mission impossible 3

My friends and I have a joke about Tom Cruise's recent movie. We dub it Mission Impossible 3, subtitled "This time, it just can't be done." Then, we hum the movie theme happily (duhn duhn duhn duhn duhn, dah duuuuuuhn!) and we have a good laugh. The producers, director, and scriptwriters of this film. Who do they think they were kidding?

Impossible Missions Force (IMF) Agent Ethan Hunt (Cruise) has almost settled down to a life away from the dangers of his job. On the night of his engagement party, he is hauled back into active duty from semi-retirement (IMF agent training) when his former student (Keri Russell) is taken prisoner by a black marketer. Russell dies. Villain kidnaps Hunt's fiancé. He is forced to steal against his agency. The mole surfaces. Hunt kills everyone that matters. End of story.

Why Hunt would retire in the first place was never explained credibly in the film. When he teams up with Ving Raimes, with whom he worked in the first two M:I films, the wind blows through Hunt's hair and he is all smiles: he doesn't look like he has aged at all. A quiet life and that much self-assurance doesn't seem to match. Besides, do you remember a Tom Cruise film wherein Cruise, as the protagonist, actually faced a problem he seemed incapable of solving? Me neither. Cruise can't seem to accept that he can't act. Instead, parts are made for him.

So much for a credible conflict wherein Hunt will face and emerge hurt but triumphant. You sort of get the feeling that Hunt will come out of all this alive, good-looking, smiling, and with his woman. Oh my God, that's exactly how the film ends.

Far fetched scenarios, gadgetry every time, duhn duhn duhn score now and again, a bountiful of explosions, face masks and voice perfectly mimicked, well-coordinated team movements, a villain designed just bad enough but not character-deep so that Hunt remains on top of your waning attention span.

Pretty soon this will be in HBO. Not worth the ticket. If you notice that the pop corn tastes bad during the film, it's not the pop corn, or you, that's a little off. It's the film.

It's just, impossible. (Dah duuuuuuhn!)

x-men 3

Police officers in the lead car in a convoy of black vehicles see a cloaked figure down the road. The figure facing the convoy does not move. The convoy does not slow down. The old man in the middle of the road raises his hand, points it toward the first car. The car is lifted off the ground. The man clenches his raised open palm. The car is crushed. He flicks his upheld arm toward his right. The floating, crushed car is tossed aside like a broken toy. The second car is disposed of in the same manner. The 10-wheeler behind the two front cars, whose freight car contains prisoners, is now visible. The truck will run the lone figure over in seconds. He flicks his hand upward. The freight car is unhinged from the truck. It will skid on the asphalt road until its momentum runs out. The truck surges ahead. The old man raises his other hand and the truck somersaults toward and above him, as though it tripped on an unseen obstacle. It crashes behind him. There are no survivors. The car behind the convoy and its occupants are crushed just as easily. Magneto, now joined by his henchmen, walks toward the back of the truck where locks and hinges burst away from the thick metal door. At the far end of the truck, Mystique, the Master of Magnetism's right hand, stands waiting, now liberated from her captors.

I would not have been able to describe the above scene as tightly if director Brett Ratner had not assembled the entire film as seamlessly, something I did not expect. The previous film (Xmen 2) had one too many mutants. You can't develop character when almost every mutant is allotted some airtime. The first film seemed too focused on Logan (Wolverine), who Xavier had to tame and who Scott Summers (Cyclops) had to keep away from his willing-to-flirt girlfriend Jean Grey.

To me, the first two films felt obligatory, with characters introduced, even if they had little to do with the story's narrative, and scenes where mutants demonstrated their powers were inserted throughout the films. The action felt stale. You are just glad the film is over.

Understandably, the stage simply had to be set so Xavier (Patrick Stewart) and Eric (Magneto) could trade dramatically delivered dialogue, with Xavier espousing the Uncle Ben principle ("With great powers come great responsibility") and Eric paraphrasing Nietzsche's Superman principle (it is a disservice to themselves for Homo Sapiens Superior to curb their powers according to the dictates of mediocre human leaders).

Xmen 3 has no such obligatory feel. With the primary Xavier-Eric conflict and hate/fear toward mutants already established, the third instalment to the mutant franchise explores two interwoven plots. The first is Xavier's delicate gamble: under his care all along was a class 5 mutant more powerful than Magneto and himself--Jean Grey (What if she goes wild?). The second concerns the consequences when a "cure" is mandated by the US Government to be injected on all mutants. The cure claims to lay permanently dormant the genes responsible for mutants' powers and appearances (Would all mutants want a normal life?).

Director Brett Ratner made me forget I had a tumbler-full of cheesed popcorn, until the movie's end credits rolled up the screen.

In a flashback ten years from the film's present, Xavier and Eric, then friends, is talking a young Jean Grey into studying at Xavier's school.

"Oh, Charles, I like this one," Eric said as both men and Jean sat in the Grey family's living room; jut outside the window, several feet from the ground were all the cars in eyesweep. Jean was showing off. "I doubt it," she arrogantly said when told she was not the only one with powers.

Flashforward. Jean's traumatic near-death experience in Xmen 2, when she sacrificed herself to save the Blackbird (the Xmen's plane), had broken the psychic restraints Xavier had used to shackle Jean's desire-filled other personality, Phoenix. Phoenix killed Scott, nearly seduced Logan, and with Magneto watching and unable to stop her, she lifted Xavier from his wheelchair and disintegrated him.

Thrilled with his potential new weapon, Magneto brings the wayward Jean to his secret camp, where she is wooed into coming with Magneto's recruited army of mutants to Alcatraz Island, where the facilities for producing the mutant cure was found, and to help destroy the forces that aim to make mutantdom as mediocre as everyone else.

I am relieved that this time, Jean's telekinesis (the ability to move objects with one's mind) has been promoted--from being merely able to lift and shove people and objects aside, to dismantling and shredding and disintegrating matter (and people), and lifting the silvery ashes upward, in a grand demonstration of conceit and power.

And then there is Sir Ian McKellen's incarnation of Magneto, who majestically wields his powers and elegantly dodges Xavier's rhetoric on the need for all mutants to be good. I have a soft spot for villains whose words sting and linger and wound, and whose mere intent can kill a multitude.

I will not mind a fourth instalment.

quarantine

Nothing like cold air pulled in by hard rain to shake my fever-induced headache away. Pulled in. I am inhaling it, with my head half in and half outside the bedroom window. Rain sounds different when they fall on galvanized iron roofs, than when they fall on empty concrete streets. And from the open window, I only see rooftops and hear the tin-can thumping of rain and the now and again distant rumbling of thunder. I thought maybe with all this atmosphere I keep writing about, I am better of as a poet, and not as the freelancer I am now. Deadlines almost always erupt in me as fever. And I have to open the window myself, just so I can breathe.

flight of stares

At some point, staring at the wet laundry on the clothesline swing from side to side brings me to a boat scene, some twenty-five years ago, when seawater, instead of a midmorning wind, lulled me into catatonia.

To a four-year old, getting lost on a long stretch of shore, with same-looking cottages everywhere, is a twilight zone. When you are dwarfed by your relatives, they being thrice your height, a foreigner trying to help, he four times your size, is a behemoth bending down to devour you. The harsh German accent on his English was probably a clue. Where are my parents? he asked. Tired of crying and walking, I turned and walked away, pretending to be more annoyed than scared. He and I were after the same thing after all: my parents. He asked me to come back, as others did, Bicolano accent in their Tagalog, and I ignored them all. At some point, the shore would end. I would find my parents. My parents would find me. Or hunger would deprive me of power, just as my toy robots stop marching when the batteries run out. But I had no expectations. I kept walking.

I remember riding a small fishing boat, one with frames of bamboo for balance, on both sides; the hum of its motor a distant drone, the voices of an uncle and the boat owner behind me. I squinted at the lazy sun muffled behind a carpet of cottony clouds, and I kept to myself. Maybe it was my reward for wandering back to my family's cottage, after nearly three hours of walking.

The motor is turned off. We began to drift. The sea, when you're so far away from shore, is not as postcard-still as it looks from the cottage. It tilts, like a slow prelude to a tidal wave that never really comes. And our boat is gently shoved and rocked and left alone. Thin beams of sunlight escaped the clouds and struck the sea, like a xylophone, and tiny mirrors bounce off the water like music, and like music they fade, as sunlight is curtained once more by cumulonimbus clouds. I should get lost more often, if this much quiet is the prize.

Now, twenty-five years later, I stare at wet clothes. The Encyclopaedia Britannica on my PC spreads out the entry I am looking for: "Catatonia." To a near-thirty wanderer, there comes a point when the wandering has to stop, something should dampen this imaginative wanderlust. I think it was Socrates who said that to be free of attachments is to see Beauty pure and immortal. If only Beauty could pay my immortal bills, to which I am always attached.

I close the window, silencing the scene of clothes and boat rides, and continue reading. One day I will find a cure for my catatonia, and on that day I will cease to be myself; I will be completely practical, consistently cheerful, with all my anti-social genes replaced by happier ones.

the promise of rain

The brown-rusted patches of a distant rooftop is getting unevenly brown, just as I sit on a window ledge, rubbing my afternoon sleepy eyes. The gray areas are getting grayer. Then, I hear confirmation: a faint tin can thumping. It's beginning to rain.

I am waiting for the thumping to get louder, and to spread to nearby rooftops, but with the storm having already passed, the wind that shook the acacia and guava trees free of dead leaves has become a weak but cold gale. I miss the storm, and the gray-dark horizon and sluggishness it brings.

Beside me is one of those windows of old childhood. Old wooden frame with small glass panes framed inside, with the whole thing swinging side to side, routinely shoved by the wind, and hanging on old and squeaky hinges. A stagnant Sunday afternoon. The remnant of a storm.

I have to hold out my hand, to stop the window from swinging at me, as a cold moist wind shoves it. The gray rooftop farther away has stopped darkening. Raindrops have stopped coming down. I feel betrayed.

I stare out, past the rooftops, into the grayish horizon, willing darkness to come, holding the wind and sky to a promise of rain.

according to color

A bulge rises from the sheets of paper on the floor. The first time it happened, I nearly squashed it. I thought maybe it was a mouse (but then I have nine cats, which cannot co-exist with mice). Now, the sight of a bulge suddenly moving is, well, normal. This one moves in sudden spurts, then wiggles itself free from the pile of papers I've been sorting through all day. A whiskered kitten emerges from the rubble. Blinking, it meows at me, probably wondering why I had again forgotten that I had thrown the previous semester's worth of scratch papers on the floor, disregarding the sleeping cats, which were on the floor first. But this afternoon only one cat had slept upstairs, in the bedroom, where I am compiling my portfolio of previously written and previously published works. Switching jobs means bonding with a domestic side of you you had forgotten you had before: your unemployed housecleaning side.

The kitten walks on the pile of papers on my left, leans on it, and the pile tumbles down. My other cats climb up the stairs and enter the room to see what the racket is all about. Now, there are six cats whose paws are trampling on my stuff on the floor. I grab one and put her on my right. I grab another, and another, and sort them according to fur color.

This could take a while. Unlike the sheets of papers, cats stand up and move about after I sort them.

a biography of whiskers

he surest sign that the bedroom is a mess is a fluffy balled up cat sleeping on all those sheets of papers on the floor. There. He shivered in his sleep. Maybe he's fighting off a tomcat in his dream. One paw is covering his eyes, like a drunkard with a hangover denying the morning after. How am I going to clean this up if I keep staring at him? There! He shifted, exposing his fluffy belly. As I scratch it his whiskers twitch, and then he stretches to his full length, kicking away the previous semester's stacks of photocopies. I used to spend nights writing with only him, Bolabola, sleeping on my books, for company. Now, new cats add to the roster. Behind me, snug-comfy on the beanbag that Bolabola used to completely own, are two more cats, not really cats, just a bit older than kittens: Bangus and Lasing, two new whiskers who sleep in the room at night, on mornings, at noon.

I'm going to have to ask the two beanbag cats to leave me the room, nicely, so I can start cleaning up. But how to convince them to do that when their elder brother is stretching in the center of the room, and I am tolerating it?