WHITE COFFEE- I go through the motions automatically like what I do every morning. I put the perculator (coffeemaker) on the gas stove and wait, then after a few minutes, pour the hot liquid in my mug.
It's hot water, no coffee! I have forgotten to put a scoop.
Thinking too much.
ANXIETY- I have asthma and chronic rhinitis and every cough, every itch in the throat, every sneeze, which in normal time I just shrugged of as nothing, start off a chain of bad thoughts from getting sick, to being hospitalized, to infecting my two girls, to dying a painful drowning death from collapsed lungs.
Thoughts that could leave me catatonic with fear if I don't fight it off every seconds.
Though I try to not to, I just can't help it especially after hearing that the mayor and the municipality's health chief are also covid positive.
They have been mingling with barangay leaders, the captains are on the ground with the sitio chairpersons, down to the relief processing and the distribution.
I mean...the infection probability meter is off the scale.
MAYOR- Though a lot can be said against our mayor for his absence (on vacation in the US), lack of urgency during the first few days of the crisis and his ill thought of "mangutang muna" advise to his constituents, he doesn't deserve the bashing he is getting.
I too have a lot to say about how things should be done, but it's nothing personal.
He doesn't deserve to be sick, no one does.
PLATFORM- I saw The Platform on Netflix. It's a about a prison where a platform comes down with food. The top floor occupants get to eat first, after they have eaten, it goes down to the next level, etc.
I was hooked on the first few minutes. The conversations between Goring and Trimagasi was slow but it builds up the character and tension, the symbolism is also subtle and literary.
It's an attempt at social commentary about the trickle economy and social class struggle but after Trimagasi was killed and new characters are introduced, the allegory stops being allegorical and it became an in your face caricature which does not require that much of an imagination to interpret.
And when the blood and gore started, it lost me. It became a blood porn with most of the character getting killed off in brutal ways.
The story line is psychedelic and jumps up and down (how the hell did they get transferred from floor to floor?), the characters quirky like in Snowpiercer, which I suspect was the stock where this film was marcotted from, and the blood and gore, too much for a preachy movie.
Is it a bad movie? From the start this is not an ordinary movie of the verse-chorus-verse kind and to expect coherence is not to be expected. But despite it, I am expecting a twist a surprise that will leave me staring up the ceiling for a few seconds.
I am disappointed. There is none and an attempt at positivity, the little girl survived. A child as a symbol of hope? How obvious and trite? It is like showing a picture of a hamburger and saying that that is an allegory of a hamburger.
For me, Goring and Trimagasi could have pulled it off with their conversations. It should have ended with Trimagasi eating Goring. At least that leaves a troubling and powerful image that would linger in the head for a while.
Is it a bad movie? The fact that I am still thinking about it, ambivalent about it.
Should you watch it? Yes.
Why? Some movies are so bad they are good.
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