The next frontier in science fiction isn't about aliens. It's about alienation. It isn't about new worlds peppered among those billions of galaxies in space. It's about the most desolate, dullest place man can ever step on. Duncan Jones' Moon experiments with just that. Click the link for the bloody synopsis, I haven't got the patience to summarize the thing. Just a couple of things the movie is assuming:

1. Extracting Helium 3 from the moon is practical.
2. Mining the moon hasn't any detrimental effect on Earth.
3. Scientists can mass produce clones, much less launch them into outer space.
4. Clones and robots have the same status as slaves--both are inferior to vagina-expelled human beings.
5. Man has replaced God as the creator, rendering God and morality unnecessary.
6. The government and the scientific community are oblivious to all this cloning thingamajigger.
7. Robots are more humane than humans. (Very Blade-Runnery.)

All thus listed except the last are difficult to swallow. Should Moon pose itself a hard SF flick, it lacks the kick to prompt me to suspend my disbelief.

1. Yes, Helium 3 is an excellent energy replacement for fossil fuels. Turns machines into tree huggers. But sending mining equipments and space shuttles to and fro the moon costs billions of dollars worth of rocket fuel. It just isn't practical. Say, man has discovered a cheaper way to transport He3 to Earth. American pirates wouldn't be the only ones digging the treasure on the moon would it. Arr, moonbase pirateships representing different countries all over the world would flock the dull rock. It'd be a hubbub of eyepatched Johnny Depps sword fighting and smashing rum bottles against each other.

2. Harvesting the moon its He3 poses ethical problems which have yet to be protected by cosmological laws. It's no different from illegal logging, in other words. The moon is necessary to sustain the evolutionary processes of life on Earth. Harvesting its resources, thereby transferring its mass to Earth, has detrimental effect on gravity. This simplest most important law of nature, if tipped to the tiniest of changes, could result to mass extinction of several species. He3 just isn't the answer to our global energy crisis. The problem isn't energy crisis to begin with. It's overpopulation. Producing too many humans too fast wanting so many things all at the same time, sooner or later you wouldn't wonder why you're breathing more fart than you normally should.

Nevertheless, the moon would suffer the same fate of Nibbler's home planet Vergon 6 if it were to be mined. After Vergon 6 was harvested of its dark matter pellets (the fecal matter of Nibblonians), it simply collapsed into itself. If the moon collapses into itself, what would become of hippie surfers all over the world? What would become of evolution?

3 & 4. Reproductive cloning. It's not like this hasn't been dealt with before. In Futurama, Professor Hubert Farnsworth cloned himself to grant him a successor to all his inventions. His clone Cubert, however, is far beyond the mirror image of himself. For one, Cubert's nose is upturned and pig-like due to being squashed up too long against the wall of his cloning tube. Besides that, he doesn't give a doodley-squat about Farnsworth's inventions. He doesn't want to be a scientist. He wants to be an artist. Case point in: clones are unique in themselves regardless of the fingerprints they share with their original copies.

Moon is suffering from multiple identity crisis, existential and suicidal at that, once the clones realize they indeed are clones. But what makes clones different from their original copy?

The answer is this: nothing.

Structurally, there is no discernible difference. A clone is a carbon-copy of the original, regardless of its unique personality traits. So: what power does anybody have, anybody at all, to say that clones are inferior to their original copy? If I cook carbonara and cook another the exact same way, what grants anybody the power to tell which is better? Whoever that person is, he's a royally pompous asswipe.

Despite this, them clones in the movie are no different from the robot Gerty. All of them were programmed by real humans who came from real slimy vaginae. They share the same properties of mass produced objects, much like the mass produced clones in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. But Huxley's reproductive cloning was rather socially acceptable. It wasn't just acceptable; it was the norm. Moon, however, is grounded on the same beliefs and ideologies we have about cloning today. The debate persists, and the world of Moon is still immature and oblivious to take any side just yet. Is it supporting cloning or is it against it?

Then comes the question: where the hell is the humanity in all this torpedo shit?

And what the fuck is up with all the cloning when AI's can do all the stupid harvesting to begin with? I just fail to see the purpose of a human being on the moon.

The movie can do away with the cloning--what with all that personal existential drama that really made me want to puke my ovaries out. It can do away with the harvesting; mining the moon already creates far more problems than solving any of them. Moon just fails to see the complications and consequences of every bit of detail put into it. It's what I call skiffy.

5 & 6. The film too is riddled with puns on religion and morality. Examples: Sam's daughter is named Eve, the same clone from Adam's ribs. The harvesters are named Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, the gospels that tell Jesus' similarly asexual birth.

Man is elevated into the status of God, what with the power to fiddle with carbon-based entities. But I can't see the point of clones when them scientists are merely being immoral, unthinking, and uncreative. In the real world, such sort of scientists cannot possibly exist.

Skiffy Moon assumes that without God, man has no reason to be moral. When God massacred millions of people in the Old Testament, nobody questioned his morality. But when the new god, man, does the same atrocious act (ie., disposing clones as need be), we're supposed to hate him.

It could be, all this is but about man's claim to the highest forms of power: access to clean nuclear energy, and the power to create and destroy humans. But with all this power comes a price: to be inhuman.

God is not human. Was he therefore inhuman? What are we, then?

7. Oh the irony of it all come the ending. This story isn't about them clones really. It's really about that giant humping robot Gerty. Moon follows the footsteps of Blade Runner, The Bicentennial Man, and Space Odyssey: humans and robots have traded places. Humans have become inhumane and robots humane, regardless of the programming.

Aye, the robot is the hero again! Which goes to say Moon just isn't original.

I'm prolly the only person who hates the film. I hate it just as much as I hate 2001: A Space Odyssey, Alien, and Solaris. All four have one special thing in common: the yawn.

Still, if there's one thing my heart leapt out for in this movie it's this:

An Alice in Wonderland geek t-shirt!XD [ link ]

I can't write without smoking a cigarette so before writing this first sentence I roved around the house and looked for one. I found a stick of Ray's Red Marlboros squeezed in one vacant slot of my brother's-in-law (brother-in-law's? Fuck that. I forget. Whatever.) library collection of DVDs. It looks like it came from someone's pocket who's ran a marathon race, the cig all scruffy and battered and creased and crooked with brown stains and tobacco shreds bunched up at one end. If the cig would talk it'd say, "For heaven's sake throw me in the trash can already." The lack of cigarettes is just one reason I can't write. Another is my laptop's fucked up so I'm bound to borrow my sister's Mac Book. While another is that I'm taking depressants to clear my liver of alcohol and prevent cirrhosis, which runs in the family.

I'm a health junkie, despite all counter evidence.

With no cigarettes, no laptop, and low energy, I'm depressed as hell. The last thing I'd like to do is overdose on caffeine and rev up my serotonin levels but that would require another swig on a bottle of brandy to smash me to sleep. Which is counterreactive to my liver therapy.

I am a health junkie I am a health junkie I am a health junkie.

I drank three cups of green tea today but I wolfed down a greasy Whooper burger and oil-saturated french fries from Burger King. What I really want is to be a vegetarian. No meat, no sugar, no dairy, no animal products and animal derivatives. But when you step out the door with a grumbling tummy, every street is infested with nothing but fast food chains. What I want and what the world offers are two different bananas. The simple truth is that no matter how you want to be a herbivore, everybody else in the world is a carnivore. Your family is a carnivore. Meat for breakfast, meat for lunch, meat for dinner. Your friends are carnivores and alcoholics. Every restaurant out there caters the carnivore population. If there's a vegetarian resto in the city, it's either too expensive or the food tastes like recycled toilet paper. There's no other choice. It's either you leapfrog into the horde of stretched mass suicides or be alone, live longer, and die miserably healthy.

I want to rid of all this shit and junk from my system but I'd need a support group, like the Philippine Veggie Association or the Everyday Happy Herbivore Club. Or I might just join my fellow cows and horses chewing on raw leaves in the fields.

Every day there are animals dying. They are not dying from old age, cancer, heart attacks, brain tumors, or Parkinson's Disease. They are dying under a butcher knife in slaughterhouses. They are dying choking on soda push pins floating in the sea. They are dying because the forests are bald. They are dying drowning at the North and South Pole because the ice have all melted. Even Santa Claus and his legion of furry elves have died drowning in ice water. They are dying because. They are dying because we magicked them to die with our deadly magic wands.

For the past few weeks the heat in the country reached its highest recorded temperature you can literally see people deep fried in their own liquefied body fat. Then for the past two days it rained like the sea was taking over the land. Newscasters bellow it's Global Warming in full throttle, rage and violence combined, punishing us toxin-generating motherfuckers. Us parasites of this giant cellular organism called Earth. If we want to cure the planet of this human-derived disease, we should just nuke all fossil fuel dependent vehicles in all spherical corners of the world. We should just wear rollerblades or rollerskates going to work or school. Or we could fire ourselves from catapults using strategic trajectory positions and pull out our parachute strings when landing on our destination. A Filipino invented a car run solely by water but it was suppressed because it threatened the global economy. The thing is, without oil, all countries will go berserk and the earth will glitter with exploding neutron bombs all the way from ex-planet Pluto. What this all boils down to is our decision as a species to choose between economy or ecology. This is life or death, people. Peace or war. Pepsi or Coke. (Oh shit, another Global Warming advocate.)

Cult films added to my favs, garnering six pink stars out of five. (Fuck you I want them pink, bugger off.) If you want to see an excellent film and not just random comatose inducing junk on the screen, go to IMDB's top 250 movies of all time, cover your eyes and point at the screen, then google the title along with the keywords "watch movie online".

I am a pirate. Ar.

The resolution sucks mothballs but who gives a shit. It's still a good movie.

The Silence of the Lambs is far less boring than the title implies. In the film, Hannibal "The Cannibal" Lecter is now imprisoned behind unbreakable glass and Clarice the youngish Jodie Foster consults him for advice on how to catch the serial killer Buffalo Bill. Lecter is the proficient psychoanalytic wizard who can read your personality profile simply by sniffing the vaginal wash (or dick wash) you used this morning. He earned an Academy Award in his brief appearance of about sixteen minutes in total. His laconic eloquence draws an impact that would stretch your consciousness to the alpha state where everything does not exist beyond your peripheral vision except for his mouth sputtering epiphanies on the screen. Heightened sense of perception, to put. There's nothing quite like this character who requires 101% of your attention. Arresting.

Leon, sometimes entitled as The Professional, is about a lonely professional hitman (Jean Reno) who inevitably adopts his next door neighbor Mathilda, the thirteen-year-old Natalie Portman, when her family was massacred by drug syndicates. Learning Leon is a professional assassin, Mathilda insists on making him teach her the skills to avenge the death of her little brother--she hates the rest of her dysfunctional family. Behind the blood and gore, the gunfires and carnage, the smoke and drugs, is a pederast's dream love story. The young girl falls in love with Leon along their How To Be An Assassin tutorial and ends up in sodomy and child pornography widening and bruising Natalie Portman's bloody asshole.

I'm kidding.

In One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, the younger Jack Nicholson eludes imprisonment by pretending he is a wacko fucko. As a result, he's thrown into a mental asylum with retards and numbnuts and birdbrains ranging from stuttering talkers to hysterical crybabies. Jack Nicholson undoubtedly looks like Batman's Joker with his upside-down checkmark eyebrows and sinister grin. If you think about Nicholson's character in other movies, like The Bucket List or The Departed, it shows a trend of how inflexible his character is. He's always that sick fuck possessed by the devil into implementing some diabolical plan. In this film though his mission is to disrupt the order of the asylum and teach them how to have a good time, like booze drinking, fucking, watching baseball, and breaking out the barbed fence to go fishing.

Funny how my brother-in-law says "barred wire" when he means barbed wire. Wahahaha. He keeps on repeating it it kills me every time.

The ending is so bizarre it's stuck to my head. Nicholson had to die a pillow death to retain order. Order snaps back after that, everybody back to their own solitary business, but he changed one wacko's life; he inspired him to escape the asylum, the same Indian chief-looking giant who pillow-suffocated him.

Film: UPCAT
Rating: 2/5

So I've seen it. And the movie is a disappointment.XP (Cram it into one word and my reaction would be: "Err".XP)

I'm tamad to write a review so here are some shotgun bulletpoints:

• The situations are all too extreme they're devoid of verisimilitude. (Yack, Comparative Literature term!XP Use another word! Simplify! Communicate to your audience! Where's my mongol rat-bitten eraser?) What kind of parents wouldn't want their kids to take the UPCAT? What kind of parents would force their kids to take the UPCAT? Parents over children domination: that is so centuries ago. Parents don't own their kids, mind. They only serve as springboards from their downfall. Why can't them parents just be NORMAL and COMPLIANT to what their kids want to be? Parents should teach their kids to exercise their FREEDOM! And not tether them on, say, a fire hydrant. Your kids are not your pets, when will you ever get that?
• Death from hazing isn't that rampant in UP any more, whatever campus. That ended in the 90's. Kids these days are point-blank chickenwinged wussies they can't even throw a tiny booger-sized crumpled paper at a professor.
• The movie's fogged with too much mysteries and revelations. Lo and behold, your UPCAT tutor was a cheater during the exam. And lo and behold and begrip yourself, your father provided him the cheats. And lo and behold and strap onto your seat belts, your father's best friend died from a fraternity hazing. And your father's best friend is your tutor's brother. Surprise, surprise, surprise. It appears that the only way to dazzle the viewers is to portray complex scenarios that'll divert them from the essential elements of the movie. And it would've been all cleared up if the father was open in the first place. "Look here son," the father should've said. "My best friend died from a fraternity hazing so I want you to join a sorority instead."
• Jane's cousin, a sorority leader in UP and a biaaaaaatchy high-class supervixen wannabe, that character just simply CANNOT exist in UP!
• a - b = b - a :: Oh come on! A retarded kindergarten can answer that!XP Why, that's the cosine theta of the arc tangent of an oblate spheroid spiraling into the astral black hole of your asshole.XP
• What happened to Jane? She just vanished winkly from the picture.XP
• Lucas, inspired by Nick Joaquin, took up Malikhaing Pagsusulat in UP. But Nick Joaquin wrote in English, and never in the Filipino language! Lucas should've just taken Creative Writing or Comparative Literature major in Philippine Literature Written In English. Otherwise he should've been inspired by Vlad Gonzales or Bob Ong instead.XP
• Shading circles? WTF. When did that become part of a review? And why just circles? Other shapes have rights too. Give justice to the isosceles and rombuses and trapezoids! Besides, the answer portion uses oblongs, not circles. And it uses pen ink, not chalk. Teeeeeeh.XD
• How can a Fine Arts graduate review kids for the UPCAT when his own admission exam only included skills test--sketching, painting, blending, sculpting, and the like. FA grads don't know nil about math, language, and reading comprehension exams.
• The characters strike me as insipid. They're not at all motivated for academic excellence.XP All they want to do is impress some authority figure who don't even give an elephant's fart about them, bleah.
• It dwelled too much on the love angle which isn't the point of the story.
• If Lucas (Feliz Roco) and Jane (Yas Neri) had the face of real probinsyanos (dark skin, thick lips, sarat ilong), the movie would've crumbled into molecular antimatter.XP
• What's the point of watching this? It should've focused on what high school students would do to get an admission test and pass the exam. Remember the indie film Batad? The protagonist, an insular boy thriving on the fields of Banaue Rice Terraces, earned his way into getting a pair of hiking shoes. Flip the coin and Lucas hasn't earned anything to get into UP. You don't even see him read one bloody book. He just sort of materializes on the screen, typing a mysterious novel in his laptop. And mind you, not all novelists are successful. Of a thousand books written in the Philippines, only three will be published, and only one will reach the local bookstores.
• Lucas as a writer is just so FAKE. If he were a writer he shouldn't be portrayed as ordinary; he's too ordinary he doesn't even have a personality. As Butch Dalisay once said (Well, he said it yesterday during our lecture on Good Country People.XD), "You're not normal people because you're English majors." A writing career doesn't equate to big bucks, and it takes decades to earn a legendary status, which doesn't necessarily include wealth. Lucas is just BLAH, some random pasang-awa in the UPCAT who won't even amount into anything. Without his good looks and charming smile, not to mention his fawning sycophantic best friend, the film isn't worth the watch. It's cabbage throwing worthy and a fart in your face worthy and a... Give me my money back! Grarrrr.

Overall, the movie lacks direction. I should've written it! With me as the director, producer, main cast, makeup artist, and camerawoman. I can do that all by myself and make it to the box office and movie awards and international film fests.XP Gaaaaaaad, this movie is a reject. It should've been entitled Kropek instead.

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