movie notes on a Saturday

It’s 5:42 AM and well, my eyes are just inching a bit into Sleeplandia but not yet totally there. The black Kopiko has done its job once again.

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1:02 PM

After hashing out some stuff on the computer for my resume, my battery went kaputt, so it was time to leave the library. It was already past 8 then. When I came to the Vinzons jeepney stop, there was a long line there. Seems like there was traffic somewhere. After some 30 minutes or so of standing up, and with people leaving the line to get to their destinations faster, I finally boarded the 2^nd jeep. I’ve been thinking about ordering Pasta Puttanesca for takeout. And then I remembered Ender’s Game because I’ve been wondering about it in the library. And true enough, it was showing in Trinoma. Next show was at 9:55 pm, about 20 minutes away, so there’s nothing to be done about the grocery I was supposed to do. Bought a chicken burrito from Mexicali and wintermelon milk tea from Gongcha instead. And there. Settled inside the cinema. Weird that cinema 7 is not directly connected to the other cinemas. So that’s the place where not so popular movies are shown I guess. Still, there was a sizable crowd.

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11.18 pm

So it starts. I believe the opening was really nice, giving an overview of the current situation in Ender's time. Short but informative. 'Course things are changed a bit. Most noticeable thing is the boys are older. In the book, Ender was just 5 turning 6. Really just a child. Here he was shooting into puberty. When he shouts, you can hear the crack in his voice, he hasn’t matured yet, but is almost there.  And they are tall boys. Bean is already part of his launch group. Dap is no ordinary student but a full-fledged sergeant at the IF. Anderson is a black woman, with the conscience. I believed it was the other way around.  Abigail Breslin as Valentine -  wow, she’s really grown up. And his brother Peter is a looker. I didn’t really get a sense of how sadistic Peter was. Because in the book, that characterization was repeated, over and over. And Valentine and Peter's side story  – Demosthenes and Locke – wasn’t used anymore. So was Ender’s journey with Valentine to find a home for the queen of the buggers. I also expected Petra to be more eccentric, but here she was just goody two shoes, normal looking. And they’re exploring a romantic angle between her and Ender, not with her and Dink. 

The isolation thing was not too nicely done. Again, my basis was the book, so with what I've seen, it seemed the movie was not giving enough reason to justify the way the story’s been going. I’d have liked to see more of the Battle Room scenes in the book explored in the movie. But well, that’s the limitation of a movie adaptation. I’m not sure if Ender's brilliance was justified (like how he made sense of things), nor his frustration, nor his internal and external struggles, nor the changes in how his schoolmates and the officers saw him. The Battle Room was very nice though. And Bozo Madrid was really hateful there. A real Spanish looking warfreak smaller than Ender who just wants to get his own way.  My friend Nicole did say Asa Butterfield doesn’t have much talent to speak of. It showed. He didn’t have to act a lot. It seemed the movie was more predominated by the special effects, since of course, it was set in a more technologically advanced future.  It was just amazing though having to see the battle scenes made into something visual - like when he had to reorient himself during the final battle by saying that the enemy’s gate was down. Yeah, that was something else. And to be able to zoom in from where you are at the other side of the galaxy and zoom in right to the surface of the planet they were attacking - coolness!Well, I should watch it again once I’ve sufficiently distanced myself  from the book. Just so I could appreciate it better. 

I actually read or maybe heard somewhere that it combines stuff from Ender’s Game and Ender’s Shadow. Well, so far, all it was was the whole Ender’s Game, from beginning to end. If it was longer, it would’ve been fine. Shoot, I really wanted it to end up really really nice. Since Orson Scott Card was the producer or was he part of the screenplay (?), somehow I thought it would be okay. When I watched the trailer over a month ago, I had goosebumps. Something I love being turned into a movie. Oh, I really thought it would be epic. I have to find that aspect of it. 

Oh well, I should give it some time.

And just before launching into my impression of Ender’s Game, I watched The Internship. It seems like it was officially sanctioned by Google, because hell yeah, their setting is the actual campus in CA. Complete with the free food, slide, sleep pod, dance classes and electric cars. And two old timers, Vince Vaughn and Luke Wilson are trying to make it , to get a job even though their tech knowledge is nowhere near basic. Is that how they really get interns and eventual employees? It was really fun and challenging. I like Lyle. And the Indian girl is so beautiful. But the two main characters are really the cohesive glue of the team. I love their people skills and the veritable Geeklandia as well - they play quidditch, with brooms!  

sunsets and nostalgia

Finally had the time to just sit by the Sunken Garden and do nothing yesterday - after coming in late to my Italian class and just generally disappointing myself all over again with the way I've been handling it, and then followed by a particularly entertaining "Was bin ich von Beruf?" (What am I as a Job?) game in our German class (Herr Lehrer was in his element as Quizmeister, even providing the needed sound effects woot!) where my teammates BJ, Jam and I came out tied for 2nd, this after being comfortably nestled on top for a while during the earlier part of the game.

I didn't want to stay at the shop where I used to work at and where I'm still welcome, since it's another air-conditioned environment with computers - which is where I am for forty-something hours a week, all the while dedicating some more hours to the laptop when I'm at home. So when I'm at the PC shop, I can't help but be drawn to the net-connected PC so I decided to just stay by the Sunken to do some review of notes and/or the finals I just received. I did start out by noticing the hurried way I answered my and then later on went over my answers to the exam. It was evident in the lack of needed verbs and misspelling a certain pronoun because I've confused it with another noun. And then I read through a list of Italian verbs that require certain prepositions. This still didn't help me with my predicament though. All the while, I was listening to Jam since it's Friday Slide (my favorite radio program) and learned that a woman has successfully ended her life in the LRT Line 1 EDSA Station. She is the 24th attemptee I believe and, I was surprised to find out, the 10th who successfully did. I was immediately reminded by the remade Wall Street where Shia LeBouf's mentor does exactly that - reading the papers in a cafe on a seemingly ordinary day and then setting off for the subway, meandering through the throng of people and stepping into the train's path as soon as he got there - when everything he worked for suddenly failed. This happened at 5:50 AM the other day. All I'm left is wonder at would drive someone to end her life in such a manner. Last snippet I heard from the radio is that she hasn't been identified yet.


The Sunken Garden was actually a bit to my right. I was sitting in one of the benches in front of PHAN  (Palma Hall Annex) so my view was actually that of the huge tree obstructing one's view of the Bulwagan ng Dangal, which was in front of (or depending on one's perspective, to the side of) the Main Library. And I just let myself look at that tree - some of its leaves on its left side, and some a bit more in front, illuminated by the fading sun. You know all the leaves are the same color, but with the vantage point and light direction you're given, it's like some of it is more alive, and some are duller. Joyce (who arrived a bit later on) was right in pointing out that it looked like a forest. I agreed, I've been thinking the same thing, like it was a tree in the forest in the Lord of the Rings. That's how majestic the whole scene came to me then. I wanted to take a picture of it, but I knew the gadget I use for a camera wouldn't capture the interplay of light and colors, so I just let myself gaze at it, somehow committing it to memory.

I just sat there all through the rest of the afternoon, until the sun finally faded and all I'm seeing is the dark green of the trees. And somehow, a sense of my younger years in the university was coming over me.


There was a time when I was still somehow fresh out of UP (as late as last year in fact) that the image that comes to my mind when I think back to my college days is of wide open verdant spaces. In all my years in and out of buildings, classrooms and laboratories, the impressions that seem to have stuck to me are the times I was out of my classes. And of these, the, let's say, memorable ones were those I spent under the hot sun, rainy skies and the newly-cut, though many times unkempt, grasses of the Sunken Garden, with people I somehow considered as family, doing the thing we all love, staying together until after everything's done with and coming together to do that three or four times a week. Yes, we did and we were all somehow addicted, coming and yearning for it all throughout those times when we had exams and what-nots which hindered us from going.

Yesterday, as the day wound down and people were jogging around the Oval (like what I had planned on doing), the impressions were a bit different. For one, it was only then that I was able to witness once again the turning of day into night. These days, I'm inside the four walls of the production floor when the sun finally gives way to the moon. The fact that I was in UP while I was witnessing this brought me back to my first undergrad days (yes m'dears, I'm on my so-called second undergrad/college days at the moment). At first, it seemed like the times back in my first year when I'd go to my then, only, org's tambayan after classes and we'd just sit and talk, and later on, we'd go somewhere to drink or watch gigs - cramming all of these in time for curfew (which I had for five years!). I guess it was about that as well, since when I get home, there's nothing to do since I wasn't overly friendly with my landlady's family, only had my space in the room, didn't have a computer at that time, and it was either I read, talk to my roommates or sleep. My college days were in fact, the only time that I've stayed out of my sleeping space long after the sun has set for in our house back home, I didn't grow up doing that. Even when I was in highschool, I was usually making my way home immediately when there were no org or practices or meetings that needed to be done when classes ended. And my stepping into UP gave me that one big dose of freedom. One helluva huge dose indeed. Then I realized later on that this whole feeling was also probably connected to the days spent in that space called the Sunken Garden, once my most favorite spot in the whole of UP. I've recounted what we used to do then; it may be connected to what I was feeling.

But before I could fully bring back the impressions from the past, I had to move. With that, the fleeting sense that it's about to reveal itself was gone. I could've held on to the feeling a bit more, and subsequently basked in its full memory, if I stayed still a bit longer, but somehow, everything is not in sync. So I'm writing this to commemorate that afternoon when I somehow went back to the nostalgic feeling of my youth.

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Joyce told me yesterday as well about Sir MonRa and RA Rivera's Tales from the Friend Zone project. Friend zone is a term I've been reading almost everywhere just recently. Is it because of this project and a few others like it? Anyhow, the second video was what I could relate to the most.

Takeaways which ring true:

- why one becomes expectant, i.e. bakit umaasa (girl's POV): girl may not be used to having kind, sweet and/or handsome boys who befriend her so that the first one who comes along and is just that, she starts to think there's something. So yes, as girls have observed, when he doesn't say anything, it's nothing. Don't overthink.

- lower one's expectations because as MonRa explains, that "0.0001 na pag-asa na yan, or otherwise known as malisya, ay nagiging germ at lumalaki nang lumalaki dahil sa imahinasyon natin at sa pagnanasa na maging tunay na pag-ibig yan..." WELL SAID.


So...

Happy -ber months! Potted Potter is on in a little while. Tschuß!