Oscars 2009

Best Supporting Actress Penelope Cruz

Mondays, just like the Oscars, are horrible—but today, everything's bright and sunny.

The people I'm rooting for won:

• Heath Ledger (The Dark Knight), best supporting actor
• Penelope Cruz (Vicky Cristina Barcelona), best supporting actress
• A.R. Rahman (Slumdog Millionaire), best original score

I'll be doing cartwheels later on.

Gollum in Empire

The worst magazine cover of all time: Empire's March 2009 issue

I love Gollum, but seeing him smiling like a drugged out tarsier is devastating. Only obsessive people with bad spending habits would buy this magazine—unfortunately, I'm part of that demographic.

To justify what can't be justified, I came up with a couple of reasons why this magazine is worth having:

1. I'm not dying to watch Watchmen, but Empire's black and white photos of the cast make me want to give it a go.

2. There's a feature on Lesbian Vampire Killers.

3. In “A Film from Heath Ledger and Friends…” maverick filmmaker Terry Gilliam talks about Heath Ledger's untimely death, and how Johnny Depp, Jude Law, and Colin Farrell went on to save his latest film, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, from production hell.

Three reasons... not bad.

Gollum, here I come.

Aurora (2009)

Rosanna Roces returns to the silver screen in Aurora
(picture from http://aalixjr.multiply.com)

Director: Adolf Alix Cast: Rosanna Roces, Sid Lucero, Kristoffer King, Angeli Bayani Country: Philippines

The two-headed Sasquatch (more formally known as the the Movie and Television Review and Classification Board or MTRCB) struck again.

The prudes gave Aurora, director Adolf Alix's new film, a double X rating. The culprit: a 27-second rape scene involving Rosanna Roces and indie actor Kristoffer King.

When the film premiered in UP, Roces went on stage and said that if she ended up raping King and not the other way around, their tiff with the censors would have been avoided. She was jesting, of course, but her smile carried with it pointed barbs of resentment and frustration.

Aurora is Rosanna's comeback movie. Presently, the only institutions allowed to screen her film are UP and the CCP.

Alix made Aurora with Roces in mind. In the film, the 36-year-old actress plays a kidnapped social worker struggling to evade her captors in a densely forested region in Mindanao. What's great about Aurora is that it never goads the moviegoers to think or feel a certain way.

I hope I can say the same thing about the MTRCB, which—sad to say—goes about its duties with a rigid mindset fit for the Dark Ages.