№ 821. The Odyssey

rahalarts

 

№ 815. 2026 Mother's Day Movie: Remarkably Bright Creatures

Latter Day Saint Geeks

 

Growing older with Remarkably Bright Creatures

Shelby Van Pelt’s novel was the perfect way to start my next decade of life.

№ 806. 2026 Happy Chinese Lunar New Year

The opening sequence in “ Eat Drink Man Woman,” in which a delectable Taiwanese banquet is prepared by a master chef, is guaranteed to make you contemplate the non-buttered popcorn in your lap and cry. Not quite as delicious -- but nonetheless enjoyable—is the repast that follows: Ang (“The Wedding Banquet”) Lee’s amiable family farce about generational tension and, of course, food.

№ 759. Elderly Filipino Week

 Film showing for the office celebration of Elderly Filipino Week

№ 754. Para Kay G - September 11, 2009

№ 752. Red

 

 

№ 695. Movies Killed the Radio Star

 

 

    The movies are, once again, not dead. Art forms are more like viruses than animal species: They don’t become extinct; they mutate, recombine, go dormant and spread out again in new, sometimes unrecognizable ways, which carry memories of older selves encoded in their DNA. 

№ 374. Retiro X

Chungking Express Art

She lip-reads her swift murders,
In urban-drenched neon monologues,
Fractured day dream sequences.

She sketches boarding passes on a tissue paper
Later thrown away, unread,
Melting in the midnight monsoon.

She sleepwalks in vindaloo alleys,
Concealed and armed by wigs and stilettos,
Tipsy with chaos, solitary and morbid deadlines.

Like the poisoned city she breathes,
She is livid, resigned and, cruel.

№ 369. A Dictator is an Artist

Guilt is petite bourgeois crap. An artist creates his own moral universe. Ergo, fuck guilt! Fuck guilt and all its moral trappings. Be your own kind of dictator. Build your own ethical constructs. Be free from the fetters woven by those who came before you. Consolidate your own moral realm. You gotta do what you gotta do.

Does this mean President Duterte is an artist?! That makes Trump a Picasso.

№ 340.Throwback Wednesday

I haven't seen this movie in ages. Still charming and funny. There's a poem by Auden too. What's not to like?

As I Walked Out One Evening

As I walked out one evening,
  Walking down Bristol Street,
The crowds upon the pavement
  Were fields of harvest wheat.

№ 329. Nothing Gold Can Stay

Robert Frost, 1874 - 1963

Nature’s first green is gold, 

Her hardest hue to hold. 

Her early leaf’s a flower; 

But only so an hour. 

Then leaf subsides to leaf. 

So Eden sank to grief, 

So dawn goes down to day. 

Nothing gold can stay.

№ 310. Happy Mother's Day

Happy Mother's Day.

"We are born of love. Love is our mother." --- Rumi

№ 300. Making Whoopee

I remember Whoopi. What in the world is she doing?! Come out, come out wherever you are.... 911 Whoopi. 911.

№ 230. Life in Slow-Mo

Art slows time. 

Art slows movement. 

Art slows life.

№ 229. Feast of the Senses

№ 228. Jiro is a Borg

"While watching it, I found myself drawn into the mystery of this man. Are there any unrealized wishes in his life? Secret diversions? Regrets? If you find an occupation you love and spend your entire life working at it, is that enough? Standing behind his counter, Jiro notices things. Some customers are left-handed, some right-handed. That helps determine where they are seated at his counter. As he serves a perfect piece of sushi, he observes it being eaten. He knows the history of that piece of seafood. He knows his staff has recently started massaging an octopus for 45 minutes and not half an hour, for example. Does he search a customer's eyes for a signal that this change has been an improvement? Half an hour of massage was good enough to win three Michelin stars. You realize the tragedy of Jiro Ono's life is that there are not, and will never be, four stars."

Ooma in Megamall has one of the best Gyozas in town.

№ 123. Babette's Feast

"The sense of wonder, that is our sixth sense. And it is a natural religious sense." --- D. H. Lawrence

 

№ 108. Fresh Guacamole, Batman!

Lean, crisp and fun. That's how we like our servings of diversions.

Lean narrative. Crisp sound. Fun visual.

Unique pairings of objects with the underlying reality they represent---you know, grenade for avocados, baseball for onion, pin cushion for tomato, dice for diced tomato, electric bulbs for peppers, etc. I could almost "see" in my head an actual onion being peeled as the film showed a baseball being shed its thin skin.

Metaphors? In animation?

Yummy.

№ 82.God of Carnage

"In America, it has been, for so long now, the belief that guns designed to kill people indifferently and in great numbers can be widely available and not have it end with people being killed, indifferently and in great numbers." The New Yorker

 

All huddle in midnight vigil.
They wait for paid violence to awake.

Dark menace finally rises up
To uncoil out of the silver pages.

Then bullets litter the air.
Special effects, they think.

Fire metals pierce
Flesh, bones and fiction.

Cellphones ring unanswered
In the pockets of dead children.

Popcorn kernels litter the exodus
While Gotham reels empty after the carnage.

Pilgrims welcome the refuge outside.
Almighty Bruce redeems his masses back to reality.

Bento Box: 

"It is the implicit bargain every moviegoer makes. You buy your ticket, you go into an auditorium full of people you don't know, you look toward the front of the room, the lights go down -- and in the darkness, you are safe. The movies promise us a happy ending, a return to the familiar world we know" (When it's not 'only a movie'). 

Alas, no more of that fiction beyond the film.

№ 80. Infinite Loops & Legos

We wake;
We conceive.

We wonder,
So we begin.

We create
And realize.

We see;
We marvel.

We pine;
Hope wanes.

We regret
But resolve:

We build;
Hence, we destroy.