From pages to film reels

1. The WB film adaptation of Frank Miller's graphic novel 300 is slated for release in 2007. According to the synopsis on the website:

Based on the epic graphic novel by Frank Miller, 300 is a ferocious retelling of the ancient Battle of Thermopylae in which King Leonidas (Gerard Butler) and 300 Spartans fought to the death against Xerxes and his massive Persian army. Facing insurmountable odds, their valor and sacrifice inspire all of Greece to unite against their Persian enemy, drawing a line in the sand for democracy. The film brings Miller’s (Sin City) acclaimed graphic novel to life by combining live action with virtual backgrounds that capture his distinct vision of this ancient historic tale.

300 even has a production blog to whet the film enthusiast's appetite. Of the five video journal entries so far, I was able to download only the fifth as an exclusive from Apple Trailers. But what an interesting fifth entry!

According to stunt coordinator Damon Caro of 87eleven, he and his companions had to look at a lot of different methods that they had trained in since there were no records of the actual techniques and tactics used in the Battle of Thermopylae.

Thai kickboxing and other more popular Asian martial arts are a given for inspiration, but here's something Pinoy martial arts/sports/culture enthusiasts should be raving about.

Caro says that the weapon bases, ( I hope I got that right) specifically, are heavy on, among others, Filipino influences. Chad Stahelski, also of 87eleven, also mentioned eskrima and arnis as something they used in the unit shoots of the Spartans.

Just an interesting footnote: 87eleven worked on the stunts of The Matrix trilogy, , Mr. & Mrs. Smith, Troy, Constantine, Van Helsing, V is for Vendetta, Troy, The Bourne Supremacy, and Fight Club.


2. Check out Ghost Rider's interesting trailer. I never thought I'd see Nicolas Cage do the Marvel rounds, but what the heck! I've marked my calendar for Feb. 21, 2007. The action, as far as I can tell from the trailer, looks promising.

Just two words: "Daddy, Daddy"

In Villagers Mourn Loved Ones Lost to Quake :

JAMPRIT, Indonesia (AP) -- Poniran's daughter was breathing when he dug her from the ruins of his house. But 5-year-old Ellie died in his arms as they waited for treatment at a hospital overflowing with injured.

''Her last words were 'Daddy, Daddy,''' said Poniran, who like many Indonesians goes by one name. He took a break from searching the rubble of his village for salvageable items. ''I have to start my life from zero again.''

In today's issue of the Phil. Daily Inquirer, a news article beneath a full-colored front-page photograph of villagers burying their dead in Indonesia bears the headline "Her last words were 'Daddy, Daddy". The lead paragraphs:

BANTUL, Indonesia - his daughter was still breathing when Poniran dug out her out of the ruins of his house. But the 5-year old died in his arms as he waited for treatment at a hospital overflowing with the injured.

"Her last words were 'Daddy, Daddy," Poniran said as he took a break from searching in the ruins of his quake-devastated house for salvageable items. "I have to start my life from zero again."

Same subject (the quake that rocked Indonesia on Saturday). Same newswire source (the AP). Different readership. Same picture of grief.

Father's Day is not far off.

A lot of persons won't hear themselves be called 'Daddy'. Others won't have anyone to call 'Daddy.'

The Way of the Petticoat and other items of interest

Time constraints mean that I don't visit the NY Times site regularly, but when I do, I find some good reads there.
1. U.S. Plan to Lure Nurses May Hurt Poor Nations. The up side of working for a green buck, and the downside of leaving home.

2. Another interesting article, this time from the New York Times, about a subject that I most definitely understand: Where's the Petite Department? Going the Way of the Petticoat by Michael Barbaro.

3. Gym notes: 24-Hour Sweaty People. How I wish the gym in the University Hostel area would open 24/7. I'd be there every other midnight.

4. And because Italy has always fascinated me: Exploring Tuscany's Lost Corner.

Prayer for the Dead & the Wounded

As of the second update at Inq7, at least 1,700 persons have died from the early-morning quake that shook Indonesia today. Prayers and aid are sorely needed by our devastated Asian neighbors. If we cannot give one, perhaps we can give the other.

Sex in Gaming and in Literature

I went through my gmail, and saw that there were several other unopened issues of The Escapist in my mag rack.

Issue 43 looked at sexual content in gaming, and "Youthful Indiscretions" is a short but potentially controversial peek into the issue of sex in gaming. One observation in "Youthful Indiscretions" about sex and sexuality in games applies just easily to sex and sexuality in the romance novel genre. According to author Charles Wheeler:

The game developers realized that for sexual content to be truly compelling, it would require emotional attachment.

Cultivating such an emotional attachment is a difficult task, but not an impossible one, as can be attested to by the legions of fans who have mourned the loss of their favorite characters over the years. If the ability to create both emotional attachments and sexually desirable characters exist, why are they rarely, if ever, combined into a single product? It may be because the power of emotional attachment ensnares not only the players of games, but the developers, as well.

There's a grain of truth somewhere in there. While red hot reads are attention-grabbers, they are easily forgotten if all they have to offer are tales of mere wham-bam-thank you-ma'am. But if they've got that something more (an excellent storyline, characters readers can identify with or get attached to, and not just lust over - because lust is a temporary attachment), the ensnarement is longer, more permanent, and no less binding than novels of other varieties.

And for those who severely oppose sex in gaming (remember that GTA: San Andreas furor?), here's another observation that's apt to get them all riled up, again from Youthful Indiscretions:

Gaming is going to want to get better at sex, and the only way to get better is to practice.

Me? I don't mind sex in my videogame. Or in my books, for that matter. But I would mind it very much if my many toddler nieces and nephews were to access such stuff. But if the viewer/reader/player is all legal, it's fair game.

That said, I'm going back to reading my Nachura. Issue 44 has something on IP in relation to the future of independent game studios, but that will have to wait until I start on Comm Law.

Game Design

Writing a game isn't that easy, and trying to realize a personal game designer's manifesto can be sheer hell. Here's an entertaining account from Max Steele on the difficulties of creating a role-playing module.

Prepaid Culture

We all know that going prepaid is a very Filipino way to do things. Internet access. Cellular phone load credits. NDD and IDD calls. Online gaming. It's a micro-marketing strategy that works not just for the consumers who are counting their pesos and cents, but also benefits the vendors. Call it the mini-size me equivalent of the ICT sector.

If you look at it, going prepaid seems to work in a service-oriented setting of the tech & society variety. Microsoft wants to take it one step further with its Pay-As-You-Go Personal Computing. The tech giant has joined hands (and to a certain extent, purses) with Chinese PC maker Lenovo (IBM, baby) to make - drum roll - PC-ownership more of a reality for people with "variable or unpredictable income".

How does it work? Microsoft claims in its PressPass page for the Pay-As-You-Go venture that with its Microsoft FlexGo technology, hardware, software and service solutions have been 'aligned' "to work in unison to meter and add time to the PC, so retailers, telecommunications providers, banks and OEMs can offer PCs to a broader community of customers ... The technology informs users of time used, showing them how to add more hours by simply typing in a number from a prepaid card. If time is not added, the PC gradually moves into a “reserve tank” or limited-access state until customers purchase more time either online or at local vendors. The PC is owned outright after a set number of hours are purchased."

Sounds interesting, but it's not as easy as it sounds. The customer has to cough up half of the purchase price before he/she/it can take home the PC and go prepaid. Oh, well. Come to think of it, Pay-As-You-Go in the FlexGo sense combines the prepaid way with the traditional method of purchasing on installment.

Microsoft has expressly said in its website's PR pages that market trials have been conducted in Brazil. The next round of pay-asy-you-go and subscription trials will take place in Mexico, China, Hungary, India, Russia, Slovenia and Vietnam.

The Philippines is not on the map. At least, not for the next round. Darn. But maybe the computer giants are concerned with the piracy issue, or they think that we're such a security risk. After all, what's to stop people from plonking half the price in cash, then instead of buying the prepaid cards, re-arranging, if not cannibalizing the specs of the PC? But then, who says it's only in the pearl of the orient that such things happen?

I really wish they'd try out Pay-As-You-Go here. Who knows? It may actually work.

Delay in the Blogger mail

Jill and Toni, for some reason, I just received notice from Blogger about your comments for that archaic Inter-dorm blues post yesterday morning. I know, those were made on January 19, 2006. February, March, April, May. Unbelievably true.

To think that if I hadn't enabled Comment Moderation on Blogger on a lark, I wouldn't have learned about those messages! Here's the screencap from my mailbox:

So, Jill, I'm using bigger fonts from now on. Rest assured I didn't use those quaint fonts just to spite your eyes.

Toni ... but maybe SM will be raking in a profit when X-men rolls into local theatres? A small comfort for the policy-makers of Sy's cinemas...

A Passion for Repression

I started the day hungry. First, for food. I started on Poli Law last night, after a prayer meeting, and after I decided to do the remaining 300 pages of Azucena's vol. 1 in hourly installments for the next week or so. I'm done with volume II, by the way. At this point, I find it a more interesting read than volume 1. I finished several articles of the Constitution and started on Nachura at around three am, but 27 pages later, my stomach was growling. So, I downed a cup of Soupy Snaxx, hoping that the black hole that is sometimes my gut would be temporarily sated, at least until mid-morning. Unfortunately, my gut screamed back at me, "I want some more." Quite persistently, in fact, that I started having visions of the breakfasts my mama used to cook for me as I lay there in bed trying to capture sleep. Bacon and rice, steaming hot chocolate and iced tea, eggs sunny side up with the yolk breaking under the pressure of toasted pandesal ... Morpheus didn't want weave his spell yet, and the dawn caught me gripped in the anticipation of breaking my fast.

And in my quest to break my fast, I derived two pleasures far removed from the culinary. The first pleasure was seeing the sun rise. It may seem odd to some, particularly to those who are, for all intents and purposes, the "larks" of the human race. But for those like me who are favored by the night, or whose blood only start to quicken when darkness falls, the beauty of the sunrise is a gift rarely seen.
My second rush of pleasure came as I held my first newspaper in ages. Well, my first newspaper since my grandmother went back to the province. I can almost hear you say, "A newspaper? Come on." I would probably have mirrored your incredulity with the utmost sincerity and empathy on some other day. But not today. Oh, not today.

My second hunger was for information, the variety of which was different from the bar reviewee's compulsory fare. News. I wanted news. I hadn't seen a newscast, much less cracked open a timely issue of any newspaper in what felt like an eon. Reviewing for the bar sometimes takes away the desire to touch anything with text on it immediately after a lecture or even a personal review session. There's this faint tendril of anxiety of information overload. And then, wham! You realize that you've become so immersed in your law books and law friends and everything law that you're in the inside of a glass compartment looking out.

So, I got myself a newspaper. The Inquirer, what else? I would dearly love to read a Businessweek as well, but spending P50++ on newspapers when I'm on a budget deficit is anathema at this point. I got myself a paper and was almost instantly reminded that for every pleasure there is a corresponding pain.

The first thing that caught my attention was the full color photograph of Erwin "Pastor" Emata, left arm extended to the pale yonder of a snow-covered portion of Mt. Everest.

The headline read: "Second Filipino conquers Everest, Garduce expected to reach summit tomorrow." I hadn't even known that compatriot Leo Oracion had reached the summit 24 hours earlier. Good for them, and I hope Garduce reaches the summit safely as well, and that for each mountaineer the journey down is just as untroubled as the climb. If truth be told, however, all that media coverage was a bit off a turn off. It wasn't just the glory of spotlighting the first Filipinos on Everest that motivated all this press, I should think. One media outfit trying to scoop out the other in a never-ending networks war is what primarily comes to my mind.

"Time mag writer placed on watch list." According to the news article penned by Armand N. Nocum, "Justice Secretary Raul Gonzales yesterday said he had ordered the Bureau of Immigration to put TIme's Philippine correspondent Nelly Sindayen on the list [watch list of politicians and businessmen allegedly behind the alleged coup attempt of Feb 24 against PGMA] to compel her to shed light on the alleged plot.

Gonzales is reportedly adamant that Sindayen is a key witness to an alleged meeting between civilian and military personalities determined to withdraw support from PGMA. Sindayen and Cojuangco (one of those Gonzales pointed out as having participated in that meeting) are equally adamant that no meeting of that nature occurred.

Gonales is reported to have said that the correspondent's testimony is key to unmasking those behind the failed coup. He is quoted in the same article: "She won't be arrested, but she must cooperate. We're not asking for anything except the truth. We just want to talk to her." In addition, the article quoted Gonzales as having said: "The NBI report is not completed. We want to know why they were in that meeting. We will file charges against these individuals if I find that there's probable cause."

Okay.

When the good secretary of justice said that Sindayen wouldn't be arrested, but she must cooperate, what exactly was he saying? The directive for the journalist to cooperate is mandatorily voiced. Must cooperate. What are the consequences of a failure to satisfy the "powers that be"? A cordially extended invitation to glove the coercive hand of "justice"?

The Secretary says "we" are not asking for anything except the truth. Who comprises "we"? And would they even know the truth if it bit them one by one on the nose? Or is it that they want to put truth in a noose?

Another thing. When will the NBI report be considered complete? When all the facts are in, or when those who are demanding that report get a report that paints a picture that satisfies them? What face truth?

The witch hunt is on.

Just as disturbing is this news article, "City of Manila bans Da Vinci Code". The movie. Manila's dads have banned the movie.

For Pete's sake. Brown's Da Vinci Code is disturbing to some, though I must admit that I love the way it was written. It's a book. A work of fiction. A facet of Dan Brown's literary landscape that I inhabited for those few hours that I was immersed in it. And if it is not fiction, does it necessarily make everything else a lie?

Father James Reuter is reported to have said that "Rome, in general, has condemned it...{But) the Holy Father has not made it a sin if you watch it." I am not Rome, and Rome is not, and never will be me. And the judgment of whoever makes up "Rome, in general", is not mine to adopt blindly.

I have all the respect for the Holy Father; all the love my heart can muster for the right hand of God on earth. But if God has not spoken in the negative, and the Holy Father has not made it a sin for people to watch the movie adaptation of Brown's book, who are these politicians that they dare strangle the freedom of choice of others on the altars of their personal beliefs?

So much for going to bed after breakfast.

Of Friday night

M:i:III is a good enough film to unwind in. Lots of action, just enough neat blood to balance the syrupy sweetness between Agent Hunt and his wife. Thankfully, this movie doesn't end like In Her Majesty's Secret Service. Those of you who were old enough to catch, or interested enough to go back to the old 007 movies get my point. It raises the question, though. if ever there's another sequel, will Mrs. Hunt still feature in it? If she doesn't, what kinda excuse are they going to give? Divorced? On vacation? Involved in an extended medical emergency? What? The film is open-ended enough to admit a fourth installment. The rabbit foot isn't explained, not really, and going on honeymoon isn't retiring.

By the way, wasn't the pilot/driver there the coach in the indie film Bend it Like Beckham? And somebody tell me if the computations being scribbled across the glass pane by Hunt were actually equations or plain gibberish.

M, thank you for Seduced by Moonlight. I've actually scanned two of the earlier books in the Merry Gentry series. The world of the fey didn't really do it for me in the beginning, but let's just say that it grows on you. Not you, literally, but I'm excited about the whole stuff now. There's a possibility I'll complete the series to see

1. Whether Prince Cel (Celtic: KEL) is a completely insane sadist who deserves rightly not to ascend the throne of the Sidhe, and
2. Which of the former Queen's Ravens Merry ends up with, the Queen's Darkness or the Freezing Frost.

The clincher was the bibliography at the end of the novel. I know. But I really like checking the biblio. Plus, it's easier to collect the four books, compared with the 14-novel Anita Blake series. Toni, Danse Macabre is coming out on June 27. I hope to read just a tad less about the ardeur there, and more about lycanthropic and vampire politics.

Chapel Cat

Cats and roads aren't exactly the best of friends. Cats and busy roads make for disastrous ends. Roadside venturing felines rarely make it to adulthood unless
1. They have learned to be traffic-savvy and avoid anything round that growls and moves, or
2. They are extremely lucky
Otherwise, cats account for prime roadkill. Followed by frogs, rats and even dogs. Roadkill. Not my favorite sight. All those bloody entrails, matted fur and goggle-eyed mess. The last part is if there's still a head left. Puke ... puke ... bloody drivers @#$# ... cry ... turn away.

So, when I saw a cat crossing over from the UP Chapel to the UP Infirmary last Friday afternoon, I nearly got a coronary because of the suspense of watching it cross the busy street. To be, or not to be roadkill? That was the question.

Chapel Cat moved cross the street like an old lady taking a walk in the park. CC just ... strolled. And when I say stroll, I mean stroll. Leisurely putting one foot in front of the other, no hurrying. Just getting from point A to point B as if nothing else was there. No cars, no PUJs, no people. Weird. No stopping. No looking. And no listening.

So, there went the cat, middling in the late afternoon across the street. Two cars were coming from the direction of the UP Post Office,and I was muttering "C'mon, c'mon,cat." Inside, I was, like, "Speed up. Run! Run! Why aren't you running, you little furball? I don't want to see how roadkill becomes roadkill. The car's coming."

The car up front sounded the car horn insistently. But did CC speed up? Oh, no, not this chapel cat. No change of pace there. It wasn't just me waiting with bated breath for the question to be answered. Just about every vehicle coming in CC's direction slowed down, and the car did stop for a few seconds to wait for clear passage. Thank God the driver of the car up front apparently saw the cat and wasn't one for testing CC's nine lives. And so did the PUJ coming from the opposite direction.

That little scene must have taken the whole of forty-five seconds, but it felt like an hour. Was the cat suicidal? I don't know. It just occurred to me that perhaps it was deaf. I don't know if the fact that the cat was crossing in front of the church made a difference, and drivers were just reluctant to challenge God's dominion over the life and death of CC, or they were naturally kind and not predisposed toward making giniling out of animals crossing the street. Whatever the reason, I'm glad CC made it, if only for the fact that I didn't witness a roadkill-making exhibition.

Getting serious

Graduation has come and gone. My grandma has come and gone (back to Laoag, not to the hereafter). My cousins (both the pesky and the cuddly varieties) have come and gone. Moments of sleeping the heat away have come and gone. It's time to get serious about the bar exams. Really. That's what I'm telling myself. And today, after two weeks of trying to get into the game, I finally feel my inner warrior stepping to the fore. I'm ready for the books, the reviewers, the lectures, the endless hours and the early mornings. Bring it on.