Snacking with Adel

Our boys Bobby and Rico celebrated their 7th birthday yesterday! As always, they got a nice chiffon birthday cake of their own to eat (with our help). A few pics.

Bobby waits for the ceremonies to begin:

The brothers patiently wait side-by-side for more of their share of the loot from Obachama* Yoriko-san :

Can we have seconds? Please? Iye? Honto? But it’s our birthday!:

* ‘Grandma’ in Japanese.

(Warning: Here there be spoilers.)

During the scene of Jon Osterman (Billy Crudup)’s first full-on appearance as Dr. Manhattan, at the lab cafeteria where he manages to reconstitute himself days after being blasted apart by the Intrinsic Field Center, there was a crude, jarring and ham-handed jump cut in the movie, the first of many, and I thought, ok. So it was the blue penis that threw the MTRCB censors into apoplectic fits and made them cut up Watchmen. So are they going to censor every instance the big blue banana makes a screen appearance? If that was true, we were in for a lot of jump cuts.

It was just the one time, if it was even a cut; the blue banana made subsequent full frontal appearances unmolested by the MTRCB later on in the movie, to uncontrolled giggling of largely juvenile audiences. (I suppose these are the same people who giggle at the UP Oblation every time they pass by the statue in the Diliman campus.)

Apparently the MTRCB’s major trims were reserved for the backseat action in Nite Owl’s ride, between Patrick Wilson’s and Malin Akerman’s masked heroes (and apparently, we discover, Nite Owl performs better in costume that he does in civilian garb.)

Unsurprisingly, there were no trims for the graphic double arm amputation scene at Rorshach’s cell, or the dogs fighting over the partially eaten shin bone and still-shoe’d foot of the murdered and mutilated little girl, or the goodfella intestines hanging off the ceiling of the club courtesy of Dr. Manhattan. I was especially taken aback by The Comedian’s exceptionally brutal and vicious attempted rape of Silk Spectre.

Loving, passionate sex always trumps unflinching, graphic violence, as always. So snip snip snip. No gratuitous sex! Gratuitous violence, yes, but sex? No frakkin’ way. (But that’s a ranting for some other post. Like my mother-in-law loves to say about most things in life, what can we do?)

A large part of the adult nature of the material is precisely that unflinching violence, present in the graphic novel, and front and center in the movie. It is this violence that sets it apart from even the already sobering and serious tone of The Dark Knight. This is the nasty stuff. The bone-crunching, flesh-rending kind of brutality more at home with recent gore porn like in the Saw series of films. Viewers looking for pop-culture superhero-ness in the vein of Iron Man or Hulk will be in a for a surprise. This is a comic-book movie?

But Zack Snyder’s stylized treatment puts a glamorous veneer over the violence of Watchmen, and the slow motion stop-starts of the action make the fighting less draining and somehow exhilarating. The Dolby punctuation of the teeth-jarring punches and the juxtaposition of incongruous, yet appropriate music makes for exquisite contrast. I will never listen to “Unforgettable” in the same way ever again.

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After editing and writing for magazines for years, it never fails to tickle me pick whenever I get a cover story out on the stands. Even if it’s for a magazine I don’t edit. Especially if it’s for a magazine I don’t edit. Most especially when it’s a major title with a big national circulation.

One came out this week: Metro’s March issue, with my cover interview of actress Cristine Reyes.

After trading my old editorial duties for a more organizational role in magazine publishing, I don’t get to write as much as I used to, so I really like it when I get a chance to do a piece. I’ve been writing tech pieces so much for the past decade I hadn’t realized I missed writing about non-geek stuff. About people that make you blink, instead of things with lights that blink at you when you turn them on. (Hmm, that’s a thought. I think I’ll think I’ll give my geekery a rest this year.)

Cover stories are the Holy Grail of journalism. (That, and Pulitzers.) My first cover was when I was barely out of high school, for a mag called TV Times, and a cover story about Champoy, the old comedy sketch show of Noel Trinidad and Subas Herrero. (I think Dad still has a copy in a drawer somewhere in the old house. He and my mom, God rest her soul, were prouder than I was, I think.) It’s a heady feeling, having something you wrote partly responsible for the sale of a magazine. Scary too. Never forgot it; no matter how many times it’s happened, that feeling is still the same, after all these years.

I last wrote for Metro almost two decades ago, as a freelance contributor. Back then it was staffed by my idols in feature writing. Who would have thought it would still be around 20 years later – Metro celebrates that milestone next month – and who’d have thought I’d still be writing for it? A cover story, no less!

Get a copy of the March issue of Metro when you can, read it, and tell me what you think.

Is it creepy that my true inner voicetrack sounds like Sheldon from The Big Bang Theory? Sarcastic, snotty and snarky to the core. I’ve been that way since I was a child. I just don’t act on it, nor speak any of the words that run through my stream of consciousness—although sometimes some of it slips out, as those who know me well will attest.

…but not in this case.

Apatow’s Angels: Rudd, Rogen, Segel and Hill. Ugh.

From Vanity Fair, picture by Annie Leibovitz, spoofing her own original 2006 VF cover photo.

Have you ever tried to count how many remote controls rule your life?

Mine crowd the table like so much driftwood, jostling each other for position. Sometimes I think I’m going to drown in them. The pic above, while slightly intimidating, is even missing a couple. Must be under the bed or under the rack. Or maybe the dogs ate them. (When he was a puppy, Bobby once chewed the AV Receiver’s remote close to death; only 40% of the buttons work now. I still haven’t forgiven him for that—all the settings are on the remote. My bass is permanently overcranked, to the chagrin of my wife.)

Hey, come to think about it, I’m missing four more, actually, if you add all the damned wireless game controllers. Ack. That’s an even dozen. And each of our Macs at home have their own remotes too. That brings it to what, 15? That’s downright ridiculous.

I can’t count the number of times I’ve grabbed one of them and pressed a button only to have something else turn on rather than the one I was meaning to. They all look alike. Four of them have the red-green-yellow-blue AV row which makes them all look like each other. By far, the worst offender is the PS3 remote. Since it runs on Bluetooth, just inadvertently brushing against any of the gazillion buttons on it, whichever way it’s pointing, turns on the PS3 as long as it’s within range. Even Bobby can turn on the PS3.

I have a big, clunky old Pioneer Universal Learning Remote, but I can’t find the manual and can’t remember how to add devices to it. Nothing on the net about it either. Which effectively turns it into a big, clunky old paperweight. Oh, my kingdom for a Logitech Harmony 1100!

From the Walang Magawa Department:

Ground Zero from CarlosLabs combines Google Maps and Nuclear Weapons. Pick your city, pick your bomb, then just Nuke it!

Jeez.

Some humans have actually seen it, damn them. Reviews are out, and are all good. The normally loquacious AICN’s been reduced to inarticulate, babbling praise.

I plan re-reading Watchmen this weekend. Or shouldn’t I? Hmm.

UPDATE: I just found out SM Cinemas has removed all screenings of Watchmen from their theater due to the R rating it got. No big loss, really—save for the IMAX option. Damn it. We should sic Rorschach on them.

I’ve pissed off a lot of friends in the past whenever we watched movies, because I insisted on sitting through the end credits. I used to flat out refuse to stand from my seat until the last few lines crawled up the screen and the logos faded out.

My friends or my date usually had no choice but to fume beside me, or leave me in the theater and just wait for me in the car. This would often make me/us the last stragglers out of the theater, sometimes a scary proposition if you’re at the last screening of the night (and especially if you were watching one of the Lord of The Rings movies, whose credits take up to ten minutes to finish). The janitors give you funny, irritated what-the-hell-are-you-still-doing-here-go-home-so-we-can-lock-up looks as they clean up around you.

My friends ask me why I did such a dumb thing, when I obviously can’t take in every single name. I couldn’t possibly individually reflect and ruminate over each person’s contribution to the movie I just watched. Who reads that crap, anyway? And who cares?

True. Most people stand up and start shuffling through the aisles the minute the words start crawling up the screen. Some of them are really inordinately and inconsiderably long—you know it’s too long when the theme song has finished and the editors segue in portions of the score for the remainder of the credits.

But I think I sit down and wait through them for the same reason I stand up when they play the national anthem: to show respect. Because if I were one of the people responsible for the movie, I’d want people to see my name up there. Get credit. As someone who creates things too, I understand how important getting that distinction is, however fleeting.

It’s the same as having my byline on an article getting edited out and no one caring to know I wrote it. (Not that I always write deathless prose, but you know what mean, those of you who work hard at your craft.) It’s kinda like leaving off J.K. Rowling’s name off the book jacket, or Steven Spielberg’s name off the poster. Credit is important. For some people, it’s part of why they do things. (The entire closing-credits thing even has a Wikipedia page devoted to it, and is fascinating, at least to this geek).

I write about this now because I had a depressing self-realization after watching the new House episode tonight. Continue reading