a fiery Christmas

The cold breeze which we should be experiencing is replaced by hot, fiery evenings due to the succeeding disasters around the country concerning fire disasters. An amateur video landed last night in media spectacle where a frantic girl is stuck on the roof of the burning department store in Ormoc. And it’s not even March, the Fire Prevention Month.

Last March 2005, I had my short internship with a local newspaper here, which would end my practicum for 3 agencies. It was days before my graduation that I did a story on the fire prevention month focusing on the status of city buildings that are considered fire hazards. It landed on the front page and I think what made it more interesting is the fact that one interview I had revealed that even the building of the Bureau of Fire Protection was a fire hazard. I learned a lot from doing the story. I realized that if concerned agencies don’t give a shit about the situation the city would be a potential inferno.

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I watched The Queen, Brick and Elephant over the weekend. All three films at some point dealt with themes on loss and detachment, which I realized strikingly coincide with the other, more somber side of Christmas that is obviously overridden with superficiality and commercialism.

The Queen is an intimate examination of the life of the royal family during the death of Princess Diana, particularly Elizabeth II’s struggle between private mourning and the public’s outcry for a display of emotion. You cannot take your eyes off Helen Mirren, who plays the Queen and her exchanges with Michael Sheen, who’s perfectly cast as Tony Blair.

Considered to be one of big misses in awards season, Brick tells the story of Brendan Frye (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) a young adolescent who chose to shy away from society but finds himself enmeshed in a dangerous cat-and-mouse game after he finds out that the girl he only loved is dead leading him into the dark recesses of drug mafia. I actually had a hard time catching up with the ‘druggie’ language or whatever it’s called, which is like reading A Clockwork Orange.

Gus Van Sant’s Elephant has enough grounds to shake up conventional filmmaking, (After all, isn’t this what independent cinema is all about? Hehe) and indeed it went to win the most revered Palm D’Or during the 2003 Cannes Film Festival. The film is obviously inspired by the gun-shooting incident in a high school in some US state which killed a number of young adolescents. It scrutinizes America’s policy on gun safety and ownership. The film is almost boring as we watch the characters in long extended walks from behind, which gives us a feel of detachment and piles up into an unspeakable crime. It’s sad that this is actually happening, and in the misunderstood world of these kids, everybody is like a stranger watching them on a glass bowl.