World Food Month

You know what's the other name for October?  

It's World Food Month according to the UN.  'Course, the month will not be complete without my mentioning it.  So in memory of the millions suffering from famine, the peasants who have barely enough food to eat while their masters dine in caviar chased by Monsieur Perignon, I commemorate the month in their honor, along with this legendary pic from one of the lamented members of the Bang-Bang Club, Kevin Carter.  It's a heartbreaking picture of a famine-stricken Sudanese toddler crawling her way to the UN Feeding Center while a vulture waits in the background.  The picture had bothered the beejesus out of my seven-year-old niece who was bugged by the fact that a child that young might actually die because of sheer lack of food.

So the next time you dismiss sweet spaghetti as a mere "bastardization" of past-uh, the next time you start tapping your gag reflex just so you could fit into your size 2 5o1s, the next time you order a second helping in a eat-all-you-can buffet (and throw the rest  to waste anyway), think of the child who has neither of those luxuries.   

In honor of the penniless, foodless people all over the world, this is for you.  

MassKara Chronicles: The MassKara Queen Spectacle

“Aargh!” “Eurgh!” “Aaaaaaaaahhhh!”
Common reactions from the  House of Horrors, starring decapitated heads and faux human entrails that look suspiciously like last night’s chicken dinuguan.
“Aargh!” “Eurgh!” “Aaaaaaaaahhhh!”
Common reactions at SM mall during the press presentation of the MassKara Queen candidates for the year starring… well, I don’t want to sound sexist but I don’t want to lie either. Let the reactions talk.
Anyhooo… I was one of those invited for the press presentation. There was one girl who keeps on waving her arm as if presenting an Inno Sotto gown, except with the frequent way that she did it, you might think there’s a huge boil growing on her underarm (there was none, thank God). I slipped in and out of a coma throughout the presentation, just coming to long enough for me to vote for the girl who I thought has “It”. Jan Maricris Vega, a La Sallian student, won as Darling of the Press. She was also Best in Question in Answer. She wasn’t particularly witty; her answer would get lost in a sea of witty bon mots from past pageants (“High tide or low tide?”), but she was the only one who managed to answer the question without mangling the English language. At the end of the show, though, I sort of wanted to take back the vote after the girl’s rather noisy fans started screaming like idiots. Minus points for bringing imbeciles to the show… the morons don’t know how to behave in public. My over-excited pitbull, currently diagnosed with ADHD, displayed more decorum. 
And on with the show… Nothing remarkable happened, really. No Melanie Marquez-ish “long-legged legs” to speak of, nobody wants to join the education department just so she could save the diminishing tarsiers.  
The girl just paraded with their flight attendant smiles. One of the girls even tried to affect an American accent (why?), and the host referred to judge Chrysee Semillano as “Creasy” (like the Denzel Washington character in Man on Fire. Okay, now repeat after me: Cry-see. Now say that 10 times over so you won’t forget.) 
Highlight of the event: A performance from an artist who wore nothing but thin boxer shorts. A couple of things made a surprise appearance as he kept on crossing and uncrossing his legs. And I’m not saying what. Let’s just say I’ve had bad dreams for three nights now, my dreams always featuring giant b- spheres chasing after me. (EEEEEEEEKKKK!) 
And now a compendium of knee-slappers from the previous pageants that I covered (with my bitchy remarks in italics afterwards):

Q: What makes you proud of Bacolod?
A: I am proud of Bacolod because it has a lot of beautiful natural resources. (What are you referring to, darling? The yellowish beaches of Punta Taytay or the murky Magsungay River?)

Q: What do you intend to do after this?
A: After this, I would like to live a simple lifestyle and be a fashion model at the same time. (Honey, you want a simple lifestyle? Ditch your modeling dreams, don a saffron toga and join the Dalai Lama in Tibet.)

 Q: What do you do during spare time?
 A: I go to a silent place in myself and do some soul-searching. (How… um… transcendental.)
 
Q: What do you think is your best asset?
 A: My legs, because the color of my legs is fair. (Huh?)

 Q: Which would you rather have, happiness or gratification?
 A: Gratification.
 Q: (Taken aback.) Why? What is gratification for you?
 A: Gratification is… gratitude. (Is that it? *Stalks away to look into the dictionary*)

Q: What is your favorite among your five senses and why?
A: My sense of sight, because they make me see the beauty of the world and of God’s gentle creatures. (Where have you been, honey? Have you just emerged from your self-exile in Avalon or something?)

And of course, this gem from the recent batch of candidates.

Q: Why did you join the contest?
A: SO that I can gain friends and boost my confidence. (Yeah… being paraded in front of an audience on the look-out for an unsightly peklat must do wonders for your ego.)

It’s too early to tell who would really win. Not when, as a friend puts it, “there ain’t no beauty in this pageant”. I disagree. One or two girls look half-way decent.  As for the rest… well… nothing to say except one of them resembles a refugee from a starvation camp (eat up, girl!).
Guess we will just have to wait come pageant night, huh? Then we can see which really deserves the crown, and which one would let us hope we are spared of the farce unraveling before our eyes.

Jump the Shark Special: Iron Chef America

Saw re-runs of the Iron Chef America the other night. My eyeballs were hurting from rolling too much at the sight of Marc Dacascos’ Chairman trying to out-camp his “uncle” (“And the secret ingredient is… *whish-whish* ONIONS!” I was half-expecting fires to come out of his nostrils, but no such luck.)  
But nothing inspires me more than Bobby Flay. He’s the George Bush of cooking. He has proven that a guy that can’t cook could be an Iron Chef. Way to go, Bobby!

The MassKara Chronicles: Travesty of the First Order

Talk about a travesty.  
Look, aren’t festivals supposed to be celebrations of something good? The pagans in pre-Christian times at least know how to celebrate these things. They celebrated when the harvest was good. When a new leader was born. When the chief screwed one of his daughters.
Whatever.
At least, there was a valid cause for celebration.
And now the MassKara Festival. It was first celebrated because MV Don Juan sank, bringing along with it an important figures of Negros, including a scion of a political family in Bacolod. I would like to think that the people celebrated because the city is one member short of a tyrant, but heck no. That would be purely delusional. Instead, the leaders grieved because of the loss. And all these at the time that the sugar industry was also going the way of MV Don Juan.  
That was a double whammy for the elite in Negros. One of them died, and the industry that paid for their mansions, luxury cars and Chanels was in deep sh*t. So what to do?  
Why celebrate! Give masks to the people! Smiling masks! To hide the grief!
Don’t know about you, but when my pockets are empty, and somebody I love just died, I don’t pop out the champagne (or the Coca-Cola – hehe). I would find the means to work harder, mourn the dead, and bury them. (And when you come to think of it, what if Mr Scion survived? What if only the common tao were killed in the tragedy? I don’t think we would even have the MassKara festival. Nobody grieves for the nobodies except their fellow nobodies).
That’s why, come October, I really don’t feel the need to celebrate along with the rest of the city. How can I, when I remember what the festival was all about?  
As I said, a travesty.

Namets!: A Taste of Negros

Negros is a diabetic’s nightmare.
Whoever invented the piaya, the pinasugbo and the Napoleones must have been trying to exact revenge against diabetic bully, hoping that in a roundabout way, the bully could be done in by hyperglycemic shock.
And it’s not just the desserts that have earned their reps for being killers. There’s our cansi and the chicken inasal. Both not complete without a generous of layer of grease.
Negrenses, after all, like their food two ways: sweet or greasy. Or both.
Either be a diabetic, or have high blood pressure. Or both.
The Negrenses’ love for food is the stuff of legends.
It ain’t exactly surprising then, that somebody had thought of making a movie about food IN Negros. And who can do it better than somebody who has a feel of the province, a true-blue, proud as heck Negrense, Jay Abello?
Yup, he’s the same guy who brought us Ligaw Liham and who is now slowly but surely creating buzz because of his new film, Namets!, a finalist to this year’s Cinemalaya Festival. Namets! (yes, that’s with an exclamation point) is written by fellow Negrense Vince Groyon, he of The Sky over Dimas Fame, himself an astute observer of the quirks of the elite in Negros.
Namets!, for the uninitiated, stars Christian Vasquez as Jacko and Angel Jacob as Cassie, two not-exactly-star-crossed lovers. Just a couple of chefs who share the same passion for cooking. Somewhere between the lumpia ubod and the cansi is love waiting to happen.
Abello, in an interview with IT Magazine, said the title Namets! was coined by Groyon himself.
“[E]veryone loved it,” he recalls, seeing that the word has a rather naughty ring to it. It works marketing-wise, Abello says, and it helped that it roused the curiosity of non-Hiligaynon speakers.
People who have seen the movie swore the food was the big star in the movie. Worth watching, they said, was the chemistry of its two lead stars. It’s a love story. With food. And Abello has no pretensions about his intentions when he shot the film. No Gallaga-ish dissection of the elite in Negros society. No Freudian analysis of the peasant struggle.
It’s a straightforward love story. Period.
In fact, Abello pretty much sums it up: “A no angst, nothing to say movie -- a popcorn-date-movie.”
The director points out that, after Ligaw Liham, people had been asking him why he hadn’t done a movie in the Hiligaynon language. The movie was his sort of answer to those pesky questions.
“I wanted my second movie to be in our dialect… And I wanted to do something commercial,” he said. Fusing food into the plotline seems like “a no-brainer”, given the way Negros takes pride in its food.
And it definitely helped that he worked with Negrenses, especially Vasquez and the MAN himself, Peque Gallaga.
Abello describes Vasquez as “wonderful and underrated” while he has nothing but praises for Gallaga, calling the director a “master”.
“(Christian) is very hard-working, very disciplined, very passionate about what he does, and very open to direction. Oh, and he really does his homework, he really works on his role. It was so easy to work with him. He gave so much to Namets that I can't even take any credit for his work on Namets,” he said. As for Gallaga, whom he fondly calls Direk Peque, Abello describes a “tedious” preparation the likes of Tom Hanks usually puts in his roles (remember the gauntness in Philadelphia? The ridiculous mullet in the Da Vinci Code?).
Gallaga, he says, “…studied his role to the point that it was his idea to cut his hair, and shave his mustache -- and give a totally new look to his role. And that takes a lot of commitment.”
What Abello appreciates most was the very non-intrusive way that the legendary director carries himself on the set.
Gallaga had been “very collaborative and very respectful. He doesn't go to the set as a director or teacher, he really respects the people in charge and he's there as an actor and collaborator. It's amazing.”
No J.Lo ego there. No prima donnas on the set. Which is a good thing, Abello says, because it made his work a whole lot easier.
GOING MAINSTREAM
Meanwhile, Abello is keeping himself busy directing a show for TV5.
“That is as mainstream as I can get,” he said. He keeps an open mind about going mainstream, although as he says, “there are no offers yet.”
Still, Abello maintains he has a soft spot for indie filmmaking. There is, after all, something liberating about not having to kowtow to studio’s wishes about how an effing movie has to end. How many mainstream films have been emasculated just so it would fit the commercial formula?
The director rightly observes that in the indie circuit, stories that are deemed too “uncommercial” by big studios are tackled by indie filmmakers.
“I think that the fact that indie films are not being dictated so much by formula or the pressure to earn back the producers investment, makes for a purer environment on the set of making a feature film where all the artists are plainly drawn by the art. And so-- the initiative in this arena is far richer and deeper, thus giving the movie a lot of love so-to-speak, which in some weird way gets translated on screen,” he says.
Aye, aye Direk!
Never mind the mainstream project (for now, at least).

Bring out the popcorn. Namets! is rolling by.

* This article will appear on IT Magazine this month.

CTE1: Buy Me!

Remember back in those days when you don’t have a cell phone? Or a PC? Or an iPod?
What would we have been eating before the McDonald’s introduced their Happy Meals?  
One thing’s for sure: Life has been a hell lot more complicated after we learned the simple joys of eating greasy hamburgers designed to clog our arteries, not to mention turning on those MP3 players that would most likely make our hearing go faster than Gramps’.
This is consumerism at its worst. Picture a typical day in my life. I switch on the TV to watch my favorite local channels, then discovered that the news on rice shortage has been cut because the program has to give way to an advertisement on how to make your hair shine. I turn off the TV and leave my house in disgust. I decide to walk downtown, only to be bombarded by Jericho’s smug mug, urging me to eat sardines with him. And on another corner, there’s Cesar Montano, telling me his sardines is better than Jericho.
To escape from it all, I decide to go to the movies! GASP! Kris Aquino telling me to eat corned beef in between screaming for her life! Jason Statham is caressing his Audi as though he’d rather sleep with it than his hot co-star! Sharon Cuneta treating her child to McDonald’s! THESE ARE MOVIES PEOPLE! But then again, on hindsight, movies have always been pandering to big-named advertisers. Nothing’s sacred: from cars to sparkling water.
So I go back to my house, where the bland model is telling me to get some hair exactly like hers…
I give up. I open my refrigerator for a glass of cold water. Then I saw a half-empty bottle of Coke. I took it instead, knowing “it’s the real thing”, more real than water perhaps. It might not be the choice of the new generation, but hey, I’m not that picky.
I prepared myself a peanut butter sandwich, from peanut “made with real peanuts”. I don’t know about you, but I don’t like the taste of fake peanuts. Of course, none of it would be complete without a bag of my favorite potato chips (which I presume is made from real potatoes). I need my salt. And my potato chips has 50% sodium.
And then I go back to my miserable existence, letting advertisers sell me stuff I don’t really need.
 

Film App - Cinemalaya: Orasyon and Tulad ng Dati

My class had a chance to watch two films shown in this year's Cinemalaya. I thought: Cool, now they can see what indie really feels like, sounds like.
The first, Tulad ng Dati by Michael Sandejas is a semi-bio of The Dawn. While watching it, I thought that the film worked in so many layers and levels. In one level, could be viewed as a fanboy’s fantasy of what ought have happened had The Dawn stuck to their old sound, a sort of wish movie reliving the heyday of a band that had helped shaped Pinoy rock. In another level, it could also be seen as a parable of a man who simply refuses to change, while the people around him are changing and drifting away. It could even be seen as a fish-out-of-water tale, a man becoming alienated and cut off from things around him, becoming a stranger in his own universe.
Which was why I was kind of disappointed when I learned that Sandejas chose The Dawn mainly because “kabarkada ko sila”. And he made the film mainly because he was a fan. Dang, was I demystified.
Anyway, there is no doubt that the film was really well-crafted, with Sandejas experimenting on editing styles and mise-en-scenes that -- while not exactly new – lazy mainstream filmmakers shy away from.
My only qualms about the film was the way it spoonfed audiences with aphorisms, pounding the main message away until there’s nothing left of it but an onion paper-thin sheet.
And why, oh why does it have to have a snarling villain, a bald scenery-chewing actor who we know has to be a bad guy because of his sneer? I know he was supposed to represent the degenerates of the local band scene, the kind who think that shouting “putang ina” in their songs makes them edgy. Unfortunately, the actor playing him made the character one-dimensional.
Other than that, the film was really interesting and well-crafted. It generated a spontaneous applause from my class when it was shown here.
And now to Orasyon by Milo Tolentino.
The story delves on the Jungian theme, the duality of man. It’s a very simple narrative about a typical old lady stuck in her old colonial-style mansion, praying day in and day out to all the saints in heaven that her son would remember to visit her one day. Then, a stranger stumbled into her home one day, helped herself to some of the old woman’s rice cakes, and appointed herself as the maid-slash- bodyguard. Pretty soon, the stranger started to make her true colors show and eventually threw the old woman to despair, nearly driving the poor lady to kill herself. The film ended with the old lady going to confession (a beautifully shot scene of redemption), and the stranger-cum-(Satan’s) helper packing her things and leaving.
The film was shot with split-screens which, the director assured us, was meant to demonstrate the duality of things: the two contradictory sides that the characters were showing for instance. The lensing of the film was just masterful, and I appreciate that the film was shot entirely in black and white reinforcing the theme of the movie.
It was, however, a stark contrast with Tulad ng Dati, which tend to get talky on scenes that need quiet reflections. Here, the director seemed confident enough that the audience would figure out for themselves about what’s going, so even mysterious shots like the one with a male incubus in the closet was not fully explained.
As for the split screens – personally, I found myself distracted from an otherwise decent story. And for a horror movie, the film did not scare me one bit. Well, I didn’t squirm when I watched Saw and the yolky-eye bit in Hostel, so I must be one chromosome short of my scary gene.
But most of my class didn’t get it. Must be the reason why the applause was more tentative, more polite, huh?

Photo courtesy of www.pulse.ph