Wexistence

Chillin’ with Darth Maul
as the 8th Philippine Toys, Hobbies and Collectibles Convention
June 13, 2009, SM Mega Mall Megatrade Hall 2

Pictures from yesterday’s foray into the sea of nerds here. (I say “nerd” with no trace of condescension. We’re nerds, so it’s okay for us to make fun of other nerds. If we were jocks then that would just be plain mean.)

We were supposed to just look at not buy, but Ry and I went home with one toy each: a Soundwave MP3 player (that actually transforms!) for me, and a Revoltech Rodimus Prime for him. It seems like there was less cool merch this year compared to last year, but it was still interesting to poke around.

The cosplay parade was fun as usual. Lots of really awesome intricately-made costumes. I could’ve done with less of the anime dorks and gothic lolitas though.

For a political economy major and a science fiction aficionado such as myself, this is just too awesome for words. Global governance and Battlestar Galactica. *Nerdgasms*

Edward James Olmos, on his authority as Admiral of the Battlestar Galactica, tells the assembled crowd at the United Nations there is no race but the human race.

“SO SAY WE ALL!”

Take Watchmen off your shelf, watch the pages as you rapidly flip through them with your thumb, and it will almost be like watching the movie: images rushing at you without conveying the full weight of their significance. There are just too many subplots and too many layers of nuance to properly tell the story in a two and half hour movie. I guess Zack Snyder did the best he could given the limitations of the medium, but it was more like a movie based on the Wikipedia entry on Watchmen than a movie based on the actual graphic novel.

We all know that movie adaptations of our favorite books never live up to our expectations. I can accept this particular adaptation for what it is. If you liked the Watchmen movie taken in and of itself, that’s fine. But if you liked it because you thought it was “just like the comics,” you need to stay the hell away from me.

The characters:

• Matthew Goode as Adrian Veidt/Ozymandias – 5/5. I didn’t think he could pull it off. In my mind he was still the cute secret service agent who was chasing Mandy Moore around Europe. He should’ve looked a little bit older but all in all it was a convincing performance.
• Jeffrey Dean Morgan as Edward Blake/The Comedian – 5/5. The Comedian is an amoral, sadistic, cigar-chomping womanizer yet Morgan still managed to portray him as a somewhat sympathetic character. Good job, dead guy from Grey’s Anatomy.
• Jackie Earle Haley as Walter Kovacs/Rorschach – 5/5. Haley got an Oscar nomination for his performance as the town pedophile in Little Children so we knew he had the creepy psycho thing going for him. He did not disappoint. I especially loved the scene where he trashed the shrink’s office and growled, “WHERE’S MY FACE?!?” The only Rorschach moment I didn’t like was the part where he killed the little girl’s kidnapper instead of leaving the knife beside him and setting the house on fire. I don’t see why they felt the need to change that detail. It wasn’t a minor detail – it changes our understanding of Rorschach’s sense of justice.
• Patrick Wilson as Dan Dreiberg/Nite Owl and Malin Akerman as Laurie Juspeczyk/Silk Spectre – 4/5. They look like their respective characters, except they’re both too young and too hot. Dan’s a dumpy middle-aged man. When he’s walking around naked you’re not supposed to want to check him out. Laurie’s in her forties and going through mid-life crisis. They’re both shadows of their former selves. Malin Akerman’s most notable role to date is the wife of the redneck freakshow in Harold and Kumar so we weren’t really expecting much from her, but wow. She’s a terrible actress. At no point does she show that she’s capable of any depth and her emotional breakdown on Mars just seemed contrived.
• Billy Crudup as Jon Osterman/Dr. Manhattan – 3.5/5. Dr. Manhattan experiences time in a non-linear fashion. His perception of the world is radically different from that of ordinary people. Human concerns seem pointless, the morality of human actions escapes him. Over time his emotional capacities decrease. He becomes more and more detached from the world, with Laurie as his only link, until he eventually loses her too. Crudup’s portrayal wasn’t able to demonstrate this great divide between Dr. Manhattan and the rest of humanity. His Dr. Manhattan just seemed kind of clueless. Also, couldn’t they have done something about his voice? Put it through a filter or something. It’s hard to be in awe of someone who sounds like geeky Jake Gyllenhaal. Plats thinks the only reason Crudup was chosen for the role was “because he was the only one willing to expose his peeper.”

Likes:

• Genuine attempt to be true to the original look and feel of the graphic novel, though they were more successful in some parts of the movie than others. Loved the flashbacks especially, very Golden Age.
• Cohesive story. Smooth transition between scenes. You never feel like you’re missing something or confused about how something came about. Of course that meant sacrificing content, but that’s better than trying to cram too much material into a limited amount of time.
• The soundtrack. Paul Simon and Jimi Hendrix! I loved that scene with All Along the Watchtower. I don’t understand why some people are saying that the music was out of place throughout the whole film.
• The scenes where they fought like old time comic heroes — hook-like punches and all. Nothing artistic or graceful about them, just Bam! Kapow! Zokkkk!
• Confrontation between Nite Owl and Ozymandias. This doesn’t happen in the graphic novel. Nite Owl doesn’t challenge what Ozymandias did; he accepts it. The ends justify the means. But in the movie, it is presented as a moral dilemma.

Dislikes:

• No sense of impending doom. The world is on the brink of nuclear destruction but for some reason you don’t feel the direness and urgency of the Cold War-esque situation.
• No crescendo. There’s no build up and no climax. By the middle of the movie I was already bored, and remained so all the way till the end.
• Laurie and Dr. Manhattan’s conversation on Mars. This is actually one of the best parts of the the graphic novel, but it had nowhere near the same impact in the movie. The scene felt awfully weak, partly because they whittled down the dialogue too much, party because the actors weren’t very good.
• Nite Owl and Laurie’s fight scenes in the alley and the prison corridor. Too smooth and too choreographed. It felt too modern, not at all the way I imagined they would fight. I had in mind something much grittier.
• Awkward talkie scenes. There were several in the movie but the first one that comes to mind is the one between Nite Owl and Rorschach in Nite Owl’s lair after Laurie and Dr. Manhattan teleport to Mars. Rorschach’s being a pain in the ass. Dan goes, “Why do you gotta be like that, man?” Rorschach goes, “You’re a good friend, Dan.” Dan goes, “I’m sorry man.” And this whole time they’re just standing awkwardly in front of each other and the camera angle doesn’t change. Is it because in the graphic novel that conversation takes place in only one frame?
• The ending. Some people argue, who cares about the squid? The same effect is achieved: a threat to humanity unites humanity. But I disagree. I think that the fact that the threat to humanity came from humanity should change the outcome. The squid is neutral; Dr. Manhattan is not. The US created Dr. Manhattan. He was their most powerful weapon and he backfired. This resulted in massive destruction and loss of life around the world. Why should their mistake unify the nations of the world? Why would Russia or anyone else be rushing to embrace the US just because they suffered casualties too? I think human beings need to be confronted with something larger than themselves, something completely removed from them and totally beyond their known universe (e.g. aliens) to enable them to rise above their small-mindedness.

Conclusion: I knew it was going to be a let down but it was still worth watching. 3/5 stars.

Vicky Cristina Barcelona would have you believe that if you choose to be a responsible adult you’re doomed to a boring existence. You must flout social norms and conventions in order to truly live life. You must necessarily be a pretentious faux-bohemian to have passionate relationships. You must be emotionally dysfunctional to create anything of artistic value. The movie is mildly entertaining, if you can get past the artsy pseudo-intellectual masturbation.

Cristina, who spent the last six months writing, directing, and acting in a 12-minute film which she then hated, had just broken up with yet another boyfriend… [She] expected something very different out of love. She had reluctantly accepted suffering as an inevitable component of deep passion, and was resigned to putting her feelings at risk. If you asked her what it was she was gambling her emotions on to win, she would not have been able to say.

We all know a Cristina. Ry even dated one — something I’ll never let him live down. In fact I think those people exist because of the propagation of the stereotype by various media. Life imitates art, etc. etc.

But as much as I scorn everything that the character represents, I can, to a certain extent, relate to her. Cristina suffers from chronic discontent. She doesn’t know what she wants. All she knows is that she’s restless and unhappy with her present situation.

Like Cristina, I find myself constantly searching for something that will make me happier, more fulfilled. I’m not exactly unhappy with my life, I just feel like I should be doing more with it. Not sure what specifically, just more than what I’m doing right now. I’m nagged by the thought that I haven’t achieved enough in my career, that I should be pushing myself harder, that I should be looking for “better” employment, with no real definition of what “better” is. More financially rewarding, perhaps? I am tired of being broke all the time. Sometimes I wonder if my idealism is worth it.

I don’t know if it’s just me or if “chronic discontent” is characteristic of twenty-somethings who are still trying to find their place in the world.

We’re all sick of Twilight. I live with an incessantly squealing fourteen-year-old girl so I’ll wager that I’m even sicker of it than you are. I will be brief.

I’m not too “sophisticated” to enjoy young adult fiction. I love Tamora Pierce, Libba Bray, Maureen Johnson and Eva Ibbotson. I grew up on Sweet Valley and have yet to outgrow my Francine Pascal addiction. I was reading Fearless in my early twenties and to this day I still think Ed Fargo is teh hotness.

I don’t think books/movies necessarily have to serve an edifying purpose. I can appreciate that some things are just meant to be fun.

That being said, I just can’t get into Twilight. I tried, but I gave up in the middle of the first book. Ironically, it was the vampire sexiness Rob Pattinson himself who best expressed why the series makes my skin crawl:

“When I read it, it seemed like (grimaces) I was convinced that … Stephanie was … convinced that she was Bella, and uh, and you, it wasn’t, it was like it was a book that wasn’t supposed to be published, like reading her … her sort of sexual fantasy about some — especially when she says that it was based on a dream, and it’s like, “Oh, then I had a dream about this really sexy guy” and she just writes this book about it, and there’s some things about Edward that are just so specific that it’s like, I was just convinced that, that this woman is mad, she’s completely mad, and she’s in love with her own fictional creation…” – Rob Pattinson (E Online)*

But, y’know, if a vampire stalker is your idea of hawt I won’t take that away from you.

That’s all. Moving on.

One adolescent vampire love story that does intrigue me is Let the Right One In, which by all accounts sounds like an impressively original take on the vampire myth, masterfully executed both as a novel and as a film. I’ve read some reviews that compare Let the Right One In and Twilight, but it doesn’t seem fair to even mention the two in the same breath.

Let the Right One In is a 2004 novel by Swedish writer John Ajvide Lindqvist. The story centers on the relationship between a 12-year-old boy, Oskar, and a 200-year-old vampire child, Eli. It takes place in Blackeberg, a working class suburb of Stockholm, in the early 80′s. The book focuses on the darker side of humanity, dealing with issues such as bullying, drugs, theft, pedophilia, prostitution and murder as well as the obvious supernatural themes. The book was a bestseller in Sweden and has been translated into many languages including German, Russian and English in 2007.

The 2008 Swedish language film adaptation of the novel has received widespread acclaim and has won numerous awards. (View the trailer here.)

Reviews say it is darkly perverse but also incredibly poignant. One reviewer wrote that it is simultaneously the goriest horror movie and the sweetest love story he’s ever seen.

Admist all this young love, a string of ritual slayings begin to occur in Oskar’s small town–right around the time Eli and her “father” move in. The victims are found hoisted up by their feet, their throats slashed, blood drained. It’s no great SPOILER to tell you that the murders are indeed being perpetrated by Eli’s “father.” However, when one of blood-hunts gets botched and Eli’s father has to make a terrible sacrifice (you have to see it to believe it) in order to protect his “daughter,” Eli is left alone, forced to hunt for her own blood supply. Having no other protector Eli turns to Oskar, her only friend, forcing the young boy to make a man’s choice about who he is going to be in a world of predators and prey.

Let The Right One In is a stunning achievement in terms of direction. Unlike so many American horror films, Let The Right One In doesn’t bash you over the head with obvious metaphors or hackneyed plots that barely hold together beyond getting you from murder scene A, to murder scene B. Tomas Alfredson crafts the film like a series of short stories, rather than a whole novel. What I mean by that statement is that Alfredson meticulously packs every scene with detail and nuanced implication, helping every moment to convey so much, while doing so little. Like any good short story, you could take any scene of Let The Right One In and have it stand alone as it’s own short film-and because every scene succeeds so well in telling it’s own story, the movie as a whole is able to present what, on the surface, seems like a straightforward narrative, yet taken in context with all implications surrounding it, the story becomes a complex, densly layered morality tale that resonates in a fundamental way with our emotional compasses. This is all accomplished using the bare minimum of cinematic tools: dialogue in the film is sparse, there is very little ambient music (basically the same eerie tune from the trailer playing out in full), and the stripped down format helps to give the gorgeous visuals extra room to breath–creative space that Alfredson works with a skillful hand only the most masterful directors posses.

Within the context of a horror film, the minimalist approach truly flourishes: before a word is even spoken we’re already deeply invested in Oskar. We sympathize with the pain of each and every hit the boy takes in the schoolyard, yet we can’t help but feel a deep-seeded anxiety whenever Oskar, alone at home, takes his favorite hunting knife out into the yard to fantasize about murdering the classmates who torment him. Twenty minutes into the film, Alfredson has us doing emotional somersaults about whether we’re watching the sufferings of a picked-upon nerd, or one of the Columbine killers (to put it in an American context) having the seeds of a murderer sewn by the abuses of his formative years. By minute twenty-one, when Eli first appears, the movie has achieved one of the near-impossible feats of telling a good vampire story: keeping the human drama elevated above the monster madness. (link)

The film is scheduled for a 2009 English language remake to be directed by Matt Reeves, but I want to see it in its original form. The DVD of the Swedish version comes out in March 2009, but I’m sure it’s somewhere on the Internet.

* Thanks to Feanne and the Aissa who isn’t me for this quote.

To lighten the serious political mood this blog has been sporting lately, let’s talk about midgets. By some weird coincidence midgets keep being randomly brought to my attention. Now I shall bring them to yours.

Midgets in Pinoy Showbiz

I’m not exactly immersed in Filipino pop culture, so in the past the only celebrity midget who came to mind was Mahal of Lunch Date/Jimboy Salazaar/Shower Scandal fame. Thanks to this article, I now have a better appreciation of the contributions of little people or unanos to the Philippine entertainment industry.

I hate Lost. I’ve been told I should just stop watching and spare myself the mental anguish but I’m the sucker who stuck with X-Files for nine years. I never learn.

It looks amazing… for a movie that isn’t Watchmen.

I love badass superhero movies as much as the next person, but Watchmen was not meant to be just another glossy leather-and-chrome comicbook adaptation. The depth and breadth of its storytelling puts Watchmen in a completely different league from even The Dark Knight, awesome as TDK was. Watchmen remains the only graphic novel to win a Hugo Award and it’s the only graphic novel to appear on Time Magazine’s list of 100 best novels of the 20th century. It’s the crown jewel of the medium for a reason.

Watchmen is about a team of aging superheroes who are past their prime and who are struggling in different ways with the fact that their glory days are behind them. Most of them are retired, but some continue to work behind the scenes as powerful forces who influence the political economy of a world on the brink of nuclear war. The story is not a simple showdown between hero and villain. In fact, it’s a deconstruction of the conventional superhero archetype. It’s an exceedingly complex tale that expertly weaves together dozens of individual plotlines and explores themes like the nature of authority and social power, fascism, free will and determinism, absolutism, consequentialism and moral relativism.

How a two-hour film is going to give justice to this sprawling epic is beyond me. Alan Moore said it himself, “With a comic, you can take as much time as you want in absorbing that background detail, noticing little things that we might have planted there. You can also flip back a few pages relatively easily to see where a certain image connects with a line of dialogue from a few pages ago. But in a film, by the nature of the medium, you’re being dragged through it at 24 frames per second.” (EW)

I can appreciate the great visual styling of the Watchmen movie, but it looks and feels nothing like the comic. I understand that certain comicbook elements don’t translate well on film (e.g. real people would look ridiculous in costumes that looked exactly the way they did in the comics), but that’s just one of many reasons why some comics should stay comics. The Golden Age look and feel of the Watchmen comic is, for me, not just an aesthetic but integral to its storytelling. The very contemporary packaging of the movie has made me wonder (and fear) what else they’ve streamlined/updated/modernized. I’m bracing myself for a V for Vendetta-type butchering. (To make V for Vendetta more “relevant” to the current political climate, it was turned into a political satire about neo-conservatism, when the original story was really about fascism and anarchy.)

I’m not a purist who complains that adaptations of my fandoms aren’t “canon.” I can appreciate creative decisions to alter certain aspects of a work, provided they’re well done and respectful of the original material. But if you’re going to produce an adaptation that only resembles the original in the way that tic-tac-toe resembles chess, you should just go and write your own damn story.

The animation wasn't bad, but that's the only good thing I have to say about this movie. Having gotten that out of the way, my litany of complaints shall now commence.

The existence of Urduja as an actual historical figure is dubious at best. Her story is compelling and she's a source of pride for the Pangasinenses, but she's right up there with Kalantiaw and Maragtas and the Ten Datus of Borneo — more fiction than fact. But Urduja wasn't meant to be a documentary on pre-Hispanic tribal life in the archipelago. In the same way that I'm not going to complain that Pocahontas wasn't historically accurate or that Hercules got Greek mythology all wrong, I'm not going to criticize Urduja for taking liberties with Philippine history. At least, not per se. My issue is that the “artistic license” taken by the writers was gratuitous, unnecessary and made absolutely no sense.

The Badjaos are boat people of the Sulu and Celebes Seas in Mindanao. They most certainly did not live in trees. (It was the Visayans who built treehouses, which they only occupied during times of war.) The Badjaos didn't hang around Luzon, they would have nothing to do with the Tawalisi tribe, and if there's any tribe they had a problem with, it was the Tausugs. I don't understand why the writers didn't just use a tribe from Luzon in the same vicinity, or why they didn't just create a fictional rival tribe. It was completely nonsensical to pit Urduja's people against the Badjaos specifically.

Vida as a PRS China teacher will have infinitely more to say about this, but I disliked how they made a Chinese general the kontrabida. I understand that every story needs a bad guy, but they could've simply used another pirate with a personal vendetta against Lim Hang instead of portraying the Chinese as bloodthirsty, gold-plundering conquerors. In the 14th century when Urduja allegedly ruled, the Chinese empire wasn't even interested in other lands. During the Yuan dynasty Chinese traders were even discouraged from trading abroad in Southeast Asia. In the 15th century this anti-foreign policy was reversed when Ming emperor Yung Lo launched a series of naval expeditions to Southeast Asia, Arabia and Africa. The Chinese didn't come as conquerors, but as ambassadors who invited leaders of foreign countries to establish tributary relations with China. They weren't interested in conquest or any sort of political interference, they merely wanted to do business. Relations with China brought economic prosperity. Thus, having a Chinese general bring war and oppression just seemed ludicrous to me.

And finally, the question begs to be asked: What was Samurai Jack doing there? I'm hard pressed for a logical explanation, but Ry says he was there so that Ruby Rodriguez's character could throw herself at him and return with him to Japan as the first Japayuki — a social commentary on how Filipinas look to foreigners for their salvation.

There are no tarsiers in Pangasinan. They live in the islands of Samar, Leyte, Bohol, and Mindanao. But tarsiers are cute and I totally would've let Urduja's stray tarsier slide, except that he wasn't cute. He was an annoying loudmouth bading from a cheap beauty parlor trapped in a furry wide-eyed forest creature's body. Then there was Michael V as Lim Hang's smartass pirate rat sidekick who kept up a steady stream of bad jokes in the place of witty repartee, and Jimmy Santos as the carabao whose sole purpose was to mangle the English language. (Carabao English, get it?) I'm usually a sucker for talking animals but the only remotely endearing creature in this movie was the snake, precisely because he didn't talk.

The dialogue had us literally squirming in our seats and laughing uproariously at all the wrong parts. I don't think I've ever been that loud and disruptive in a movie theater, but it was just so horrible. It was one contrived line or bad metaphor after the other, and Pinoy scriptwriting gems like “Wala kang nakikita kung di ang tibok ng bulag mong puso!” Many of the characters spoke in the Taglish peppered with Filipino slang you'd hear on noontime television, which is more offensive to my ears than any amount of cussing. The humor was crass and slapstick, and it's really not surprising that it was written by the same people behind Eat Bulaga.

Like a sizeable chunk of Filipino pop culture, Urduja isn't terribly original. There was a lot of Mulan and Pocahontas in it, and the song number of the rat and tarsier was a total rip-off of Hakuna Matata from Lion King. Right before we went to see the movie, Ry and I were talking about a Pinoy graphic novel called Trese, which was pretty good except that it was basically Hellblazer with John Constantine as girl fighting Filipino aswangs. The Filipino penchant for copying things wholesale irks me sometimes, but I don't see it as a necessarily bad thing. I see it as the early stage in a process of development, in the same way that Anime started out as a rip-off of Mickey Mouse and Betty Boop before evolving into something distinctly Japanese. We're still learning, and there's no shame in learning from someone who's better at something than you presently are. Hopefully in time we'll come up with more original ideas and develop more distinct styles.

It bothers me that people are determined to extol Urduja regardless of how bad it is, just because it's a Filipino first. National pride, yadda yadda ad nauseum. But patting ourselves on the back for mediocrity contributes nothing to our development as a nation. Let's give credit where credit is due, but let's not feel obliged to be proud of something simply because it's Filipino-made. Let's be proud of things because they're Filipino-made and they're good. It should be an issue of national pride for us to challenge our countrymen, whatever their field, to do better than they have previously done. (And to apply the same standards to ourselves, of course.)

I didn’t enjoy Indy 4 as much as I thought I would. The first three movies are cultural touchstones of my childhood, and I don’t know if Crystal Skull didn’t live up to (my memory of) them because I was less critical as a kid or because it just wasn’t that good a movie. Probably both. Also, it never used to bother me the way Indy would manhandle ancient artifacts or trash archeological sites, but this time around I’d wince every time he did. Now I understand why real archeologists hate Indiana Jones. It was fun to see some of his classic moves on screen again, but it was still a disappointing movie experience. They lost me at the aliens.

I don’t understand how anyone could not like Speed Racer. Unlike some previous Wachowski projects, this movie was made not to be taken the least bit seriously. No pseudo philosophical/religious/political statements, just lots of amazing special effects and seizure-inducing psychedelia. Everything was absurdly exaggerated, the dialogue was cheesy, the plot predictable, and the “twist” was non-existent as it was blatantly obvious that Racer X was who Racer X was. But did anyone really expect otherwise? I left the theater satisfied that I got what I came for, though I felt the drama with Racer X’s secret identity was totally unnecessary, and Trixie was totally slutty (and I don’t mean in a good way).