Menthol-Guy

I firmly believe that going to a moviehouse just to watch a movie (whether it’s slightly interesting or not - but if it’s extremely interesting, say Angels and Demons or something close to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, then I might just change my way of thinking) you’re not really crazy about is a waste of money. Why spend 200 bucks for a movie?

In my case, I check the Internet every weekend for the schedule of Cinemax, Star Movies and HBO here in the Philippines: they usually air blockbuster (even indie!) movies every Saturday night and also throughout the weekends. I only spend twenty pesos an hour to do the blogging, the movie-checking, the photo-posting and all. Perhaps I’m just not really a fan of watching movies on theatres and perhaps, it’s a nice way to maximize the use of our cable subscription.

Let’s see. The first movie I watched on a moviehouse was Madrasta (I only remember Sharon Cuneta and… Rico Yan) since we sort of toured my American-grown cousins around here. Then the Richard-Angel movie (entitled “The Promise“) where it featured a love scene on some lighthouse: I watched it since a bestfriend forced me so hard to watch this one. Then Spiderman 3 with Rens, Joe, Alan and Aaron at Mall of Asia, just for the heck of it.

See, I don’t really give a damn going to movie theatres except if someone made me do it.

_{The point of the explanation is this: I’m a loser, so I make movie reviews about movies from decades or years ago. Enough said.}

Death Sentence - Kevin Bacon, Kelly Preston. I totally liked the gory and bloody scenes on this movie. It’s about Nick Hume, a man who becomes a vengeful vigilante killer after his son is murdered by a gang as an initiation ritual. The movie tends to shift to a ruthless mood when Nick Hume’s wife and sons got killed after the gang took revenge on the slaughter of their ‘gangmate’.

The Breed - Michelle Rodriguez, Oliver Hudson, Taryn Manning. Lame, lame movie - the way I see it, it’s the dogs that made the movie hair-raising and horrifying. But I like the concept of using bows (as in bow and arrows) to kill genetically-mutated attack dogs. Big, big deal. The dogs are even smarter than the cast themselves. See, the dogs unlatched their yacht off the dock and even killed three out of the five characters. LOL.

Zodiac - Jake Gyllenhaal, Mark Ruffalo, Robert Downey Jr. It’s about a serial killer named Zodiac who kills people at California’s Bay Area during the 1970-1980s. The cinematography was nice, the scenes were pretty much convincing to tell you that it did happened in the 1980s. Even the scenes were a bit chrome (yellow?) in color, for chrissake, and it was really nice and thrilling and all. The evolution of the plot was unmistakably the thing that made me feel devoted to watch the movie: it so happened that the Zodiac can’t be found due to distorted fingerprints and the use of gloves. Jake Gyllenhaal and Robert Downey Jr. work on a newspaper (San Francisco Times, if I’m not mistaken) house and there they received Zodiac’s coded letters and stuff.  Zodiac was never captured or even tried or hanged for the death sentence after eleven killings on the span of twenty-something years. It’s really nice, masterfully captured, and it’s a true-to-life story.

Venom - Agnes Bruckner, Jonathan Jackson. A real Urban Legend-like thriller about some whatever. It’s all about voodoos and stuff and how each and everyone was killed by a zombie infested with sinister souls and all. Not really a good plot but it would make you scream the way director Jim Gillespie made you scream in I Know What You Did Last Summer.

Next - Nicolas Cage, Jessica Biel, Julianne Moore. This is the kind of movie where it kills you on the end (just watch the film and see for yourself). It’s about Nicolas Cage, a magician who can see two minutes ahead of time. Yet when he slept with Jessica Biel, whom he has been predicting for such a long time, he has seen what happens for the next several hours (therefore concluding that Jessica Biel is a potent key for him to see the future longer). The plot’s about a nuclear thingamajig planted on the center of Los Angeles that would kill around a couple of million people plus the infrastructure damage and all, and the pursuit of FBI for Nicolas Cage’s “power” of seeing the future - since they still don’t know where the bomb was. The ending? Definitely the suckiest.

Memoirs of a Geisha - Zhang Ziyi, Michelle Yeoh. I rarely watch movies when the protagonist’s a female (I don’t know, not that I’m a anti-feminist but this one’s too classic and I have no idea why I somehow didn’t like the movie at first glance) but this one’s just too good to be missed on HBO. It’s about a child who was left out by her parents and her sister and the dream of being a geisha and attracting wealthy people. It’s about lust, love, treachery and deceit behind their white faces and their impressive kimonos. The entirety of this movie is just one of the best with all its historical, tell-tale style and the illustration of the Imperial Japan before the World War II was just spectacular. Definitely a must-watch.

The Omen - Liev Schreiber, Julia Stiles. Grand, grand movie. Really grand but not in a phony sense. Grand, well-funded movie. It’s a thriller, though it may be blasphemous to the devouts. This movie used a lot of symbols (like 666, which traditionally is regarded as the “number of the beast”) and everything. It’s a movie that would leave you shell-shocked for a while. I liked it, though the father should’ve killed the goddam child first. And the ending, ARGH. Definitely depressing.

Now I shall check the movie schedules of HBO, Cinemax and Star Movies. Bahaha.

About pinoy movies

It’s such a shame that I have only watched a number of Filipino movies in my entire life. Let me recall the names.

• Do-Re-Mi (Donna, Regine, Mikee): I know, the movie sounds corny. But my sisters loved it back when I was a cute little boy, very cute boy in fact.
• Madrasta: My first movie to watch on theatre, since we treated two of my cousins from States (Maan and Michael). We watched in in Meycauayan, in Aliw. LOL.
• That Richard-Angel movie where they had kissing scenes on a lighthouse. I forgot the title but it’s not really good (for me, it’s AWFUL); my bestfriend insinuated the very idea of watching it, and needless to say, I am just plain interested. And it was a bore.
• Moments of Love: I watched it in the bus from Los Banos to Cubao. Coolness.
• Bikini Open - LOL at Francine Prieto.
• All About Love - While watching the movie, I somehow miss the conventional Angelica Panganiban back then. Heh.
• Chopsuey: The most splendid, most - how-could-I-put-this? - touching and probably one of the best Filipino movies I’ve ever seen. Dimples Romana really had a knack on acting, especially when she delivered her Chopsuey speech (I think I have a post for this movie: HERE). I watched it at Cinema One, a cable channel.

And just yesterday, the movie with Angel Aquino and Ara Mina and Carlos Morales and all (I searched it and it’s LARO SA BAGA, lol). Angel Aquino acted so good, and so did Carlos Morales (which at first, no offense if ever you guys like this guy, didn’t look like an actor to me). Only Ara Mina’s role of some twangy Balikbayan, for me, put the movie down with her nonfluent English-speaking skills. But anyway, the story is downright touching - about some guy confused and wretched induced by the marriage and love-related arguments waged by his belligerent wife (and yes, the wife unsuccessfully cut his penis when he was sleeping - it was only a gash, though), and his family problems, his obsession with his mother (if I’m not mistaken - Angel Aquino’s role is a mother or a grandmother, since it flashed back scenes where his Mom used to give him a bath and he was peering a good eye on the breasts and all) and his drug abuse and all. I don’t know why it’s good: not that I can relate to the plot of the story or whatsoever, but I guess the acting and the harsh reality behind it made the movie biting and impressive.

I think those were the only Filipino movies I’ve watched in my entire life. And oh, that Angelu-Bobby movie about poor Bobby and rich Angelu and all that live-in stuff and in the end Angelu died with a tumor on her brain or something. I forgot the title, though. Movie titles always slip out of my mind.

Heimlich-maneuvered

Dad gave me this magazine, Poets & Writers, straight from the shelves of Booksale - probably a gift towards the book he borrowed from me (William Gibson’s “Pattern Recognition”, which he loved so much). I really would like to thank him for the extra mile of thoughtfulness and for - at last - outwardly accepting the very knowledge that irritates my Mom: that his youngest son, despite his monkish and solitary existence in his room this vacation (and his way of sneaking cigarettes inside his room), has this ounce of consciousness to dream of being a productive writer. Mom had been the stubborn shadow, the Nursing advocate, but little by little her support grew to a point where she told me that I’m free to pick my own course as long as I’d buy him a mansion (which was what I promised her probably eight years ago, riding on our owner en route to somewhere, then we accidentally came across Villa Rica’s mansion and told her the promise. Not even a hollow block was funded as of the moment).

Regrettably, the very magazine he gave me “Heimlich-maneuvered” my extinguished depressions and such thoughts about the uncertainty of a career I had not even planned, had not even stomached. For one, my course (which is absolutely out of the context with creative writing) is obviously not helping me to become a writer; it is teaching me more of the economic side of things about farmlands and barns teeming with carabao shit. And also, in my own point of view, my erratic way of writing is still prevalent up to this moment - I rarely use has, have, had not because of confusion but with the fear of committing venial grammatical mistakes (I welcome criticisms so much, so please, MTV, pimp my post). I try as much as possible to simplify a sentence to avoid the use of such; as long as the thought remains, of course. Also, the magazine’s approach to me seemed to be mocking: it flashed articles, novel and essay excerpts with the content faces of its authors - mostly twenty-something and pursued a Masteral degree in Fine Arts, Major in Creative Writing at some college/university in the States. Not really mocking: more of challenging the aspiring authors and writers out there to follow their steps, make a manuscript for two years, polish it for seven months or so, and find a publisher. Lastly, it seems like, as months go by, that the dream is becoming improbable.

I don’t know, I don’t know: the usual “come-what-mays” may answer my questions and fill the voids for the moment.

And this post is way too formal than I have ever dreamed of.