Jessica Zafra's Blog, page 69

Cat reenacts famous horror movies: Tremors

Drogon as the Graboid in Tremors (1990) starring Kevin Bacon and Fred Ward.

Mozart in the Jungle: Mad Genius, or Drama Queen?

FROM THE TITLE I thought it was an adaptation of Fitzcarraldo, the Werner Herzog movie about a would-be rubber baron who dreams of building an opera house in the Amazon. The mad glare of Klaus Kinski emanating from a TV screen — the prospect is both terrifying and thrilling. But the jungle in the title […]

Someone is torturing and killing cats in Dasmarinas Village

Photos sent in by a reader. Arguably there are bigger, more urgent problems than the death and disappearance of fourteen cats in an upmarket gated community in Makati, but the fact that anyone thinks they can get away with torturing small animals is cause for alarm. Animal cruelty is a gateway crime. In the greater […]

Looking for Kafka in Prague

It’s been 14 years since we went to Prague with our sister. We’re old. We saw a hotel called Metamorphosis. Cracked us up. Check in as a person, check out as a cockroach. It was snowing in late March. A man on the street sold us cheap tickets to the opera. Our seats were just […]

It is useless to resist them.

Boysie of House De La Cruz

Movie reviews vs Premature Opinionation

Cat’s Eye (our new column in the Philippine Star) 24 January 2016 by Jessica Zafra Movie reviews can be many things, but they are primarily their authors’ reactions to the movie they just saw. I underscore they just saw because while it seems obvious that you have to see something before you can pass judgment […]

Better Call Saul: The moving story of an honest sleazeball

“YOU’RE the kind of lawyer guilty people hire,” the embezzler’s wife tells Jimmy McGill (Bob Odenkirk). Even the most clueless criminal can tell that the protagonist of Better Call Saul is a shady character. But when the AMC series begins, Jimmy has not fully embraced the shady side. He’s still trying to do the right […]

The Big Short: A comedy about how stupidity and greed broke the US economy

In The Big Short, Adam McKay’s adaptation of the Michael Lewis nonfiction book, a motley group of highly-strung fund managers and financial analysts realize in 2005 that the housing market, the very foundation of the American financial system, is headed for a meltdown. For starters, no one thinks to ask why subprime mortgages are called […]

Charles Bukowski’s cat was a literary critic

On Cats, hardcover at National Bookstores, Php955. It turns out that Charles Bukowski, the poet of the American lowlife, loved cats, took in many strays, and admired their toughness and no-bullshit ways. a reader by Charles Bukowski my cat shit in my archives he climbed into my Golden State Sunkist orange box and he shit […]

Does anyone still care about the Oscars?

The steadily falling ratings of the annual awards telecast reply: No. It doesn’t help that the ceremony is full of flat jokes and corny musical numbers, everyone talks too much, and our bets never win. The red carpet coverage is boring because everyone is styled to within an inch of their lives so we can’t […]