When Love Wins, Who Loses?

Joy pours out

finding the gayest place on Earth

in this colorful home.

Now, who loses?

Definitely not these eager beavers.

Makes one appreciate the primal life in this age.

Frenched by French

Ever been made love to by a piece of art? French Filmfest is back to rekindle our passionate exchange of intellectual orgasms.

Recent contemplations have come down to a single fear of losing sight. When French Filmfest came greeting my beachless summer, I responded swimming in joy upon a realization my eyes were born normal to view filmic wondrousness.

It shouldn't come off a surprise that my idea of "me time" for the weekend would be sightseeing. Should you see this a travel from the obtuse to the precocious was worth every waking second processing subtitles, movie after movie. It was a tour free for all but the dense or a time killer seeker. 

La Famille Bélier is, in Kristofferson Guela's persnickety world, perfect, to say the least. The kind of perfect that made me cry with utmost genuineness. That's saying a lot considering I only get touched, in a mindset conditioned to appreciate the mainstream, by heartbreaking farewells in a movie. 

 
With La Famille Bélier, a full-fledged un-mainstream work of art, the goodbye scene shot right through all my senses before they even reached my heart. I did not know I was being prepared to cry in the end. I felt betrayed. And that betrayal messed about with my stubborn mechanism to be satisfied. How can most family movies not be like La Famille Bélier? How you demonstrate emotional appeal without hingeing on pity, entertainment without relying on the cheesy, and triumphant love without the wordplays and pick-up lines is in brilliant display in La Famille Bèlier. 

The elements of music coming into play, handicap does not entail obviousness or overuse. I am glad La Famille Bèlier did not bring music to gratuitous exposition and stayed focused on the main story arc.


Come mid-afternoon and another helping of French goodness filled the movie theater in the picture of Les Garçons et Guillaume à Table! It's like the Birdman of comedy or what I feel a breakthrough genre I may dub "SOLILOCOMEDY." The depth of this comedy is a tinge of black and heartwarming. Guillaume Gallienne urges himself to do the script more than justice; rather, he delivers with a usual sense of duty as do most French films I have seen. The premise, the conflicts, the exploitation and the denouement, all unfurled like a canvass too revealing to rede piecemeal. Guillaume could deliver best actor and best actress speeches in one night, on one stage, both at the same time.

I don't remember a single time a French film had ever failed me. Until 108 Rois Demons came along. It is, to say the least, too elementary even a nursery book can put it to shame. Put it this way: I have exerted more effort fighting snooze from second scene on than figuring a conspiracy how mediocrity had slipped into this cinematic digest. A number of other "me timers" weren't too shy to share this sentiment leaving the cinema with a discernible air of whatdafackness 40 minutes into this test of patience. Ultimately, it served me a valuable lesson: this is how not to make a good movie.

My "me time" Sunday culminated in a redemptive mood that's so cruel French cinema did me some ample reminding of why they are superior in filmmaking. In three words and 90 miuntes, it won me back - Lulu Femme Nue. How could a married woman with three children choose to lead a life of abandonment and find solace in learning the ropes of survival preying on other people's equally lonely lives is the moral uncertainty this movie gives us a taste of. There's another story similar to this. There is an exhausted human being who wants a life out of his aquarium for the past 1 or 3 decades (1 as a corporate slave; 3 an ambitious firstborn). Denudate and in personal recession, albeit on different levels of reality, this movie is my story.

Le Havre was my mint following an adventurous meal capped off by luxurious afters. I had it a day later - a Monday, a Manic-for-Movies Monday. It's vintage and rightfully a classic. Its story inspires the way a Dolphy movie would - all about the good, the kind, and the miserable. Complete with Messianic formula formed in the last two decades of the 20th century,  Le Havre incites feelings of nostalgia and old-school genius. It was a perfect pitter-patter of my yearly dose of French.

The 2015 French Filmfest finds me watching alone yet again. Two of my movie buddies have immigrated to places I have always wanted to be. Both enamored by their boyfriends, almost in a "put a ring on it" phase of their lives. Who knew my own life's plot twist would be me marching on without my supporting characters?  French films have consistently put me in what-ifs that go a natural direction to be eerily close to reality and tragically funny. They have tickled my artistic senses more than 253 likes a Facebook photo could sire. A highlight of my year I celebrate in the company of dark chocolate-covered almonds, Jamba Juice, and tofu chips. This once-a-year phenomenon I pine for as only French films can make beautiful sound exquisite, disorienting turn into imposing, and great, as a sated moviegoer would exclaim by film credits' end, look magnifique, or basically make filmmaking a synonym game of thematic clichés only the French could make headway in. 

All By Me

I'm in the minority for never liking this song 
but somebody told me it fits my vocal glove. 
Don't be mean on my first try. 

Besides, been a while since I last posted a selfie-deoke.

This is me doing All Of Me during my All By Me time.

The Lab Purgatory

Time is Gold. 

And if time were affordable by gold and I were the richest, I would use it to buy another time - the RIGHT kind of TIME. 

The right time to get out of what this truth-reaffirming article calls the "love purgatory."

The Absolute Tragedy Of Meeting The Love Of Your Life At The Wrong Time

[Most Striking Paragraph Award goes to:

"You meet other amazing, beautiful people with whom you want to work things out, but it never happens because something is off. He or she just isn’t _____ (fill in the blank with your person)."]

I am in it. Have been in it for 7-8 years now. Could be a curse, a maddening test or sheer reality of a lifetime I wish to get over with for the love of my life but never be over for I love life. The best person I "never" (read: 3 months = never) had. 

Time, I have learned, is such a mean thing. It punishes without a promise of recovery. It has the power to convert itself into a more insufferable form - space. Just when you thought you are free to love again, here comes time re-presenting itself as great distance; playing Moses, bullying two souls into opportunities they can only live on seas apart. We're talking Singapore and the Philippines here. We're talking another matter of when in the form of where. 

Have I tried closing in? Goes without saying. Were we within 5, 10 or 15 kilometers apart? Probably. Kilometers that could be replaceable with "impossibilities." This time talking about 5, 10 or 150 impossibilities. I prayed for it. Hard enough. But time, that mean thing in the guise of space, is harder to beat. By the time we were 1 kilometer/impossibility apart, probably in the same airport, we found ourselves bound for different spaces of geography and purpose. 

Giving up has never sounded this convincing. But I am better known patient. Or at least, have aged with greater amount of it. This isn't false hope. This is my war against time (and space) and I shall win it. The love of my life not totally the trophy; rather, our happiness together. Armed with my gold to afford time's biggest enemy - the RIGHT TIME - these intangible riches will have you within my reach. I can't wait to hold your hand (again)...in or out of this lab purgatory. 

One Year, Two Babies

This was 1 year ago.

It's their 1st birthday today.

I should remember; they are the only worthy residue of a retrospective wilderness.

Happy birthday Baby Aki and Baby Hidee.

Your (Grand) Daddy loves you so.