Wexistence

The Democracy Video Challenge of the US State Department’s Bureau of International Information Programs (IIP) is a call to people from all over the world to create a short video that completes the phrase “Democracy is…” Over 900 contestants from 95 countries responded to the call and this Filipino entry entitled “Long Live the Fearless Man” was chosen as one of the 18 finalists.

It makes a very powerful statement about Philippine democracy. To vote for this video, go to the Democracy Challenge page and click on the thumbnail of “Long Live the Fearless Man”. Click on the thumbs up button. When it turns green, that means you’ve successfully cast your vote. Voting is until June 15, 2009 and you can vote as many times as you want! Vote and spread the word!

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!”

I am part of a lost generation
and I refuse to believe that
I can change the world
I realize this may be a shock but
“Happiness comes from within.”
is a lie, and
“Money will make me happy.”
So in 30 years I will tell my children
they are not the most important thing in my life
My employer will know that
I have my priorities straight because
work
is more important than
family
I tell you this
Once upon a time
Families stayed together
but this will not be true in my era
This is a quick fix society
Experts tell me
30 years from now, I will be celebrating the 10th anniversary of my divorce
I do not concede that
I will live in a country of my own making
In the future
Environmental destruction will be the norm
No longer can it be said that
My peers and I care about this earth
It will be evident that
My generation is apathetic and lethargic
It is foolish to presume that
There is hope.

And all of this will come true unless we choose to reverse it.

Read the message, then read it again in reverse.

* This video by Jonathan Reed won second place in AARP’s U@50 contest in 2007. The concept is based on the Argentinian political advertisement “The Truth” by RECREAR.

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.

Public school teachers and their bastos ice-breakers.

The first time I facilitated a workshop for public school teachers, I asked a volunteer to lead the ice-breaker/energizer. She totally caught me off guard by leading the group in a song filled with sexual innuendos accompanied by very suggestive actions.

Since then, I’ve been wary of these ice-breakers. They’re hilarious and I personally don’t mind, but it does become embarrassing when we have guests who would not appreciate the crass humor. At the Makabayan Seminar last summer, I asked Joseph Raymond to lead ice-breaker to ensure that there would be no funny business, because Dr. Yvette Camacho (Assistant Dean of the University, Opus Dei Numerary) was observing.

Much to my horror, Joseph handed the mic over to a volunteer. She began by asking the group for three adjectives. They tossed out “malaki,” “matigas” and “malambot.” You can see where this is going. Thankfully, Dr. Camacho had stepped out of the room so she wasn’t there to witness this:

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.