Sixteen

1st Philippine International Pyromusical Competition

If I'm not mistaken, this pyromusical competition was supposed to have been staged at The Fort grounds late last year, but safety issues brought by typhoon Ondoy caused the organizers to cancel the event. Now, SM Mall of Asia's Seaside Blvd. will be the new venue of the event, happening from February 14 'til March 14. Of course I'm skipping Feb 14, with or without a date.



There have been many other pyro-olympics events here over recent years, but I wonder why everything is tagged as "first". Each one is called either pyroolympics or pyromusical, so what's the difference and why is it called first everytime an event of its kind is being held in Manila? Baffling.

Marina, 88

I regret not telling you often enough just how much I loved you.  I owe you my childhood and much of what I am as a grown-up. You were there for me even if I broke you heart more than once, and you were there for me every time I needed you.

I'm sorry that I was not there for you as much as I knew you would have wanted. I'm sorry that I did not even realize you were hurting. I'm sorry that I couldn't even look at you on those last days that everyone was bidding you farewell. I hope that my last gift had made your last days on this earth warm enough to make you realize that I cared about you more than you should have known.

May God bless your journey to the other side. I love you.

An Anti-MMFF Film Fest

If not for Avatar in 3D shown at IMAX, I would have skipped the moviehouses altogether during the Holiday season. Thanks to the break and a lull in work load, I finally managed to watch a number of films that were either not shown in the moviehouses in the first place or I missed in the previous months because of sidelines. So a short visit to MCS allowed me to catch stuff that local cinemas failed to screen and a trek to MOA allowed me to watch one that you just has to be seen on the biggest screen available.

• How To Be-  A dysfunctional teenager invites into his home a famous psychologist and book author to help him figure out his life and his strained relationship with his parents. It's quirky, it's almost weird, it's funny and touching at times. It's Robert Pattinson's best film to date, and he's prettier as an emotionally disturbed kid than as a 118-year-old fangless "vegan" bloodsucker.
• 500 Days of Summer - It's the indie film that luckily made it to local moviehouses and got everyone talking about the nuances of failed relationships. Boy falls for girl, the feeling isn't mutual. Sometimes two people spend so many happy moments together, and then everything goes kaput because in spite of the good times, someone's ought to realize that the other person is not the right one.
• The September Issue- In the age of reality entertainment, the devil that is Ana outclasses the competition by allowing the fat, the short, and the not-so-perfect rest of the public a rare look into her lair. This RJ Cutler documentary shows the editorial process involved in producing the September 2007 issue of Vogue, the magazine's thickest yet at 700 pages, with insights from the magazine's stylists and editors, fashion industry players, and the editrix herself. For full effect, I suggest watching The Devil Wears Prada right after viewing this film.
• Somersault -  Watching The Great Raid, Terminator: Salvation and Avatar within the span of one week is easily a Sam Worthington film fest, although it was purely by coindicidence. Now Sommersault tops everything off, but I still have not a clue why this movie earned so much awards from the 2004 AFI Awards, including top honors for the lead roles. Like many serious coming-of-age films, Somersault explores repressed emotions and sexual discovery, with plenty of nudity and a dash of gender confusion. This film is summed up by Joe's (Worthington) line that you don't go around boinking everything that moves whenever you're upset.
• Avatar - The film everyone was excited about, I didn't even see its trailer until I was lining up for tickets at IMAX. It's high-tech and lush, with a solid moral and emotional center. One neither has to be  of the tree-hugger nor of the commie persuasion to enjoy James Cameron's biggest film after Titanic, and it's easy to guess where Cameron drew inspiration from in writing the story with its anti-war sentiments even if the film ironically peaks in a natives-vs.-high-tech soldiers skirmish over precious resources and land rights. Tickets cost twice as much as those for 2D, but it's all worth it. You may get lost in Cameron's 3D world, but nothing takes away from the idea that you don't get military men (ex or otherwise) to solve your business problems, or that making a virtual warrior that gets a little sumth'n sumth'n out of a wheelchair-bound ex-soldier is not the best way to keep his loyalty (that, and the moral dilemma, of course). Sex sells, and virtual sex betrays. Love the "I see you" bit towards the end. ::sniffs::

I would have caught T4 (Sam Worthington/Marcus Wright stole the spotlight. Yay, short people of the world!), GI Joe (yuck! yuck! bad acting, cartoonish CGI and cheesy lines all over the place), and Transformers 2 (hack away some 45 minutes of useless scenes, and it would be nearly as decent as the first one) at the cinema on any given day, but my side projects paid for the rent and bought shoes.

I don't care about the stuff that MMFF regurgitates every year. How many times does Mother Lilly have to remake Shake, Rattle and Roll (11th episode as of 2009) and Mano Po (6th), or for anyone to rehash Ang Panday (nth film and nth TV series)?  Vic Sotto and co. stopped making Enteng Kabisote in favor of Ang Girlfriend Kong Aswang (My Vampire Girlfriend), but nobody cares about the flick unless they watch Eat Bulaga everyday.  On the other hand, word has it that Manny Pacquiao's Wapakman has CGI that harks back to the '80s, while I Love You, Goodbye should have been titled I LoathYou, Just Die!, judging by Jessica Zafra's funny review. I wish the Cinemalaya Film Fest was held in December instead.

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By the way, to keep those 3D glasses from slipping off your nose, you should rest them on your forehead. The 3D glass has this rubber lining on the bridge of its frame which keeps it properly in place. You'll end up with a crease on your forehead like the ones that you get when you've fallen asleep on your desk or on your keyboard, but at least it solves the hassle of dealing with glasses that were designed for non-Pinoy facial features.

The Great Book Loot of 2009

I buy more books than clothes, thanks mostly to very limited closet space. And although I updated my fashion haul this year, raiding book stores still remained my de facto activity on shopping weekends in spite of the great book blockade annoyance of 2009. Here are my favorite books for the year that was:

• Open: An Autobiography (Andre Agassi) - The only male winner of tennis Golden Slam (all four majors and one Olympic gold medal) shares his struggles and triumphs in the sport he hated, his depression and fall in the rankings, and how it all came together for him as he completed his career grand slam and finally met the woman of his dreams in this controversial but wonderful retelling of the story of one of tennis' greatest and most colorful players. Freebies for Federer fans: Agassi has only good words for the reigning GOAT.
  
• The Hunger Games (Suzanne Collins) - Not your ordinary young adult fiction, The Hunger Games is about the brutal tradition of sending youths to an annual tournament where victory is achieved through merciless killing of all other participants.
  
• Outliers: The Story of Success (Malcolm Gladwell) - The central idea for this book is that successful people do not reach their potential by themselves. Instead, Gladwell argues that success is often a result of a combination of right timing, help from family and community, and thousands of hours of preparation. In fact, to be truly primed for success, a person should have logged in at least 10,000 hours of preparation or practice in the field of their specialization, whether it is in technology, sports, or music. Moreover, a person's cultural background and family history plays a great role in one's success, which makes you realize that your background may either be a help or a hurdle towards reaching your potential.
  
• The Time Traveler's Wife (Audrey Niffeneger) - This might as well have been titled The Time Traveler, as it is mostly about the chrono-impaired man who jumps from one period to another within the span of his and his wife's lifetime. He meets her first when she is 9 and last when she is 80; he only lives to his early forties.
• A Short History of Nearly Everything (Bill Bryson) - I'm still reading this tome, a chocful of compressed bits of information about how the universe and the earth came to be, and how the forces that shaped the cosmos for millions of years allowed you to be here in the first place.
• The Pillars of the Earth (Ken Follet) - This is just a runner up, but for those who wish to have an idea of how those majestic cathedrals that date back to the medieval times were built, and how their builders went about their business of...well, building...this book is a good place to start.
  

Open: An Autobiography

The moment I opened Andre Agassi's controversial book, Open: An Autobiography, I was hooked on this brilliant retelling of the story of one of tennis' most colorful champions. The Golden Slam winner (7 grand slams and 1 Olympic gold medal) held nothing from his readers and instead offered an insider look at the lonely world--at least his world--of tennis.

The son of a tennis-obsessed, violent Iranian migrant, Agassi was practically forced into the sport at 8, his father believing all along that he would become world number 1 someday. Thus began his hatred for the sport that would make him one of its most successful players. We all know that tennis rides equally on the mental strength of its players as it does on their physical agility, and Agassi provided page after page of insight into the mental savagery that went on in every game, including the psychological maneuverings on- and off-court among players, team members, and the pesky press.

Much has been said in the media about the crystal meth and his lying to the ATP to get himself off the hook and possible banning from the game that he never failed to mention he hated to anyone who was willing to listen.  People derided his wild mohawk then, and the public made fun of the hair when it was announced that it was fake after all. The fear that the fake hair would fall during a rally even cost him what could have been his first French Open title.

However, the real story is what went on during the years of his fall from the top of the ranks to outside the 100 circuit due to depression. I remembering somewhat following tennis back in my college days through the news. While Sampras won slam after slam then, the supposed competition between Agassi and his fellow American helped make the sport very popular in the US in the '90s. I listened to news of his marriage to Brooke Shields and then found months later that Agassi had fallen so far below the rankings that it only made me believe that the actress caused his troubles. In Open, Agassi does not necessarily blame his first wife for all his results, but it surely factored in the depression over the sport, his life and the treatment he suffered in the hands of the press.  However, if ever their relationship had any redeeming value at all, it was that Shields convinced him to ditched the wig.

A year later, everything started to come together for Agassi. The humbling experience forced him to play in qualifying rounds and challenger circuits in order to be able to compete in more serious tournaments. Eventually, his efforts paid off and he managed to become the fifth man to complete a career Grand Slam and the oldest to be world number one 32.

The best part, however, is reserved for his courtship of Steffi Graf who he had already admired even before he won his first major title, how he set up practice sessions with her, followed her around the tennis circuit, and waited for her to call him back. To this reader, "fraulein forehands" represented the elusive but eventually attainable French Open title, and if the cosmos had played any part in their fates, both players won their last French Open titles on the same year.

The implications of Agassi's meth use might have had a bigger impact on tennis although it was just a recreational drug instead of a performance enhancer (I'm no expert on this). His fake wild hair was his way of hiding his confusion over who he was instead of being his way of rebelling against the norms of the sport. But I would dare a guess that what spurred him on to achieve greatness in the sport that he hated was his equal hatred for losing in it. I wonder how much he would have attained had he loved tennis.

Attack of the giggles

Roger giggles, and it makes the CNN Back Story segment. Now I'm less morose.



The interview proper:

It wasn't the first time

I caught this news on TV last week and thought the killing of Ebarle Jr. was just senseless. The victim was practically defenseless against Fil-Am Jason Ivler who was driving a "diplomatic" car. The grief displayed by Ebarle's girlfriend and relatives is just heartbreaking.



Apparently, some people should never be allowed to drive, especially if the cars they are driving have plates that just about grant them the right to violate traffic rules. From what I know, diplomatic cars are given so much freedom from traffic rules.

Strangely, Freddie Aguilar's sister's evil spawn has a pending criminal case over another traffic altercation that happened in 2004 and resulted in the death of a Malacanang Undersecretary. A number of other road rage incidents, one including grave threat, allegedly committed by Ivler are reported by witnesses.