March 15th, 2008
A Thousand Bitter-Sweet Poems for Women
By Michael Ian Lomongo, March 21, 2001
Last March 10, I watched PETA’s “Komedi Club,” a festival of 10 to 15-minute plays written by members of the PETA Writers’ Bloc. In celebration of the International Women’s Day, the plays featured during that weekend (March 8-10) were written by women playwrights (except for Nick Pichay’s “Kahit na Magtiis”). The line-up included “Flight,” an interpretative dance choreographed and performed by Martina Gonzales-Quesada, Regina Lasam, and Verni Severo, incorporated with a poem by Inge Saltarin; an adaptation of Liza Magtoto’s Palanca-winning “Despedida de Soltera“; Sheila Crisostomo’s “Emergency” (the grand prize winner of the second Charley dela Paz Awards of the PETA-PDP Writers’ Bloc); Nick Pichay’s “Kahit na Magtiis”; and Lallie Bucoy’s “Isang Libong Tula para sa Dibdib ni Dulce.”
I liked the last two plays best.
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Tags: Art, Duality, Femininity, Filipinos, Gender Issues, Layeta Bucoy, Life, Machismo, Maternity, Philosophy, Poetry, Psychology, spirituality, Theater, Tony Perez, Writing
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January 21st, 2008
Posting my review of the first two installations of “The Matrix Trilogy.”
best regards,
ian
—
The Matrix, Overloaded
by Michael Ian Lomongo, May 26, 2003
I
Why isn’t “The Matrix: Reloaded” as captivating as “The Matrix”?
I don’t think it’s because the novelty of the original movie’s winning combination of stunning visual effects and intriguing philosophical premise has faded. (We know now what “the Matrix” is. We no longer are as curious when we first watched “The Matrix.”) Neither is it simply because most sequels really do fail to come up to expectations. (Consider the “X-men 2″ which is, to me, infinitely better than the first “X-men” movie.)
I loved “The Matrix” mainly because I thought it was pop-philosophy (metaphysics) in film. The only other sci-fi/superhero film that approximates this achievement in recent times was “Spiderman,” a sort of pop-ethics with Kantian/Dostoyevskian/Nietzschean overtones. (Intrigued by a friend’s blurb that “Existenz” was the thinking man’s “Matrix,” I went out of my way to see it. I didn’t like it.)
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Tags: Ethics, Gender Issues, Illusion, Love, Maternity, Matrix, Metaphysics, Power, Reality
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