Oh god, the FRENCH

French Film Festival.
I suppose gobsmacked would be the right word after seeing all the nudity, sex and intense french kissing in most of the movies. We started with Demon Lover, went in a few minutes after the film began, got confused by the plot, the hentai and the sex and then they started shooting and abusing and what the hell, I enjoyed it when the girl shot the guy in the head in the middle of his orgasm, it was morbidly funny. All the films were well made but I really only enjoyed watching The Artist (i love those black and white films!). I expected some films to have at least a touch of Godard or like Amelie but no, the films were about people I could not sympathize with. Cebu got the bad picks in this year's French Film festival. I was not amused.

Doctor Who?

I remember a month when all I listened to were the Doctor Series 4 and 5 soundtracks. They give me a lot of feelings.

Murray Gold, you are brilliant!

Pretty Food...and tasty too!

Horrible photo, did not do justice to the food. Tsk, tsk.

La Vita e Bella

Maybe it was good that i was not able to see how the movie ended because it already felt good the way it was. It was a happy film in such a dark time. I would have cried for Guido had I seen how it ended. It would have left me with a melancholy feeling instead of being uplifting. 

Enid

Today, my worst fears about one of my favourite childrens book writer was confirmed. I saw the autobiographical movie Enid where she was played by my favourite actress Helena Bonham Carter. She was a selfish wretch and an adulterer. A child who never grew up, waiting for her father who never came home. She was a child herself that’s why she wrote those wonderful stories, but she was a horrible mother. Bam! Childhood ruined. I idolized her, I loved her books, I read almost all of them, she made me want to read more. She introduced me to fantasy stories and escapism.  Am sorely disappointed that the woman she really was is different from the woman I envisioned who wrote all those wonderful tales. I cried for my loss and for hers too. She had dementia later in life. She wrote 759 books. All those stories in her head, amazing. 

Fish are friends, not food!

I hate eating fish. Everyone gets this idea that fish is great and meat of other animals will kill you. Wrong. The meat of other animals are important too. Plus they are more palatable. Why can’t they cook fish and make it more palatable!? That is my word for this hour: Palatable. Our fish is not cooked in a palatable manner. Watching food shows will tell you that the appearance of food will contribute to its palatability. Palatable. 

Machiavellian...or not

Troll’s Eye View, An anthology of tales on villain’s point of view. I love, love, love it. It has the darkness of a Grimm fairy tale, the magic of Hans Christian Andersen and it is all about the villains! The tales are beautifully crafted and the much-maligned villains get their own tales. I love tales like these, unconventional fairy tales like those written by Gregory Maguire and now by these writers who wrote such brilliant retellings of the old fairy tales in a villain’s point of view. I love that they give these villains a background story and how they understood that they become villains for a reason, and that maybe those annoying heroes or heroines in fairy tales are annoying little gits who nose in on stuff which are none of their business. They are given a voice by the best fantasy writers of my generation. 

Rawr means I love you in dinosaur

I have a strange relationship with my ex-boyfriend. Whenever I feel down, I turn to him to cheer me up and he does a brilliant job of it. Whenever I feel elated at a recent success, he is the first one I want to talk to about it. We have been together for a year and when we broke up, it was terrible as some break ups go. Even then, we were still communicating and eventually we became close friends, even closer than we had been before. After 4 years, he has become my best pal. We may not have been a success as a couple but as friends, we are certainly rocking it. I am at a stage in my life where I feel like a failure because jobs are hard to come by for fresh grads, through it all he has been my one-man cheering squad. I never hesitate to tell him anything, and he has been very patient with me. I do not know any other guy pal who can bear to listen to my woes, nor any of my girl friends who I can speak to with the same honesty as I talk to him. He is not perfect; he is actually a very forgetful person and it is one of the most annoying things that I hated about him when we were together. He also tends to tease me and mock me, which in a boyfriend is a very annoying attitude but a very endearing one in a friend, no awkwardness involved.  My ex-boyfriend is my rock in the sea of chaos. This is getting dramatic but it is true. Its how I feel. And there’s no one else in my life who has done as much as he did and is currently doing. I love him, of course. But I am safe in the thought that we will never be together again, I do not think I can handle a relationship right now, I am like the infamous Tumblr meme: doomed to be forever alone. 

Time and then again

Getting older means getting new perspectives on past books I have read. I read the Belgariad series by David Eddings when I was about 8 years old and I loved it. I read it again this year, 13 years later, and I disliked it. Timelessness is a true test of a book's greatness and David Eddings books have never done it for me. It was a disappointment. I read the Potter series, Tolkien's books, Narnia series, Enid Blyton, Charles Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle at around that time period and when I read it again a decade or so later, it still holds the same magic, maybe even better. I was irritated with the pace of the Belgariad series, the characters were one dimensional, I find it dull. I think I'll try re-reading them again, maybe I'll find that old spark which made me read them when I was 8. Or maybe I was just a bad judge of books then, I remembered being enamored with Sidney Sheldon books, reading all his books in one summer, and years later, I find them too shallow.

A book that changed your life

Once, during a Christmas away from home, I asked for only one thing: a Harry Potter book. I did not get my wish. The one who ran the the errand of buying the book bought me something else instead. I was furious, how dare that person presume to buy another book instead of the Harry Potter series which is the best fantasy series in the entire world?! The Potter books were sold out and that person bought the book which looked as interesting as Harry Potter. I received The Hobbit, a book by JRR Tolkien. I did not know who he was back then, I was in grade school and was not aware there were other books written aside from Harry Potter (HP was the center of my bookworm existence). I can vividly recall sitting on the edge of the bed, staring at The Hobbit while shedding tears of bitterness at not being able to know what happens next in the Harry Potter series. I refused to read the book, until one day when we went to the beach and as I was and still am a very unsociable creature and having exhausted the meager supply of books in my aunt's cabinet and have deemed to read a Danielle Steel novel (who I really don't like even then) because of lack of other books, I bought The Hobbit. I read it and I fell in love. It started my romance with epic fantasies, the genre of books which for me is the greatest of them all. It takes great imagination to envision a world, a country, a land with such intricate stories that even when read a thousand times over by different people, will still hold magic among the pages.