Over Coffee

Sorry for the lousy and negative post last time. I just got from reading Alphabet Dad's most recent blog post written earlier today. Well, I know it wasn't composed on the spot, as he has this really great writing style of jotting down in his little notebook bits and bits of words which he will weave eventually to come up with an even more brilliant journal entry. I mean, who writes so damn good as this nowadays:

"I picked up Lars Von Trier’s The Boss of it All from a pirated-DVD shopping spree around 4 years ago. That was a time when the pirates seemed to have better taste, because “indie,” art house, or foreign films were also boot-legged. I remember that it was on the “sale” or “bargain” rack, which suggests that it might be damaged. But I remember getting Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai on the very same rack and it worked fine. 

The disc played okay, but my mistake was I thought it didn’t have subtitles or audio dubbing. For years, it was just tucked away in the shelf. 

In these four years or so, parenting and other good things proved time to be luxurious. Even if we stopped watching Cable TV, we really just didn’t have that much time to spare. D. and I had to give up frequenting the foreign film festivals. I bought a copy of Run Lola Run for posterity because I saw it with her on a German Film Festival. On one of our dates, she kept gushing about her German silent film experience. We were still regularly hanging out with friends when we went to our last Spanish film festival. And we still get excited over the thought of Eiga Sai or French Spring Manila. 

Nowadays, we watch an enormous amount of cartoons and Disney movies. Our little one is also a film buff in his own right. He has been very fond of having Toy Story Trilogy marathons. I must have seen the Toy Story trilogy ten times more than the Godfather Trilogy or twenty time more compared to Kieslowski’s Tres Colores. 

We still see a fair amount of DVDs, but we miss foreign films and festivals probably not just because we had excellent dates or great company when we saw them. There is also a subliminal relief in going through a communal experience in a theatre, but a worldwide curiosity in cultures and a shared experience. We blur the barriers of language with delight and understanding at least while the reel projects a collective take on human drama. It binds stories, colors, action, imagination and sentiment to liberate us from a totalizing aloneness.

One July Sunday night, when the little one was asleep, we jump on the chance to have our own date in our room. We were aching to see anything that wasn’t made in Hollywood, and we were actually willing to watch something we’ve already seen from the DVD shelf. 

That’s when I tried Lars Von Trier’s The Boss of it All. It had subtitles, after all. May the Nazareno bless the pirates and peddlers in Quiapo.

It also turned out that The Boss of it All was a comedy. We laughed away even we know that for the life of us we know we’ll probably never speak Dansk. As the Danish quietly language bounced off the room’s walls, there’s a film festival feel that nudged the darkness into life."

I shrink with envy just reading his words.  I'm no writer. He is. (The entry above is entitled "Like a Boss" and was taken from his unpublicized blog).