I officially wrapped up the Marinara gig this morning, which means the other projects I have on the queue can finally start moving.

The one I’m going to be burning mouse feet over this week is a short AVP to promote Nivea’s new line of For Men products in the Philippines. It stars the girl on the left, who I never bothered to find out the name of, as well as 5 ugly guys. The hook of the spot is that these ugly guys all have a chance with this girl because they use Nivea For Men products, which is absolute b.s., but what can you do. I’m doing the whole thing in Flash MX 2004, which means vector-art galore once again. I really wish I had time to develop a more unique look for this, but given that I only have a few days to finish the whole thing, I’m forced to just draw as I normally do. Still, I suppose it’s better than doing photo-collages again, which I did for the last two video gigs.

While I work on this, I’ll also be programming CMS’s for 3 websites (2 from scratch and 1 for add-ons), so it looks like I’ll be having a pretty full week again. No rest for the wicked, as they say.

A grab-bag of links I found interesting reading today:

• What’s the next step in Search Engine evolution? Parsing sound and video. It would be fantastic to be able to search radio and video streams, although how a spider is going to crawl the thousands of avialable feeds in time for you to actually click and watch them is beyond me.
  
• What’s the next step in Robot evolution? Folding origami. I guess this is still slightly more useful than teaching them to dance.
  
• What’s the next step in Avril’s evolution? Flipping the bird on live TV, and getting her wrist spanked. We’ll make a punk out of you yet, kiddo.

So I’ve been working on this new music video right, since we got back last Sunday. It’s a promotional spot for GMA’s new kuwela-novela Marinara. Predictably, the title is a concatenation of the three main characters’ names, i.e., Marie, Ira and Dolfina, all of which are played by the most well-known pair of boobs in the country, Rufa Mae Quinto. Yes, she plays triplets. Or sextuplets, if you want to be really technical about it.

I’ve been watching the rushes for the first couple of episodes and the only thing notable is Rufa Mae Quinto’s bushy eyebrow makeup. Man, it looks like she’s glued toasted caterpillars on there.

The show is sorta like a parody of that other mermaid series Marina, although GMA seems to be going for more of a potpourri of soap cliches here. The spoiled rich girl, the poor girl with the golden heart, the evil aunt/stepmother, the flambouyantly gay sidekick … it’s all here, folks, jump in any time.

I have nothing but disdain for this show and the people who produced it. But here I am working on it anyway (I’ve got a pretty hefty credit card bill coming in a few weeks that’s been keeping me up nights). I hate working for these people, because they pollute the airwaves with copious amounts of candy-coated feces, but if I don’t work for them, I won’t eat. If you don’t sell out, you don’t eat. The freelance life is full of conundrums.

Why is the world like this? Why can’t we choose the projects we want to lend our support to, instead of being forced to accept every job we’re offered because we’re constantly in fear of not getting anything else? Why is selling out the only to make a decent living?

I guess ultimately, the extent by which you sell out is directly equivalent to how much money you can potentially make. So it’s not really a conundrum, it’s more of a, uh, reciprocity I guess.

I don’t hate my job, generally, but I do hate my clients.

This took a bit too long to put together, but better late than never, I suppose. My camera ran out of batteries on the 3rd night and I never had a chance to recharge it, so my pictures from that day came from my phone (which is my official excuse for their obvious crappiness).

 
NAIA was as crowded and as disorganized as ever. With our flight just 90 minutes away, the line to the check-in counters reached all the way back to the airport’s main entrances. No pictures from the plane ride this time around, because I didn’t have a window seat, and the 777 we were on had a wing the size of a small apartment, which I simply couldn’t shoot around.

 
Singapore is a great little place. The main road, Orchard, takes only half-an-hour to traverse, but that’s assuming you don’t stop at any of the dozen or so malls on either side.

Conveyor belt sushi is fun-fun! I love raw salmon.

My mom and lizz at the Fullerton Harbor area. Note the Singaporean mascot Mer-lion in the background. The other photo is of some random school kids on a field trip. You can’t really see it in this picture, but it was the most cross-cultural bunch of students I’d ever seen, which I thought was very cool.

The chinese temple at Temple Road, which I figured was about as sacred as a 7-11. Anyone could just walk in, pose for a few polas and finger the incense pots, and nobody seemed to care.

The city, from Mt. Faber. The similar-looking buildings in the foreground are government-subsidized housing projects (which isn’t nearly as crappy as it sounds — those apartments are worth about S$450,000 or PhP14,000,000).

Singapore has the cleanest Chinatown I’ve ever seen … nary a smidgen of horse manure in sight. A great place to get kickass wanton, and cheap souvenirs.

Also spotted in Chinatown. Some designer must have spent all of five minutes creating the packaging for this Coca-cola drink.

The cable car station at the harbor. This was a fun way to travel the 2 or 3 kilometers to Sentosa, which was Singapore’s own little island resort. I don’t have any proper pictures of Sentosa’s beaches, but they looked suspiciously man-made to me.

Apart from resorts, Sentosa had a nice wax museum detailing their brief history. It’s interesting to note that a large number of their important historical figures are European. For example, Stamford Raffles, a British businessman, has everything from streets to hotels to airplane classes named after him to this day.

We also visited Sentosa’s Underwater World, which was moderately fun for the hour or so that we spent there. I took many really crappy photos, of which the four above are the most decent. The first one is of a water dragon, which had a body about a foot long (I couldn’t see where its tail ended though), and is supposed to be very good luck. Chinese are simply mad for water and dragons apparently. The second photo shows the glass tunnel to the main viewing area. You can ride the conveyor belt around the loop, where you are literally surrounded by marine life. The third and fourth photos are a lame attempt to capture said marine life without the proper equipment. My camera ran out of batteries soon after we left Underwater World, but nothing significant really happened in the evening that followed anyway.

The next morning I had breakfast sitting outside on a sidewalk bench, because I was sick of our hotel’s crappy morning buffet. I love how the coffee cups here have these little plastic handles, so you can carry it around without scalding yourself. I also love how their trashbins have all these unnecessarily cheerful comic drawings on them, which featured plastic bottles, paper cups and other assorted garbage asking you to "save their future." All in all, it was an ok trip. I would’ve appreciated a bit more pampering at the hotel (for example, a working flush would have been great) and a less complicated transportation system, but other than that, I had a good time. I actually have enough notes about the city to write a full-length travel guide, but I’m no Bill Bryson. I don’t really know if there’ll be any other trips for me within the next year, but hopefully the next one will have less shopping and more sights. Infinitely easier on the wallet that way, I think.

Just a short update, while I wait for our flight back to Manila at the Changi Airport. I like how they have Free Internet terminals set up all over the airport, although why they would disable right-click on all of them is beyond me. Are they worried that someone might View Source … and violate some sort of copyright law? (Or maybe they’re afraid someone might save pictures to My Documents or something … ?) Anyway, this is by far the best airport I’ve ever been in, although I guess that’s not a very fair assessment since LAX was undergoing renovation when we last went there. Still, I doubt that those renovations included a movie theater, a swimming pool or a spa …

I’ve been checking my inbox recently and it looks like I’ll be confronted with a ton of shit to do as soon as I get back to Manila, wahoo. Kinda wish there was some way I could work on them remotely, but I’m too big a big cheap-o.

More tomorrow …

[ UPDATE: I just realized that I haven’t been able to update the Election Gizmo that some of you folks have been using on your blogs. Sorry about that … I’ll fix this as soon as I get back. ]

This is my third day in Singapore, and I’ve seen enough to warrant a blog entry so here we are. No pictures until I get back though because the kiosks here won’t let me upload pictures from my camera.

We got here Thursday and it was hot as hell. We’re staying in this crummy little place behind one of the big hotels, which is convenient for commuting, but not much else. The main road, Orchard, is less than 3 km long, but it makes up for its brevity rather nicely by having a shopping mall on every block.@##@

I spent my first afternoon walking around by myself, seeing in quick succession: Le Meridien, Plaza Singapura, Lucky Plaza, Robinsons Centrepoint (!), Istana Park, Midpoint Plaza … it goes on. This is pretty much the entire trip summed up in one sentence: I saw a lot of malls.

Along Orchard Road, every other building is a shopping center, every other shop sells electronics. At a random camera store, I’m offered a Canon 300D at the rather low price of S$1600. I spend the next two days fantasizing about splurging on the entry-level SLR.

The highlight of Day One was eating at this Japanese joint with sushi on a conveyor belt. The food was pretty mediocre but it was fun chasing food down the belt.

The next day we took a short tour of the city which included a trip up to the second highest mountain in Singapore, Mt. Faber. It’s actually a bit of a misnomer because it’s only 105 meters high, so it’s really more of a hill than a mountain.

Our tour guide was barely intelligible, but he seemed like a nice enough guy. I have a whole bunch of tourist-handbook-type facts noted down on my PPC, but I won’t go into all that now.

Day Two’s highlight was two-fold: the first was visiting Funan (7 floors of tech), and the second was deciphering the MRT system, which would have been a whole lot easier if we had prepared beforehand and downloaded the Palm-compatible maps.

I’m not sure what I was expecting at Funan, but I didn’t have that giddy geek feeling I usually get when confronted with thousands of square meters worth of hardware. I guess I was pressuring myself too much to get a good bargain, and it became “work” instead of “fun.” I ended up buying a 512mb Compact-Flash card (S$150) and a Pioneer 8×8 DVD-writer (S$210), both reasonably cheap when compared with how much they’re worth at home. Still, I felt curiously empty when I took the MRT back to the hotel, and I didn’t know why.

They have this curious payment scheme at the train which asks you for $1 more at your station of origin, and then returns this $1 to you at your destination. A deposit of sorts, which I suppose, is to make sure you don’t run off with the cards they issue.

In the evening we had dinner at Chinatown, which is just about the cleanest Chinatown I’ve ever been to. Not a single lump of horse manure in site. They also had really, really good wanton, for only about $3 a bowl. They’d block off the roads at night so you could eat it out on the street, underneath the red paper-globe lights.

Afterwards we checked out People’s Park (Filipinos my age will remember a similarly named complex along EDSA) which was really just a big shopping center full of discount stores. It was getting pretty late and one of the few stores left open was (yet another) electronics store specializing in mobile devices.

This is where I found this little beauty, which I promptly bought along with a Bluetooth headset. I traded in my old-ass Nokia 6310i too, so my pocket will never be leaden with that old dinosaur again.

I had a lopsided smile on my face the whole night as I was playing with the phone back at the hotel … I guess the giddy geek feeling that I’ve been waiting for requires you to do something Really Stupid with your money first, before it comes.

More tomorrow …

(and Internet rental here is insanely priced so I might skip updating entirely until we get back …)

Omelettes are good, but this is ridiculous. Norma’s Restaurant in New York is offering a $1000-dollar omelette, containing 6 eggs, a lobster and 10 ounces of sevruga caviar (which is worth about $65 per ounce). No one has currently ordered it, but can you imagine what a spectacle that would be.

Meanwhile, this article laments the sorry state of table-napkins at fast-food joints, where managers are forced to hide their table napkins behind their counters and ration them out to customers. “Sometimes you feel like you can trust your customers, but they abuse the privileges that you give them,” said McDonald’s manager David Ramirez. Funny, they’ve been doing that in the Philippines since before I was born.

• People who can’t get enough of David Beckham will love this new “art” piece by artist Sam Taylor-Wood. It’s a 67-minute long video of the Real Madrid star snoozing.

• Italian cops drive a Lamborghini Gallardo. With a top speed of 300kph, this gives new meaning to the notion of “police car chase.”
• Shockrocker Marilyn Manson is currently in talks to play Jesus Christ in a dark comedy called “Diamond Dead.” Directed by the legendary George A. Romero, the basic plot has a young woman attempting to kill 365 people with the help of a rock band that she accidentally killed and brought back to life and has the tagline, “Death Rocks.”
  

Most film reviews content themselves with pointing out errors in a particular movie, but I’m so affected by Troy’s foolishness that I actually tried to think of a way to make it better (i.e., hopefully more satisfying for the viewing audience.)

I believe the big story flaw was that Hector was built up way too much; so much that all the strength of the movie was drained away when he died.

What they should have done was to build up Paris. Instead of making him a wimp, they could have developed his character to be one who tries very hard to earn his father and older brother’s respect, often with little or no success.

Hector’s character should have then been readjusted so that he was more overbearing, more dominant, and thus, not as worthy to become the film’s focal point. Hector would be Paris’ opposite, instead of simply a better version of him (as Petersen and Benioff chose to do).

During the fight between Menelaus and Paris, instead of having Paris grovel at Hector’s feet, we could have Hector stepping in impulsively fearing for his younger brother’s life, and killing Menelaus himself. (I know Menelaus isn’t supposed to die, but I’m operating within the limits that Petersen set for himself.)

When Hector is killed by Achilles, Paris is crushed, having never earned his brother’s approval. He becomes righteously angry and eventually kills Achilles in a very emotional sequence that will symbolize his character’s growth; he finally becomes worthy to become the last prince of Troy.

Not only is it a better way to end an otherwise ho-hum film, but it’ll satiate the legions of Orlando Bloom fans as well.

Now that we’ve all refreshed our memory of how the Iliad actually took place, let’s talk about Wolfgang Petersen, and this bumbling, awkward thing he calls a movie.

I spent the last entry pointing out discrepancies with Homer’s original poem, so I won’t dwell on the details. I will, however, say that Petersen’s first mistake was to think that you could tell this story in one movie. A trilogy maybe, or a TV mini-series, but not one movie. There are just too many characters, too many story threads that deserve to be recognized and appreciated. @##@

The fact that he chose to cut out the gods’ roles entirely is telling, although I surmise that that was actually a practical decision more than a creative one. Brad Pitt’s salary alone must have drove this movie’s budget through the roof … they wouldn’t have had enough money to cover all the visual effects of a movie with gods in every other sequence.

So when you remove the gods, you’re left with what? Gladiator, basically.

It even sounds like Gladiator, with the same ethereal-chanting soundtrack fairly saturating the nearly-3-hour long film. Which is not to say that I thought this film’s music was good, by the way. I thought it was really overwrought in some places, almost like those old epics from the early days of film, Spartacus or The Ten Commandments.

So it looks and sounds like Gladiator, but it lacks one important thing, and that’s a compelling story. How very ironic. Petersen and screenwriter David Benioff have pruned and sheared so much of the Iliad that characters are reduced to stereotypes, with nothing to drive them.

That Hector is killed at the climax of the film makes the last half-hour an exercise in futility. Eric Bana’s character was compelling, and the only good thing the movie had going for it. When he died, you just didn’t care anymore.

Petersen begins to realize the folly of forcing this story into one movie during the last 10 minutes, when he hastily ties up as many story threads as he can. In quick succession: Archeptolemus dies, Priam dies, Agamemnon dies, Achilles dies, and Paris, Helen and Aeneas escape to start a new Troy. Odysseus wraps everything up with a brief monologue, which is interesting because up till that point, his character had been given a non-essential or “flavor” role. On the other hand, I suppose it was better than having Orlando Bloom do the voice-over.

More tomorrow …