JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

Critics have called I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry “puerile”, “terminally confused”, “casually sexist, blithely racist and about as visually sophisticated as a parking-garage surveillance video”, “stupid and offensive/stupid and condescending”, “a four-alarm flaming piece of crap”, “as predictable as flies on cow patties”, and “an abysmal stab at comedy on every conceivable level”.

I really enjoyed it! Here’s the one positive review. Interesting how critics feel the need to unleash the full force of their superior taste on what is clearly a crass dumbass Adam Sandler vehicle. It’s like writing a doctoral dissertation on Happy Gilmore. Which I really enjoyed, too! And Billy Madison! And the one where Kathy Bates is his mom!

Incidentally, Steve Buscemi really was a fireman in Brooklyn, and screenplay credit goes to Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor. As in Election, About Schmidt, and Sideways.

Tree of Smoke, the new novel by Denis Johnson, opens in the Philippines on the day John F. Kennedy was shot.

“Last night at 3:00 a.m. President Kennedy had been killed. Seaman Houston and the other two recruits slept while the first reports traveled around the world. There was one small nightspot on the island, a dilapidated club with big revolving fans in the ceiling and one bar and one pinball game; the two marines who ran the club had come by to wake them up and tell them what had happened to the President. The two marines sat with the three sailors on the bunks in the Quonset hut for transient enlisted men, watching the air conditioner drip water into a coffee can and drinking beer. The Armed Forces Network from Subic Bay stayed on through the night, broadcasting bulletins about the unfathomable murder. . .”

According to Butch, Johnson was in the think tank brought in to advise Francis Ford Coppola on the Apocalypse Now script when the shoot was in trouble. Another adviser was Jean-Pierre Gorin, Godard’s collaborator in his Maoist period.

A description of the Philippines: “The setting sun lowered from the clouds and struck up at them in such a way that suddenly the entire town throbbed with a scarlet light.” The central metaphor of the tree of smoke: “”And I will give portents in the heavens and on the earth, blood and fire and palm trees of smoke. The sun shall be turned to darkness, and the moon come to blood, before the great and terrible day of the Lord comes.” (from the Book of Joel)

I have these two friends who love the movies, have worked in the movies, want to make movies, have been talking about making movies for years. They have all these brilliant concepts for the movies they plan to make, which for a host of reasons (economic, but mostly psychiatric) they haven’t gotten round to making. But they committed a crucial error. They told me, and I am implacable. Never tell me your fondest dreams, your secret ambitions, even the name of your crush, because I will hound you to go after them. I am relentless. Basically I won’t shut up, and you may feel like hiding from me, but who else will you talk to about your fondest dreams, your secret ambitions, your crush?

I have asked myself why I am this way, and come up with too many answers. My life is boring, so I live vicariously through my friends (sad/pakelamera). I was seriously pushed to achieve as a child, so now I push others (from the safety of my lifetime underachievement award). I regard life as a real-time writing laboratory, and I want to see how the story turns out. Maybe I just want my friends to be happy, even if it kills them. Maybe I just like eating paper.

So I bet my two friends that if they met the deadline for Cinemalaya applications last month, I would eat their synopses and post the video on YouTube. Well one of them actually submitted his application! True, we had to drag him kicking and screaming through heavy traffic on a rainy Friday evening to turn it in, but it was done. And I will make good on my threat and eat that synopsis on YouTube. I ate newspaper as a child (weird family ritual on the first day of school), so there’s your foreshadowing. Since I am not kidding, I have coerced (blackmailed) Jade Castro who wrote and directed Endo, best movie of Cinemalaya 2007 as far as we’re concerned, into directing the video. We shoot in October.

From the Sunday Times: “Left-handedness has reached record levels, with a more than threefold rise over the past century in the proportion of those using their left hand to write. A large-scale historical study of handwriting down the ages by academics at University College London (UCL) has found that the proportion of left-handers has gone up from 3% among those born more than 100 years ago to 11% today.”

What does this mean?

a) The apocalypse is nigh.
b) It’s a good time to open a store selling merchandise for left-handed people (wrenches, desks, etc) like Ned Flanders did in an old Simpsons episode.
c) There’s just too many people in the world.
d) You can expect to get your ass kicked more often on the tennis court by some lefty with a monster forehand.
e) “Wala lang.” That’s for my friend Danton, who gets bonkers when he asks his English class to speculate on the motives of a fictional character, and he gets this answer. “Really? Well your recitation grade for the day is…wala lang!”
f) Hey, there’s a party list. The Left.
You can train yourself to write with both hands, but you have to start early. I used to practice during class—not only do the hours zip by, but the look of concentration on your face is usually mistaken for “studiousness”. When you get bored you can do mirror-writing.

“Reading may be the most intimate of artistic practices: The work lives in the imagination in a direct, vital way. The author’s voice, his face and back story and style of shirt can only break the spell, get in the way.”

Do we really care what detergent J.D. Salinger uses, or whether Thomas Pynchon picks his nose all day? Scott Timberg in the L.A. Times: Reclusive writers leave their words at face value.

A friend reports that last week, at a dinner in her house, two ladies in their 60s nearly had a yelling match on the topic: Novak Djokovic: endearing or just annoying?

Djokovic with his crowd-pleasing antics was the sideshow at the US Open. The main show, as it has been for the last four years, was Roger Federer. Asad Raza has a thought-provoking piece at tennis.com on the workings of the Federer mind. “It’s not about the other guy, it’s about what you know you will summon from yourself at times of need.” It’s about mental economy. Conserve your strength. Identify the crucial moment. Strike.

Or as we say in my household, Be like a cat.