Jessica Zafra's Blog, page 99

On Marvel’s Agent Carter, the villain is sexism.

When last we saw Peggy Carter in the second Captain America movie, she was an ailing lady in her 90s processing the fact that the love of her life, Steve Rogers, had not only survived a 70-year deep freeze, but was physically still in his 30s. Such are the problems of having a thing with […]

Movies that make us fall over with laughter

You Don’t Mess With the Zohan (We can’t find the clip of the “Electronics store is a dream killer” scene) Superbad We just saw this again last week with our cat Mat, who watched it from beginning to end. (He identifies with McLovin.) Elf Another favorite of our cats, along with The Two Towers. Love […]

Is anyone reading this in Budapest?

Nyugati station, from the National Geographic We’re thinking of going in May and want to know if this is a good time. Budapest because: 1. We’ve never been there. 2. Patrick Leigh Fermor walked to there from Holland (Though we’re taking the train from Trieste to Vienna to Budapest, making it a Vestiges of the […]

All cats are critics

Saffy: It is faithful to its literary source. Drogon: There are not enough cats.

Adventures in Taxi-Riding: The Over-Sharer

One advantage of riding taxis is that I get stories I can repeat in my column. Like the one about the driver who was reading a warrant of arrest for murder, which I hope he had not personally committed. I have had some memorable conversations with cabbies; practically the only thing we have not discussed […]

Penny Dreadful: The Avengers Assemble of the Grotesques

Penny dreadfuls were cheap 19th century British magazines containing sensational tales of bloodsucking ghouls, accursed sarcophagi and other oddities. I imagine they were the print equivalent of Inday Badiday’s old TV program See-True, which in the 90s provided our daily ration of women giving birth to fish, men getting pregnant, and assorted weirdos, mostly of […]

Bill Murray, guru

Wes Anderson’s The Uncanny X-Men

What if Wes Anderson directed X-Men? from Patrick Willems on Vimeo. via The A.V. Club.

What we’re reading next

Besides Proust. Well we can’t ignore all other books while we’re reading him. My Struggle, vol 2 by Karl Ove Knausgaard, Php855 at National Bookstores. We’re still trying to figure out how Knausgaard makes the most banal, wala lang incidents from his history so compulsively readable. These books should be filmed with Nikolaj Coster Waldau. […]

How to choose a book

This column first appeared at InterAksyon.com. Faced with thousands of books in bookstores and millions of titles online, how do you choose the books you will read? The other week I bought a book just because I liked the title: I Regret Everything: A Love Story and its first line, “It would be easy to […]