Caustic Thoughts

Random funny thoughts with a taste of Pinoy and a hint of acid.

Panday 2 Movie Review – Sort Of

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 Belive in your own hype. No one else will.

I was in the dark, screaming for salvation, but when Flavio squinted into the morning sun and raised his sword in an attempt to convey the noble struggle of the reluctant hero, I knew I was doomed for another hour in purgatory. Purgatory. But I think I was closer to the brink of the pits of movie hell.

I should have paid closer attention to the promotional frame; respectable, bespectacled, looking-like-experts people heaping rave reviews at Panday 2 and the implied postscript that said it was for kids.  To paraphrase: Get ready for a senseless swashbuckling spectacle devoid of depth and a rational plot.

The idea should have been simple enough. Find the resurrected bad guy and kill him, simplicity I can accept and potentially appreciate, but they take the thought, pepper it with nettles, ram it down our throats and force us to believe it’s still digestible.

The problem with the story begins when Lizardo rises from the dead. Baruha’s intervention barely affords us an explanation as to the means of his resurrection other than, “She’s just got the power, man! Got a problem with that? “

If I clipped my nails, clicked my heels or did any other random act, I’d have been able to resurrect him too. That’s just saying the writer had to find any lame excuse to bring him back to life. Otherwise the movie would have been Panday 2: The Story of Flavio’s Boring Domestic Life.

It gets worse. Flavio learns of the return of his arch nemesis and promptly begins to wander aimlessly in search of him. Good for him, Lizardo loves to always be in the middle of nowhere for no apparent reason, hence affording the opportunity for some sword tickling with Flavio. When Moses wandered the wilderness, he had a destination. Flavio’s was just wherever, whenever.

What’s worse than the story are the characters and the people who play them. There’s Bong Revilla, Jr., the king of massive jaws, whose utter lack of empathy for Flavio’s inner conflict is made obvious by his perpetually pained look; not the “I’ve got a deep dark conflict boiling inside of me” look, but the “wow, these lines are so difficult to deliver convincingly” look. An elephant on tranquilizers would have done a better job.

It didn’t help that Flavio was pitted against equally uncreative and thoroughly uninspired villains. Both Baruha and Lizardo have had extra shots of laughing gas, hence explaining their unstoppable urge to incessantly laugh their lines out, an unconscious message to kids that bad guys have so much more fun than the good guys.

Twins separated at birth.

Baruha bears the burden of the stereotype more. She is a cut out from an old Halloween catalogue. Whoever dressed her is clearly unaware that Hogwarts opened 14 years ago, where hip, modern witches are no longer required to wear pointed hats and sport crooked noses. Tsk, you are so 1950s Baruha.

The special effects should have been the movie’s saving grace, perhaps the best in the Philippines, until you spot the missing twin. It’s either the Clash of the Titan’s Kraken had a twin brother separated from him at birth or cut and paste is now a standard practice in the special effects department.

Okay enough already. If I go any further I’ll lose my ability to string two thoughts together.

Cagayan de Oro Disaster Trivia – Whose Fault Was It?

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Count yourself lucky if people think you’re lame. At least you’re not yet a loser.

Like every humor blogger, I wanted to close the year with a year end special that would leave you rolling with laughter at the indignities of people in the socio-political spotlight, but I live in Cagayan de Oro. Even if you’ve been severely detached from reality by the Cartoon Network, you’d have heard that the year ender of year enders, Typhoon Sendong, swept over Cagayan de Oro City and Iligan, causing flash floods and killing hundreds. It would be inappropriate to write about unrelated humor.

Did I just say, “unrelated humor?” That implies that related humor is permissible. How insensitive of me, but really, all I want to do now is to hand some belated Christmas presents to certain city officials. There’s a good supply of “Lame Mirrors” at the local surplus shop that’d satisfy my sudden impulse for generosity.

The gifts even come with special instructions. Look into the mirror and slowly move it to the right. Stop when the letter “L” is right at the center of your forehead. There, perfect!

While it is true that no one can prevent a natural calamity from happening, common sense, caution and the absence of greed and political motives can at least save lives.

For example, common sense says you should not relocate communities by a river that sits by denuded forests and eroded regions perpetuated partly by your own greed. Your sense of caution should tell you not to ignore warnings from eye glass-wearing experts, with special degrees you can only pronounce with the help of a dictionary, of an impending disaster. Also, you should never, ever assume that nothing bad will ever happen just because it hasn’t happened yet in your lifetime or in your term of office.

I heard over the radio the other day that someone wants to set the record straight because we deserve the truth. Whose record? Why, his of course, written, edited and published by him. So while hundreds of displaced families sit in warm tents waiting for salvation, someone’s making rushed media rounds with ten fingers pointed outward. It’s everybody’s fault but mine.

Well, if he can spell E-L-E-C-T-I-O-N-S without cheating, I might believe him.

Red Socks, Santa and the Smell of…

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Christmas is for everyone, most especially for department store owners.

Warning: Severe rambling ahead.

As a little kid, Christmas to me meant breathing cool air, eating ham in pineapple juice, listening to the sound of feel good carols and showing goodwill to all. As a parent, recollections of Christmas are now peppered with memories of sardine cans the size of malls, filled with irate shoppers smelling of arm (pit) sweat in mile long lines to cashiers dressed like Santa’s haggard little elves.

This year I was officially inducted into the arm (pit)-scented society as I squeezed into congested mall aisles. My mission was to look for a Santa cap, red shirt, shorts, sneakers and knee high red and white striped socks.

The socks were the hardest to find. Every school had the “original” idea of making all their kids wear the same socks for their school programs so by the time I hit the shelves, there were only green striped socks for green elves. But my daughter is a red elf!

Good thing the man in the red suit himself seemed to be trailing my route as I ransacked every major and minor store for the seemingly mythical red socks. He was trying to cheer me on, I say!

There he was on a stand in one mall playing the saxophone. I drew close to listen to some uplifting music to inspire me in my futile search for red socks. To my surprise he didn’t seem to be playing a popular Christmas song. In fact, it sounded faintly like Careless Whisper.

In another store, I came across the man in the flesh, all 4ft. 11 inches of him, dressed in a suit so thin he looked like he was going to shiver from the cold in a tropical country. He was carrying a placard, making him look more like the bearer of bad news, “Repent! The end is nigh!”

“Will you put my photo on Facebook?” Santa asked. “Why sure Santa, so that the world may know how you’ve been reduced to a shadow of your former self and into a department store employee.”

Several more stores and Santas later and I started wondering where the guy whose birthday it is we’re supposed to be commemorating on the 25th was. I suppose Santa is the preferred bearer of commercial good cheer because store employees in newborn swaddling cloths will probably sell fewer red socks, green socks, toys and whatnot.

I finally found a pair of red socks in a quiet Chinese-owned store that didn’t seem to be celebrating Christmas. Great. Now I can tell my arm (pit)-scented community members where they can buy their socks so they don’t have to go through the hoops I’d been through and run the risk of losing their Christmas spirit.

Female Issues

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Don’t wear a bad dress or a good one backwards if you’re not Angelina Jolie.

If it weren’t for this dress’ brand tag and the two lines in front that I took to mean “This side up” I wouldn’t have known front from back. I don’t like dresses but I had to get one for a family affair. My fashion consultant, a.k.a. my husband, who is also my makeup and footwear adviser (I hope he’s not gay), picked this one. I suspect it’s because this is the one that can hide my convex curves best.

The dress was only the first hurdle. There were a hundred other things to think about— hair, makeup, shoes, accessories, dead skin cells, constantly forgetting to sit with my legs crossed, etc. For most of these I figured I just needed some Gatsby, extreme facial exfoliation, ancient baubles from Jack Sparrow’s chest and an appointment with a Halloween makeup artist. My only real great problem was the footwear. Would my dress look best with Nike or Addidas?

I kept an old pair of heels (clearly for emergency purposes) in a box along with other things I’d rather forget. Because I was certain rubber shoes would be treated like an atrocity, I had to take out the heels for a test walk. Shortly after, a trail of fine white powder started following me. Oh yeah, that’s right. Like a lot of other things you bury for three years, earth friendly sandals decompose. The fine powder was parts of it joining Mother Earth.

Of course I had to get a new pair. My first order of business was to ask the sales clerk if I could swap my pick for a pair of sneakers if I came to my senses in a day or two.

Problems solved.

Not really. Despite the ingeniously designed dress, the facial diamond peeling and the new sandals, there was a great deal of pain, discomfort and feeling like fish out of water. The dress clung on sweaty skin, the makeup artist made me look like a cheap walking undead movie extra and the heels felt like weapons of mass destruction, massively destroying the muscles in my legs.

I can’t believe any female can be feminine and be entirely comfortable.

Losing the Battle with the Bulge

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You can’t hold a gym LIABLE for any losses including the loss of self-esteem due to the lack of results.
I wish I could hold someone or something liable for my infinitesimal progress at the gym and my waning interest in hammer curls and reverse crunches. I wish I could blame it on my instructor’s total lack of concern over my Herculean struggle to repetitively lift 4 lb. dumbbells or on the gym’s ancient electricity-free equipment (I strongly suspect they inherited these from Fred Flintstone), but I can’t.
My failure to fit the clothes of yore is entirely my fault. You see, I can endure displacing my bowels with 15 straight sets of ab exercises but I can’t stand having to park my brain for a few minutes to run on a treadmill.
I can’t survive with my brain on screen saver mode. It constantly needs to have something to process. I try to process the images of the aero dancers in front of me into useful pieces of information, but all I can think of is me on that dance floor looking like a limp cow in a herd of gazelles.
I need to learn to mentally shut down or I will lose the battle with the bulge.

As If Taal Volcano Wasn’t Good Enough

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IMITATION is the sincerest form of flattery, only if it’s done in good taste.

More than a week ago, news spread of Governor Vilma Santos’ idea of putting a Batangas Hollywood-like sign over Taal Volcano. That was really just in time for Halloween. It scared the peanuts out of me. That’s scarier than The Exorcist on a perpetual play loop.

Seriously, more netizens found it hilarious, hence, the avalanche of ridicule. A few days after the announcement, the more graphically skilled stone throwers created their own mock ups to… well, mock the proposal. My favorite is this one by Darwin Dela Cruz.

Darwin’s idea is a lot more appropriate to allocate tax money to than Gov. V’s.

In her own defense, Gov. V says people are overreacting. The proposal is still up for discussion, but really, the fact that they even thought about it…

V’s defenders were quick to say the sign will help boost tourism. I don’t know about travelling to places just to see signs (unless it’s the Hollywood sign) but if I were to visit Taal Volcano, I would go there with the intention of seeing the volcano, not some sign!

The Link Between Men and Beef

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BAD ADVERTISING seeks to appeal to the inner moron.

What do men and beef have in common? Nothing, except maybe they’re both bad for your health when taken in excess, which makes me wonder at the association made in a fairly new ad between the two disparate elements.

In the ad, young men, who (not so accidentally) are either half Filipino or were born in western countries, play football on a green field against a backdrop of grazing black cattle. At first you’d wonder, are they advertising the cattle’s impending death by football or are they suggesting these chiseled men are bred like cattle? Then you realize, what they’re really saying is that Angus beef is superior to the local variety just as these nearly foreign looking men are superior to the pure native stock.

Oh but wait, who got the Golden Boot for his excellent performance in the Long Teng Cup? Wasn’t that the short, brown, homegrown Chieffy Caligdong? I’d like to see small brown cattle and Chieffy in that ad!

Pirates Know Their Synonyms

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Study your synonyms so you’ll know how to say things in a way that won’t get you into trouble.

Jan and I were in the mall when he asked me for another word for “transformers”. I thought, was that even a legitimate word? I was stumped. He showed me the answer sitting on a toy shelf. Wow, these pirates get brighter by the day. Now they know enough synonyms to ride on a trademarked hit without getting themselves into trouble.

Then again, they won’t ever get into trouble here even if they used the actual trademarked word and maybe just changed “T” to “Z”. I’ve never witnessed the law against piracy enforced in this city. I don’t know if there is a Philippine law against toy piracy but there is one against media piracy and merchants still sell in broad daylight, beside or across police stations. If DVD pirates have nothing to worry about, then more so their synonym-wielding pals in the toy niche.

Speak English Softly

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We give birth to Filipinos so we can raise them to speak a foreign language and work for other countries. 

In my kid’s old school, the English speaking area is also the silence zone. They should have been more explicit and just labeled it the English mime hall. But really, I would have preferred to speak Filipino in my own country, thank you.

In other schools, English speaking campaigns are stricter. Students are not only required to ditch their native tongue for a foreign one, they’re also punished for failing to do so. The general intention of these campaigns is well meant. Educators think that forcing Filipino kids to learn English will open more employment opportunities and produce more Ms. Universe winners.

Sadly, these aggressive campaigns have proven detrimental to our mastery of our own national language and regional dialects. I’ve known straight A students who’d rather do algebra upside down than recite in Filipino. The grandson of Filipino hero, Ninoy Aquino, no less, sits across his mother in a milk commercial and babbles in wonderful English, asking his mom to translate two simple Filipino words he does not understand.

It’s true. Knowing English can put you at an advantage. I should know. I work for an Australian company that pays well, but I still think our children should be bilingual in equal degrees. Otherwise, we’d be nothing more than a factory of workers for foreign companies.

For the record, I had higher grades in Filipino than in English. To this day, I still confuse gerunds with gerbils and adverbs with a torture device.

Now On To Some Unpleasant Business

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EXERCISE is a lot like paying taxes. It’s an unpleasant experience.

Yes, I am trying to lose weight and attempting the near impossible task of getting my muscles toned. Although this isn’t really for aesthetic reasons, I must say that’s not entirely a bad idea. I’ve grown so big I now look like an over eagerly packed spring roll in my old pants. I now sadly share my husband’s waistline, and occasionally, his pants.

But the real reason why I have to struggle to stay fit is because my blood sugar levels are high, my cholesterol levels are high and I am highly susceptible to diseases with names that sound like they were invented for a Harry Potter prequel. I wish they’d said I was high in methane, but no, it had to be those things.

I probably won’t be buying the Ab Rocket anytime soon though. Imagine putting out a great deal of effort to exercise and it’s the waiter who slims down.