burned

Those clever Coen brothers. Or, those clever people who edited this film’s trailer. All the things I thought Burn After Reading was about, I had to throw away after the first five minutes. Those sons of bitches. I’ve been had.

And I love it. :D

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– Drinking problem? You’re a fucking Mormon! Next to you, we all have a drinking problem.

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– Why didn’t you tell me?

– I tried.

– Tried? Tried? And then what, aphasia kicked in?

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Photo Credit: Filmofilia

Transcripts are from memory.

mini-reviews

Because free cinema passes are love. :)

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Madagascar 2 – There was a point in my movie-watching life when I got absolutely sick of this movie’s trailer. We like to move it, move it. Enough, already. It cracked me up the first time (“I love you, Gloria!”), but once is sufficient, as I very soon found out.

Now I’m so glad that that was the only version I was able to see, because everything else came as a (pleasant) surprise.

Favorite bits:

Mob Penguin to Chess-Playing Monkeys: Hey, higher mammals! We could use your frontal cortexes and opposable thumbs.

Mob Penguin to Chess-Playing Monkeys, who just formed a Union and is demanding Maternity Leave: (peeks beneath table) But you’re a man.

Julien (voiced by Sacha Baron Cohen) acting out what will happen once they’ve given a sacrifice to the Water Gods:

(Julien as Water God): Oh, that is a nice sacrifice.

(Julien as, uh, Waiter): Would you like to have another sacrifice?

(Water God): No, I’ve had enough for one day.

(Waiter): Oh, I insist. You take another one.

(Water God, angry now): I said, no more!

(Waiter): But look at you, you’re so thin!

I know, the script is insane. Watch it. :)

(Transcripts are from memory.)

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Passengers – I hate the movie poster: the one with Anne Hathaway looking ominous, with an ominous-looking plane behind her. Oh, and the plane had a skull-face on it. Very ominous. Ominous, indeed. It’s a fucking mess. I mean, the poster, not the movie. The movie’s okay. I think. It’s one of those movies where once you find out the twist everything else that came before just seems silly. I won’t even say it keeps you guessing. Unless of course you’re a person who likes guessing movie endings, then it will keep you guessing. Me, I just sat there, waiting for The Twist. Then, when it came, wondered if I liked the Mitch Albom turn of events. I’m still wondering.

See: if the movie’s (local) marketers aimed to attract people who’d watch the film based on the movie poster alone, then they’d just attracted the wrong audience.

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Zodiac- There was a sale, so I bought a (VCD) copy. Didn’t know the movie was long; I was actually surprised to find that there were 3 VCDs when I opened the package.

This is a good film. Much has been said about it, so that’s all I’m going to say. (Why the hell didn’t I see this film when it first came out?)

The film opens with a murder in 1968, and ends in 1991. It took twenty-odd years to pin down (sort of) Zodiac, who killed people in the San Francisco Bay area because – I’m not very sure about the because. Because he felt like it? Because it was fun? Because he was insane? The fact that the film is based on true events, and the fact that so many lives (not only the victims’ or their families’) have been ruined by the case (still open in one or two areas, according to the film’s postscript) makes the film all the more awful, all the more important.

Watch it. I have a feeling I’m going to watch it again.

dinner dinner

I got my much needed pick-me-up on Friday (this week had just been exhausting for me, I don’t know why), when I went out to have dinner with my high school girlfriends (and one of the girls’ boyfriends). We went to Avenetto at its MOA branch. (We almost switched to Sbarro when we couldn’t be seated right away, but we got tired of walking.)

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I’ve never tried that restaurant before, didn’t know they had such big servings. (Good, too, that I was warned by Sasa and Grace Anne. I mean, what if I ordered a pasta dish all by myself?)

Then Haagen-Dazs for dessert. Sasa ordered Seventh-Heaven-something-or-other; the dry ice in the middle was supposed to represent Heaven. I thought it was a nice touch. (I still don’t understand why the ice cream has to be so expensive, though. I mean – it’s ice cream!)

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I was able to get extra whipped cream and a cinema pass, thanks to Sasa’s power authority beauty employee discount bullying skills.

More photos at my Multiply site. All photos credited to Sasa and RJ. Thanks, guys!

(By the way, these girls and I are planning a trip to Bohol early next year. We’re going to stay in Cebu for a short while – do you know of a nice cheap nice place where we can stay? :) E-mail me or leave a comment.)

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The next day, Saturday, I met up with ex-office mate Eden at Trinoma. (In July last year I had a month-long stint as web copywriter. I took the job because two months of post-college joblessness just felt too long and I was getting anxious and paranoid and impatient and angry with myself for not getting a job sooner. I left because there was too much work and the pay wasn’t really good.) Eden talked like she just downed five cups of coffee. While we were inside Powerbooks she gushed over Atonement, and ripped Stephenie Meyer, Paulo Coelho, and Nicholas Sparks – in that order. I participated in the exercise (Meyer’s okay, not blow-me-away good; Coelho I believe may just be a victim of bad translation, to which Eden replied, “E bakit si Gabriel Garcia-Marquez? Ano yun, magaling lang translator niya?” Well, good point. As for Sparks – hm, no), then got a little frightened halfway through. Meyer fans can be really brutal.

We left the bookstore without buying anything. (I wanted to buy a copy of 20th Century Ghosts, but it was sold out.)

The last time Eden and I met, I practically forced her to watch Jesse James. So this time she practically forced me to watch Quantum of Solace. I wasn’t even able to watch Casino Royale. Come to think of it, Quantum might have been the first Bond film I was able to watch in entirety. It was all right; I had fun.

I just adored the song (Jack White! Jack White!) in the opening credits:

Mary Grace (another restaurant I’ve never tried before): Food for the Gods, Mango Bene. Terrific.

Before we went home, she bought me a book (A.M. Homes’ The Safety of Objects) as a late birthday gift.

Or maybe because I just kept dogging her to do so.

Hm. I should do that more often. :)