Lead Character Frenches Up His Shirt

Season 2, Episode 10

One of Lead Character's college friends, Eng, has been having his own designs printed on a shirt, just for his sake and his alone. What impresses Lead Character is how the designs, simple as they may be, are nice to look at and at the same time a very good way of expressing oneself. No, a Facebook status update is not enough. If you want to express yourself, print it on your shirt.

Eng used Japanese characters, something that not everyone in Cebu can understand. Lead Character thinks it's sly, hence he asked Eng to send him a design, one that says something offensive like "I'm a fudgepacker."

But Eng never did deliver, so Lead Character decided to make his own design instead.

The whole process hadn't been easy. Lead Character wanted a ringer T-shirt, not just any plain shirt, for his design not to look too bland. After all, his design is simply a French term in a red Ampersand font. The shop that prints out your designs for you, Transfer It! (located on the first floor of Robinson's), only had plain shirts available, so Lead Character had to search the entire city. The bigger challenge was not just to look for ringer T-shirts, but ringer T-shirts that didn't have prints on them. After hours of looking, Lead Character finally found ringer T-shirts with no prints at Giordano in Ayala.

The idea behind Lead Character's design is to go for something as sly as using Japanese characters, and with his life-long fascination with the French language, he went all out with it--something desperate, something sad.

And viola...

It's "fuck me" in French.

Note: Thanks, Chris and Chris, for teaching Lead Character useful French terms. Soixante-neuf, anyone?

You're Welcome, Uh-huh Girl, MD!

Uh-huh Girl expresses her gratitude for having won the Five Questions contest, for which the prizes were a bottle of Jose Cuervo tequila and a Starbucks 2011 Planner.

A new contest will be announced soon, so stay tuned, everyone!

Ugly Fuckable and Pretty Unfuckable

Season 2 Episode 09

Joy Bee decides to treat Lead Character and friends to dinner as a post-birthday gathering. Present, as always, are JabberedOnion, NonFacebooker, Madonna, and TamponRiot. On their way to the restaurant, Lead Character shares his current fascination with Kitchen Nightmares, one of the many shows headlined by Chef Gordon Ramsay. Lead Character can't quite explain it, but whenever he watches Chef Ramsay get all intense and hammy, he gets a series of tiny orgasms. TamponRiot points out that Chef Ramsay, despite not having the prettiest face, is fuckable. Chef Gordon Ramsay is an Ugly Fuckable.

Photo taken from elitechoice.org

The entire ride, as well as the ensuing dinner, is then transformed into a The View-esque discussion of the top celebrity Ugly Fuckables in recent history. Names that come up, not just coming from the mouth of Lead Character, include: Willem Dafoe (not sure if it's because of Body of Evidence, or him getting showered with hundreds of bullets in Platoon), Jack Black (fuckable, yes, but is he even really ugly?), Reese Witherspoon, Tori Spelling, Usher Raymond, Rupert Grint, Mo Twister, Jay-R, and, um, well, yeah, Manny Pacquiao, among others.

But the real challenge is coming up with those who have pretty faces, but are completely unfuckable--Pretty Unfuckables. Lead Character and friends are able to come up with a few, but the discussion here is filled with long minutes of staring at blank space trying to think of celebrities who are pretty but whom they have no desire of fucking.

There's Judy Ann Santos, who's pretty by Lead Character's standards, but inspires nothing sexual at all. Lea Salonga and Tina Fey come up, mostly because you cannot fuck goddesses. Someone suggests Kris Aquino, but it is met with protests because while she is unfuckable, she is not pretty to begin with. Jason Priestley is also suggested, but only circa "Beverly Hills 90210"; as he aged, he became more and more fuckable. Joy Bee suggests Lucy Torres and everyone agrees--all except JabberedOnion, much to everyone's bewilderment. TamponRiot brings up Ben Affleck, whose Pretty Unfuckability is supposed to be a consensus in America. Lead Character disagrees. Just like Kris Aquino, Ben Affleck is not pretty at all.

The night ends with everyone exhausted from all the eating and thinking at the same time. But they decide to do it again soon. Maybe for next dinner, they'll talk about Fuckable Politicians (Lead Character already thinks Bill Clinton and, um, well, yeah, Manny Pacquiao).


Note: You've probably been rolling your eyeballs the whole time you were reading this. In Lead Character's defense, he and his friends were talking about celebrities. Also, he and his friends are above the personalities under discussion because they are, in their own innate and inalienable right, pretty and fuckable. Wad-dup!

Black Swan (2010)

What makes Darren Aronofsky's Black Swan remarkable is that it is a mix of the best elements from his four previous movies: the complexity in Pi, the gore and horror in Requiem for a Dream, the perplexity in The Fountain, and the emotional rawness in The Wrestler. And with all those elements combined, Aronofsky has come up with what can perhaps be considered his best movie to date.

In Black Swan, Nina Sayers (Natalie Portman) wins the coveted role of the Swan Queen in a production of Swan Lake by a prestigious ballet company in New York. Required of the Swan Queen role are both the exquisiteness of the White Swan and the dark sensuality of the Black Swan. However, Nina is much too exquisite, that while she is perfect as the White Swan, she has trouble transforming into the Black Swan. In comes Lily (Mila Kunis), who seems threatening enough to take away the role because of her imperfect but effortless technique.

Odd things start happening to Nina. Aside from the unexplained patch of scratched skin on her left shoulder blade, she sees on a few occasions someone who looks exactly like her on the subway, something threadlike grows on her finger, a night of drinking and drug use ends in a sleepover that may or may not have happened, and these things intensify further to shocking extents--much like how David Lynch's Mulholland Dr. went, but certainly not as confusing. By the end of the movie, everything wraps up clearly to a beautiful climax; you do not have to scratch your head and hate yourself for being stupid.

Throughout the movie, Lead Character noticed that Aronofsky employed a handful of foreshadowing and possible symbolisms in the movie--most notably the reflection shots and Nina taking off her earrings. The shots showing the characters' reflection in the mirror get fully explained towards the end, but Lead Character still cannot fully wrap his head around the earrings. Several times throughout the movie, there's apparent emphasis on Nina taking off her earrings. Is it some sort of symbolism for women transforming into something else? When a girl takes off her earrings, is she suddenly a different person on some level?

Lead Character has a friend who, after an hour's commute to visit another friend, realized that an earlobe was missing an earring. Afraid that her earrings might have been ripped from her ears along the way, she frantically reached up and felt her ears. Only then did she realize that she put on both earrings in one ear. Could this piece of true-to-life anecdote possibly be relevant to Black Swan? Do earrings really represent something to a woman?

If you have the answers, please feel free to share.

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Directed by: Darren Aronofsky
Written by: Mark Heyman, Andres Heinz, John McLaughlin
Starring: Natalie Portman, Mila Kunis, Vincent Cassel

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Other movies by Darren Aronofsy: