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1,500-Year-Old Claws Intrigue Archaeologists in Peru
By Alan Boyle

Among the most intriguing artifacts are ornamental metal pieces fashioned to look like feline paws with claws. The paws may have been part of a ritual costume used in ceremonial combat, El Comercio reported. The loser would be sacrificed, while the winner would get the costume.

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We need those gloves in order to level the playing field in our household. Maybe our cats will take us seriously and stop treating us like their serf. Not likely.

In this scene Eliza (Angeli Bayani), whose husband Joaquin has been wrongfully imprisoned for murder, confers with the lawyer who advised him to plead guilty.

By popular demand Lav Diaz’s Norte, Hangganan ng Kasaysayan has been extended for one week at Glorietta in Ayala Center, Makati and at Trinoma in Quezon City.

Schedule of daily screenings from September 17 to 23:
Trinoma 12.10
Glorietta 12:30

Thank you for spreading the word. A four-hour indie loosely based on Dostoevsky and directed by one of the leading lights of “slow cinema” (We dislike the term avidly) was always going to be a hard sell, and without your support it might’ve been a first day-last day theatrical run. That the filmmakers were able to make this movie the exactly the way they wanted to was amazing; that it opened in commercial cinemas was amazing; that enough people have come to see it so it gets a second week is amazing.

Essay question: Which character is the most miserable—Fabian, Joaquin, or Eliza?

We had gone to the auction last Saturday expecting something out of North by Northwest.

Given recent news of fraud in the art market—a Luna being sold for Php55 million appears to be in a French auction catalogue for much, much less, only it’s by someone else—we were hoping for someone to yell “Fake!” and start bidding downwards. (Not that we’re suggesting that anything at that auction was less than real. The contested Luna was not part of it.)

Instead, the auction looked like a cockfight, with people in T-shirts and jeans raising numbers on sticks. The paintings were crammed onto the walls, and every plastic chair was taken. “Stay for the Magsaysay-Ho, I bet it goes for Php20M,” said my collector friend, who might as well have been at a basketball championship. (There’s probably a bookie with odds on what the hammer prices will be.)

A small piece listed at Php800,000 went for Php6.9M. It’s enough to make dead artists come back to life and paint some more. In fact they do, except that the actual painting is done by someone else. In a market like this, the genuine-ness of a piece is directly proportional to the price it might fetch: to raise questions of authenticity seems almost rude. You’re killing everyone’s buzz.

We didn’t stay long because the place was packed and we have a horror of crowds. Our friend reports that the Magsaysay-Ho listed at Php2.2M went for Php21M, but the biggest seller that day was the Ronald Ventura painting that went for Php22M.

Watch Vincent and Theo by Robert Altman, which opens with a painting by Van Gogh fetching jillions at an auction in the 1980s, then goes back to Van Gogh’s lifetime when he didn’t sell squat (and his brother Theo was a well-known art dealer).

How does a shut-in consumptive English spinster get to write Wuthering Heights? It is the most intense love story ever written, and Cathy and Heathcliff the craziest lovers in literature. Their relationship goes beyond possession, desire or wanting to live happily ever after: what they call “love” is the stuff of psychotherapy. It’s not just obsessive love—they can’t even be jealous of other people because as Cathy says, “I AM Heathcliff”.

This situation does not make for happy endings, nor do they expect one. Cathy makes an effort at a healthy, “normal” life, marrying a decent man and playing the devoted wife and mother-to-be. Of course it doesn’t work. She basically starves herself to death, but even death will not end her pain. Heathcliff meets her weeping housekeeper and asks if Cathy is dead. The housekeeper says she sleeps with the angels or something, and Heathcliff cries, “May she wake in torment!” Then he bangs his head on a tree, leaving bloodstains. He curses her for leaving him, and then he calls on her to haunt him. He asks her to give him no peace. And the amazing thing about Emily Bronte’s novel is that you believe this extreme emotion could exist.

Writing teachers always advise their students to “write what they know”—what about Wuthering Heights? It is a triumph of the imagination, fueled by powerful feelings that had no other outlet but the written page.

In Abismos de Pasion, Luis Buñuel’s film adaptation from the 1950s, the tale is set in Mexico. This does away with one of the things we love about the Emily Bronte: the atmosphere. Misty moors, howling winds, ghostly faces in the window—it’s not called Wuthering Heights for nothing. (Note that her sister’s novel is called Jane Eyre and not Thornfield Hall, though the sisters both created dark, mysterious, Byronic, unpleasant leading men. We’ve never read their youngest sister Anne—will look up The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.)

The Buñuel also dispenses with the “ghost story” and the love story involving the second generation terrorized by Heathcliff, who really is not a nice man. Though if we were to go by national stereotypes, the “passionate” Latin-American nature is a closer match to Bronte’s characters than the “polite, repressed” Brits. Instead of squelching around in the mud and contracting tuberculosis, you’ve got people in arid, dusty farms and blazing sunshine. But the emotion is the same: the passion that drags the lovers to hell.

Writers are already shut-ins by definition, maybe there is something to the reclusive life.

* In Career Girls by Mike Leigh, two friends divine the future by asking a question and opening a copy of Wuthering Heights to a random page.

* * We’re going to read Virginia Woolf’s essay, A Room of One’s Own.

85 – 88. Mariquina, Sundalong Kanin, K’na the Dreamweaver and #Y, reviewed during Cinemalaya week.

89. Under the Skin by Jonathan Glazer. Wonderfully weird and unsettling; Scarlett Johansson cements her iconhood as an alien sent to earth to seduce men. Who’s meat now?

90. The Search for Weng-Weng by Andrew Leavold. The best documentary on the Philippine film industry we’ve ever seen, by an Australian video store owner who’s gone on to become the expert on Pinoy pop cinema. This will be reviewed in full.

91. The Normal Heart by Ryan Murphy. Mark Ruffalo is ferocious as an early AIDS activist. When the pandemic was first detected in the early 80s, no one wanted to address it, not even the people at risk, because they thought it would curtail the rights they had fought so hard to obtain. Should be required viewing now that HIV infection is on the rise. Maybe people need to be scared all over again.

92. Veronica Mars by Rob Thomas. Yes, the movie funded via Kickstarter. Closure for the audience left hanging when the TV series was cancelled. A long time ago, we used to be a fan but we haven’t thought of it lately at all. Starring Kristen Bell as Veronica and that guy remembered mostly as Logan, with Krysten Ritter who was Jesse’s girlfriend who OD’d on Breaking Bad. Lots of people with small roles on the TV show went on to big careers—Amanda Seyfried, Chris Pratt, Jessica Chastain among others.

93. The History Boys. We saw this seven, eight years ago at a last full show in Glorietta, and when the lights came on, 60 percent of the audience was made of people from our high school.

94. Coriolanus

95. The Gifted by Chris Martinez. Hilarious! That’s what to do the next time you are welcomed to a Japanese restaurant by waiters shouting Irrashiamase! in your face. Starring Anne Curtis in a fatsuit and Christine Reyes with prosthetics, The Gifted dishes out all the tropes and cliches of romantic movies, only to suddenly turn them on their head. It’s subversive. Yes, why are women made to fight each other when they should be working together? Why are women judged by their looks as if life were a perpetual beauty contest with an oogly board of judges? Anne Curtis is very funny as the overprivileged bitch, and it was a stroke of genius to give Sam Milby Manny Pacquiao’s accent.

96. Le Plaisir by Max Ophuls.

The film is based on three stories by Guy de Maupassant. In the first, an old man tries to recapture his vanished youth by going to a ball in a mask and dancing as if he were 20. In the second, the madam of the town brothel goes to the country to attend her niece’s first communion, taking her employees with her. In the third, a painter’s model shows herself to be a master of manipulation. Gorgeous.

We’ve seen the movie three or four times but have never read the comics. Substantial changes have been made in the film adaptation, Peter Quill’s background, etc, but who cares? We love the movie, and the comics are terrific.

Guardians of the Galaxy (2013) by Bendis et al, Php799; Guardians of the Galaxy (2008) by Abnett et al, Php1395; and Guardians of the Galaxy: Realm of Kings by Abnett and Lanning, hardcover, Php1515 (but we found a copy on sale at Php350 yay!) at National Bookstores.