil on his ass with a coke bottle. I'm sure it was supposed to be metaphorical, but it was just gross, and that was enough for us.

Yay.

Here's that opening sequence...



Telepolis' Rüdiger Suchsland gives it some positive notice, but still calls Serbis a pornographic movie. Ouch.

In the meantime, here's an ABS-CBN News story about how the film got made.

[related posts here and here]

Labels: art and culture, criticism, festivals, film, movies

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10:16 PM | The Ides of May

It is a little too easy to believe, these past few days, that evil lurks everywhere.

A cyclone hits Myanmar, and its military government inexplicably drags its foot with regards receiving international aid, even as thousands of its people—survivors of the devastation—slowly fade away with hunger and thirst. Help, hostaged by a ruthless regime, is not coming. “We haven’t eaten for days,” says a Burmese man, his emaciated face on TV the profile of a dying people. Why?

Bank robbers commander an RCBC branch, and inexplicably proceed to kill all the bank employees, execution-style, a bullet to each of their heads. {Be warned: the pictures in the link are graphic and brutal.] They were only ordinary people who woke up that morning to go to work, but ended up in puddles of their own blood. Why?

A typhoon ravages western Luzon, and wreaks havoc. My friend, the poet and Inquirer reporter Frank Cimatu, writes of being witness to one small devastation:

Helpless. Helpless. The mother had been crying all night even as the storm was wailing. Her 36-year-old son was pinned down by a mango tree in San Fabian, Pangasinan, Saturday night. Sunday morning and still her son was there. How can her neighbors not feel anything enough not to ease that pain? The neighbors wouldn’t touch him, talking about their own problems.

I told this to a friend later over a cup of coffee, this is not how we Filipinos act. Let’s say there was no hope: his spine was broken; but we don’t leave our dead there. He said something about the ‘culture of poverty,’ of thinking only of our own puny needs in this time indeed of need. Thinking it was not us who was pinned down.

It was a tiring day. I had no energy left to argue. The storm took something we thought we can keep even if our houses were destroyed and our clothes ripped away. We thought we had each other.

Why?

Labels: current events, life

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6:05 PM | 'American Idol' Just Jumped the Shark*

A boxing face-off to begin the whole thing? Lame. Corny. Utterly baduy.

The only nice thing about the finale was the surprise appearance of Ruben Studdard doing his cover version of "Celebrate Me Home," the lovely replacement song that now serenades kicked-out Idols. I forgot how great this man's vocals was. It still is. Hear this...


But of course, Gaspy will win, forever cementing American Idol's growing reputation of championing ho-hum music and complete irrelevance. (Jordin Sparks and Fantasia Barrino, anyone?) But let's bring out the boxing gloves so to speak, hehehe. Gaspy has great vocals, yes -- but he plain irritates me with his cutesy, which was endearing in the beginning but stomach-churning months later. If he demurely says "This is a pretty song" one more time, I'll get diabetes. Cook, meanwhile, is original, 'nuff said. But alas, Gaspy seems to bring out a Zac Efron vibe, which is totally in sync with the jologs spirit of the thousands of pedophilic gay men, hormonal matronas, and screaming tweeners who keep the whole charade afloat.

Discuss.

* What does that mean ba?

Labels: celebrity, music, television

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5:40 PM | The Nine Muses

Poet Ralph Semino Galan now blogs.

Labels: blogging, writers

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12:54 AM | Third World Fashion Hits Cannes

Film is a visual spectacle. Festivals are even more so. And when you're talking about Cannes, especially for the red carpet in the Croisette, baby, you gotta dress up to the nines. So, of course, spectacle like the one below -- with Chinese actress Gong Li, Indian actress Aishwarya Rai and French model Laetitia Casta epitomizing the glamor and the international-ness of the whole thing -- is de rigeur.



And then I saw, from the festival website, these red carpet shots of the whole Serbis crew in Cannes, in full view of French paparazzi. [Click to enlarge.] And my initial reaction was: What the--? Minus the jackets, you could almost ask yourself, Are they going to Quiapo, or something?





[Photos: AFP]

In fairness, Gina Pareño looks regal. But what's with Jaclyn Jose's hideous suit, and even more hideous metallic blue eyeshadow? And Mercedes Cabral, wearing what looks suspiciously like sneakers, looks about ready to hit Divisoria. Sure, the film's another showcase of Third-World misery, but must we dress Third-World, too? Where were our local designers when we really needed them? Which was a pity, I thought. I once heard that when the young Hilda Koronel went to Cannes many years ago, she created a sensation.

And so, I breathed a sigh of relief when I searched further and found there were other red carpet photos that showed them in Patis Tesoro. At least.



[Photos: Christian Hartmann for Reuters]

Where are the grand dames of Pareño and Jose though? The only online photo I could get of them was this.

In other news: Amiens International Film Festival director Jean Pierre Garcia says both Pareño and Jose are strong contenders for the Best Actress prize, says Inquirer article. Well, let's see, and here's hoping. (My bet's on Gina.) Read further down the article, and voila, it's the "standing room" quote I knew would appear somewhere in local coverage! If you don't know what I'm talking about, read this.

Related post: Serbis gets slaughtered in reviews, here.

An update: Commenter Toti Porte says: "You can not blame the cast of Serbis if they are wearing a third world fashions, they came straight from Amsterdam and transfered to Nice Airport, and went to the photocall without changing their clothes. Even Mercedes Cabral has no time to chage his sneaker, since their luggage still un-open since they will be late for the presscon. Mercedes Cabral, Bing Lao, Ferdie Lapus and Jacklyn Jose almost made it photo finishes." Point well taken, and I apologize. But I still can't get over Jaclyn Jose's metallic blue eyeshadow.

Labels: art and culture, celebrity, fashion, festivals, film

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Tuesday, May 20, 2008

6:11 PM | Short Time at Room 180

Many, many months ago, I told Dean that his play, "Short Time" -- which won the Palanca back in 1991 -- would make for a good short film, and timely, too, considering the glut of independent movies with homosexual themes out there. He told me somebody's been trying for months now to adapt it for the screen -- but they keep losing the actors who all keep chickening out because of the demands of the roles, which include a lot of same sex friction. One former matinee idol displayed interest, but chickened out. Another very current matinee idol wanted to do it, but was advised to give up the role, or else all those gay rumors would be, umm, "confirmed."

But the film's finally out. Retitled Room 180, it has been adapted to the screen by the multi-talented Augie Rivera (best-known around town as a children's author) and directed by Rico Gutierrez. It stars Earl Ignacio, Andoy Ranay, and Francis Makil.

A screening is scheduled on May 26, 7PM at Mogwai Cafe (#62 & 63 Cubao Expo) near Ali Mall.

Labels: art and culture, film, queer, writers

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5:29 PM | Get the Ear of an American Literary Agent

From CANVAS:

CANVAS, as part of its mission, strives to open new opportunities for Filipino writers in the global market. CANVAS is therefore very proud to announce that we have tied up with the Sandra Dijkstra Literary Agency, one of the top agencies in the United States to launch the CANVAS Story Writing for Young Children Competition (target readership: 4-6 years old).

We will be putting up a modest cash prize for the winner, but what should pique the interest of writers here is that Kelly Sonnack, Literary Agent at the Sandra Dijkstra Literary Agency will review and provide feedback on the top five stories selected by CANVAS.

While there is no guarantee of anything beyond their look and review, it is notoriously difficult to even get stories considered for representation, much less publication, in the US.

We regard this as a huge, difficult-to-overstate, no-lose, possible-foot- in-the-door opportunity for writers to be introduced and hopefully represented by a literary agency that can help bring Filipino stories not just in the US, but to the worldwide market. We therefore highly encourage all Filipino writers to participate.

We will issue the official rules on Monday next week. Watch out for it!

[more info in looking for juan de la cruz]

Labels: call for submissions, contests, philippine literature, writers, writing

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11:56 AM | Xerex Xaviera Lives On

Everybody secretly misses the rambunctious tales of Xerex Xaviera from Abante Tonite.

But here's some scarlet consolation. It's finally out, FHM Erotica: Ladies Confessions Special Volume 2. (I don't remember Volume 1, but then again, let's just say I'm not the type who buys FHM, if you know what I mean.) You can't read this on the bus, or in the office, but it's worth the P195 cover price...



... if only because there are stories in there by some of the best young writers we have: Marguerite Alcarazen de Leon, Karl R. De Mesa, Joseph Nacino, Carljoe Javier, Anna Felicia Sanchez-Ishikawa, Lourd Ernest De Veyra, Andrew Paredes, Ramil Digal Gulle, and Norman Wilwayco. That's four Palanca winners doing slow, exquisitely breathless writing.

Why is there a sudden resurgence of erotica these days? I remember a workshop where an esteemed older writer walked out of a session, because she deemed the story under consideration as being way too pornographic. (Okay, I admit it, that story was mine.) Have we reached a turning point in our literary efforts, and unshackled literary prudery? Butch Dalisay used to say, in lamentation: "There's no sex in Philippine literature." Is that changing?

Of course, we had the Ladlad series (volumes 1, 2, and 3 all edited by J. Neil C. Garcia and Danton Remoto), Forbidden Fruit: Women Write the Erotic (edited by Tina Cuyugan), and Eros Pinoy: An Anthology Of Contemporary Erotica in Philippine Art and Poetry (edited by Virgilio Aviado, Ben Cabrera, and Alfred Yuson) from waaaaaaaay back, and many of the works in those anthologies certainly bordered on blushing bedroom antics, but they were rare publishing efforts that were more literary than your typical Penthouse Forum confessions. (I'm talking about the need for one-handed reading.)

Aside from Xerex, the only unabashed outlet for Pinoy sexual reading seemed to be the so-called bomba komiks of long ago.

Now, aside from the FHM issue, we have an upcoming anthology of losing-our-virginity stories and poems edited by Katrina Tuvera, Conchitina Cruz, and Edgar Samar. Some of the stories in Rogue have an erotic bent, especially the last one by Nikki Alfar. And Bing Sitoy, Sarge Lacuesta (who just did a piece for the maiden, ehem, issue of Playboy Philippines), and I have just began writing erotica for a possible anthology of three, to be finished sometime soon. Bing, of course, has been writing erotica for a Danish magazine for some time now, and she tells me "it pays very, very well."

Somebody should collect those Xerex Xaviera columns (15 years of unrivaled perversions!), and make them into a book. Instant bestseller 'yun.

Labels: philippine literature, sex, writing

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11:42 AM | Standing Ovation

Sometimes, reading the PR on some local films that make it to international film festivals, we get breathless accounts of how this film or that got a 5-minute applause, or be