A Not So Thoughtful Take on "Man of Steel"

My 7-year old nephew is the fire that bends the Iron Me.

Watching movies has ceased to be one of my favorite things. It is expensive as it is impractical. At what other period in human history when a movie pass is more costly than a book? Moreover, the high cost of going to cinemas doesn't guarantee you will see a movie so beautiful it makes you cry. That's all gone now.

These days, movies are about computerized effects and a blue backdrop. As Alan Rickman expressed of his final scene with Ralph Fiennes in the effects-riddled last installment of the Harry Potter Series, "Finally, there are just two actors acting."

And since my nephew is the fire that bends the Iron Me (I feel that's a good line, it begs to be repeated.), he turned my Sunday plans to smoke and steered me toward the cinema where "Man of Steel" like the low density, high strength titanium paper weight, sits on some hapless films brave enough to clash with Superman with an "S" which according to the movie is really not an "S."

Weed out what has been written before the film showing, these are my thoughts of it:

1. One half of the movie reminds me of 2011 Thor starring Chris Hemsworth, and 2012 The Avengers. Hollywood has to stop imitating our very own ABS CBN and GMA 7 in being recycle experts.

2. The city is ripped apart, turned upside down, blown to smithereens, bombed every square foot, and what else do you see? Those splendid city lights giving Kal-El and General Zod a dazzling metropolitan backdrop as the two unbelievable superheroes give the Cullen's and the Volturi a run for their immortality bid. Oh, I forget, in the superhero world, you don't need to turn off the power grid when disasters strike. Calling off Apocalypse. Oops, that's from another movie!

3. One fourth of the movie is Twilight. Clark Kent doing an Edward Cullen surliness. Man, you have everything going for you: strength, power, good looks, sexy bod, killer abs, great dad, great mom. But you need to search for...truth. Pft!

4. Every child, including the one with me, came to see Superman in the red cape fly. What does this film do? It takes its sweet, sweet, sweet, sweet, sweet, sweet, sweet time unfolding while giving us a bearded Clark Kent for a hundred or so excruciating minutes. My nephew has been this way and that on his seat, asking for this and that, this close to throwing in the white towel and storming out of the movie house. The kid just has so much pride. It is the other nephew who cannot finish a whole movie in the theater, not him.

5. And why is there no "(Ninoy) Hindi ka nag-iisa" in the movie? The world is manned by our OFWs. We need our own translation of "You are not alone."

I am not going to shoot down the film in this blog's entirety. It has its own shining moments, too.  It happened in the last sixty seconds of this two hours and 34 minutes long movie. If only for those few seconds, I am going to watch the sequel.

Oh, and also for Laurence Fishburne.

Time To Say Goodbye

Living alone in a 2-bedroom apartment is the loneliest that I allowed myself to be. So a month later, I took you in. That was in 2005. 

You have grown to be such a big masterpiece of a creature who acknowledges only one master: me. You can be playful and smart and soft and sweet. But you can also be dangerous and fierce. 

Having two kids in the house (now that I moved back in to my parents) while you are around is like treading on a wire 10 feet off the ground.

I never run out of black bruises caused by your excitement when I arrive home. 

But tonight has been the worst so far among all the accidents you have inflicted. Each time, I looked the other way. But not this time.

Kunot, my beloved and faithful dog, I will have to let you go. 

On Hearing Mass and Keeping the Faith

SWS survey says there is a huge drop in the percentage of Filipino Catholics going to Mass. The bishops are reported to deny this. They say the number of churches being built and the increased number of church goers each mass, some churches offering six masses each Sunday, just don't add up to support the survey results.

As a Catholic going to church to hear mass albeit irregularly, I can attest to the claim of the bishops. If you don't come at least 15 minutes before the scheduled mass, you will have to stand for the duration of the mass along with hundred others like you. This is true at the Greenbelt Chapel. But definitely there are churches with poor Sunday and Saturday anticipated mass attendance. I can name our parish as one. But poor attendance may be attributed to factors other than a Catholic losing faith in the Church. Who would want to go to a Church whose priest is a drunkard and wakes up late for the mass and who has to be awaken because he was out drinking the previous night? Who would want to go to a Church where the "servants" and "ladies" are blabbermouths? No one. So you go to a decent church.

Yet, faith tells you that the place of worship and the instrument used by God to deliver the good news are of no consequence. He is with you every where.

Pope Francis showed us that. You can hold Mass in a prison with its inmates and God is there. You come from a country that legalizes same sex marriage and God is also there. Pope Francis shows that to us, too.

What the SWS should have surveyed is if Catholics follow what their faith says. The Church does not tell us to be robotics. It tells us to listen to the heart of faith.

If all Catholics going to Church to hear mass follow the faith, (not what they think the Church asks them to do), we will all find life in the living, love in doing the right things, and not count faith by the numbers.

On Progressivism and Successful Undergrads

(This paper I submitted to the Philosophy of Education class.)        

I have always been fascinated by stories of successful people who make it big in their field and make it on their own without the benefit of higher education. Some of them went to school only for a few years. In the field of science and technology we can name Steve Jobs, the man who gave us Apple computers, smartphones, Ipad, Iphones, and other technologies that changed the world, particularly people’s lives; Bill Gates, the man who changed the way businesses are run all over the world with his Microsoft company; Albert Einstein, the Man of the 20^th Century who immortalized the theory of relativity that has become highly applicable in today’s technology-driven world by way of the Global Positioning System (GPS) used in airplane navigation, oil exploration, bridge construction, and so more; Thomas Alba Edison; Henry Ford; the Wright Brothers; Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook that connects one billion people in the planet; and Larry Page, founder of Google,  the largest library in the world accessible to everyone with a device connected to the internet. 

In medicine, there is Vivien Thomas, a black American who helped develop the medical procedures used to treat the blue baby syndrome which has led to the development of heart surgery as we know now. Vivien Thomas was a carpenter who finished high school and was hired by a surgeon as a laboratory assistant to take care of dogs used during medical experiments. The doctor-researcher Alfred Blalock discovered Thomas’ extraordinary abilities and love for the science of medicine that the former took him under his wing and taught him not book-theories but real-life situations. Without any degree in college but pure brilliance and determination, Thomas ended up teaching doctors in Johns Hopkins Hospital.
 
In the field of the arts, we can name more successful people who did not complete their education but became famous because of their contributions: Nobel Prize for Literature awardees John Steinbeck, Jose Saramago, and George Bernard Shaw; renowned painter Claude Monet; Academy Awards winning director Quentin Tarantino; and American film producer and innovator in animation and theme park design, Walt Disney.  In politics, we can name Abraham Lincoln, Benjamin Franklin, and George Washington. In business, John Rockefeller, Jr., the self-made billionaire American businessman-philanthropist, is always remembered alongside George Eastman, the founder of the Kodak Camera Company; Harlan Sanders, the founder of Kentucky Fried Chicken; and Frederick Henry Royce, co-founder-designer of the Rolls-Royce Motor Cars Company.
 

The above are notable people who did not complete their education but accomplished great things. It can be argued that they may be simply exceptions to the rule. However, these individuals as documented in their biographies and what the world knows of them, had the intense passion for learning but in an environment not bound by specific structures of the academe. Instead of handing their future over to the hands of professional teachers, they found themselves curious about the world around them. Their test results could be failed experiments, non-performing formula, one-dimensional characters, stories that did not make sense or unfriendly-user applications. Yet, the more they fail, the more they strive to be better, knowing that tests have no equivalent GPA, and results are so much more than outputs reduced to mere numerical digits. They saw problems as opportunities for success and liberation.

Let us then review what some of these people think of education. George Bernard Shaw said: “Schools and schoolmasters, as we have them today, are not popular as places of education and teachers, but rather prisons and turnkeys in which children are kept to prevent disturbing and chaperoning their parent.” Shaw’s main complaint about the school is the standardization of the curriculum, which he believed deadened the spirit and stifled the intellect. 

Steve Jobs, founder and innovator of Apple Company, said of America’s education system: “was hopelessly antiquated and crippled by union workers... Teachers should be treated as professionals, not as industrial assembly-line workers. Principals should be able to hire and fire them based on how good they were. It was absurd that American classrooms were still based on teachers standing at a board and using books. All books, leaning materials, and assessments should be digital, and interactive, tailored to each student and providing feedback in real time.”

John Steinbeck had once said when a friend of his, upon reading a just completed chapter of The Grapes of Wrath, told John that his punctuation was terrible and his spelling was worse. Steinbeck smiled and nodded and said he didn't worry very much about either of those skills. He knew his publisher had a roomful of college kids who got paid forty dollars a week to correct spelling and punctuation but he doubted if any of them could have written Of Mice and Men.

Jose Saramago, the 1998 Nobel Prize for Literature awardee said, “The wisest man I ever knew in my whole life could not read or write."  In his Nobel lecture, Saramago talked about his grandparents, both illiterate farmers, who during winter nights when the cold grew to freezing point, would go out into the sty and fetch the weakling among the piglets to take them into their bed. "Under the coarse blankets, the warmth from the humans saved the little animals from freezing and rescued them from certain death."

These brilliant minds never got to march to "Pomp and Circumstance" to get their degree diplomas. Instead, these people took education in their hands and invited the best teachers in the world: hardship, opportunities, failure and everyday people. Surely classroom teachers need to learn from them. What was it that these people did outside the school that teachers can bring into their classrooms?

Having studied the different philosophies of education, the closest one can get to mirror this kind of phenomenon is what the educational progressivism offers. Looking back as a student, this philosophy ought to have been what my school offered me. I was not interested in high school because I was not interested in most of what my teachers talked about in class. I hated our textbooks so I read the bulky anthology books I borrowed from our next-door neighbor. I hated memorization but my teacher kept on asking us to memorize whole chapters of terminologies. I wanted to do things with my hands. I loved to cook, to sew, to crochet, to write stories. But my school thought otherwise.

Based on that, I decided to become a teacher “that the child I was would like to have learned from” as Bliss Cua Lim laments in her poem “Chalk Dust on My Fingers.” Like the progressivists’ view, I believe that the goal of education is “to enhance individual effectiveness in society and give learners practical knowledge and problem-solving skills.” Students need a strong foundation where they can stand on to survive regardless where they end up in. They are supposed to be taught skills which can help them to metamorphose into something they need to be given our society’s shifting situations.

I believe in a non-authoritarian student-centered approach to education where a teacher is one with the students in their individual objectives, skills and beliefs.

In school, I hardly use the prescribed textbooks and outlines. The bases of my being a teacher are my students. Still, the challenge is to know what makes the individual student tick. However, if the teacher always thinks of the end in mind, she will know exactly what to look for and how to draw out the interest of the individual child.

Progressivism as an educational philosophy may seem impractical, but the world tells us that the best and the brightest thrive on impracticality defying the norms and those that are easy. As one teacher once told me, the student does not remember what you taught him in class, but he will always remember what he did in your class.

                       

           

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Discovering Rickman

A friend gave me a copy of the complete Harry Potter audiobooks which I listened to over the holidays and finished about a week ago.

My friend was right in saying I might have missed some points in my reading of the books and/or watching the films and listening to the audiobooks might just help me bridge the gap. How right he was!

But more notable than that is my subconscious adaptation of the British sound what with Stephen Fry stuck on my ears for weeks!

And another miracle happened. I fell in love with the character Snape who turned out to be The Other Hero in the series.

I started watching the HP movies if only to rediscover Snape. But instead of rediscovering Snape I discovered Alan Rickman.

I started with Sense and Sensibility which also featured the pre-Titanic Kate Winslet and Emma Thompson. The movie is so good I had to read Jane Austen herself. It was weird hearing Snape reading romantic verses to Marianne (Winslet) but he was so good! So darn good! And that scene when Emma Thompson realizes that the character played by Hugh Grant is not married after all was remarkably and emotionally explosive it broke my heart and sent torrent of embarrassing tears to my eyes.

Next I watched The Search for John Gissing where Rickman played John Gissing, then Truly Madly Deeply, and followed by Blow Dry. What a gem of films those are. And Rickman! He dominates almost every scene he appeared in. Fantastic!

Next on my Rickman movie list are:

Closet Land (Watched some scenes) 
An Awfully Big Adventure (Watched some scenes)
Dogma (Done)
Love Actually (Done)
Die Hard (Done)
Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (Done)
Close My Eyes (Done)
Dark Harbor (Done)
Something the Lord Made (Done)
Snow Cake (Done)
Nobel Son
Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street  (Done)  
Bottle Shock (Done)
Mesmer
Rasputin (Done)
Michael Collins (Done)
The Winter Guest (which Rickman directed)

Given enough time, I will definitely write reviews of these Rickman films. I swear most of them deserve to be written about.