My fish is obese and is defying the diet I imposed on it by eating its own shit

Listening to: Billy Crawford – Bright Lights (in my opinion: a pretty song if one makes the effort of blocking out the lyrics)
Currently: waxing poetic


I’ll be the first to admit that I have a poor knowledge of history—the world’s and otherwise. I am a product of UP’s RGEP system, and this circumstance coupled with an instinctive inclination of keeping the number of Filipino courses taken to an absolute minimum on my part has resulted in a grave deficiency in my knowledge of all things history (as per rules on prerequisite courses, one has to first take up Philippine history to get to the meatier stuff—not that I’m belittling my country’s history of course, but give me a break, I plead). In any case (I digress too much), I admit that I was floating cluelessly for a bit in the opening scenes of the film. I wasn’t expecting much—more or less I envisioned some x number of hours spent compensating my numb butt with xx handfuls of popcorn... while watching the film, of course.

My father mildly disliked the film for what he deemed an all too excessive focus on the film’s part on the more (shall we say) unsavory aspects of Alexander’s sexual preferences. As I see it, he’s taking things a little too personally as his father named him after Alexander (one of my grandfather’s “little conquerors”—my uncles are named Napoleon and Caesar). He can be something of an ultra-conservative bigot at times. But he’s adorable and I love him. I liked Alexander. I didn’t mind the sticky, gooey-eyed, meaning-laden looks and the prolonged embraces. The way I see it, strip all biases away and what’s left would be a treatise on faithful, enduring love—the kind that’s strong and selfless, the kind that inspires and gives strength. But there I go interpreting my way to girlish death. What with my deficient knowledge of the recorded circumstances of Alexander’s life et al, the story became more of a fleshed-out myth to me, like the movie-Alexander’s cherished tales of Prometheus and Achilles. Here is a man with so singular a vision that only he can truly see and appreciate it, the TV-gameshow-host in my head booms, here is a man who was so strong and stuffed with charisma that he beguiled and conquered almost the entire known world into making his vision a reality. And yadda-yadda-yadda. Strings of cheese with a strangely annoying music score. And then there was the blood and gore. The scene of the battle in the desert (Alexander in pursuit of Darius and Persia to avenge Phillip’s death) was great. Lots of blood-spurts, soaring camera-sweeps and billowing clouds of dust and sand—all red-hazed in that quintessential savage, animalistic fury of war. The pink-tinted (I know there’s a technical term for it, but I am at a loss) scene of the elephant-ridden jungle as Alexander grapples with near-death was pretty if a little too Technicolor-tacky.

Several hours before watching Alexander, I was ensconced in my parents’ bedroom watching Gangster No. 1. Paul Bettany is hot. That whole skeletal, blond-and-blue-eyed, choir-boy look always gets to me. There were a lot of funny one-liners (but I can’t quite recall all of them accurately):

“I’m arse-holed with success.”
“It’s my favourite ax, Eddie.”
“Great, beautiful, magic.”

But the old-gangster just ruined all the groundwork Paul Bettany laid out as the young-gangster. But I guess that was some sort of moral retribution. Make the young-gangster age into this little, dumpy monster of man for all the vile, vile sins and wrongs he committed whilst garbed in his blade-sharp suits. O, well.

Boy. That was a lot of brain leakage, there.