So many things to do--always the perfect reason to give for not being able to blog. Well finally, months' worth of work is up, and I'm making the most of the lunch hour by saying hello! And yes, please check out
Cosmo.ph, it'll mean so much to our team.
Also, I want to share
this beautiful letter by the late film critic Alexis Tioseco. I know, it's been linked by so many other blogs after
he and his girlfriend Nika Bohinc were shot in their home last week, but I think it's one of those things you need to read so many times over.
Here's an excerpt:
The first impulse is always one of love.
The more films I saw, specifically local independent films, the more I wanted to see. The deeper I got, the more responsibility I felt, the stronger the need to do something, to share that which I found beautiful.
Writing in English, I never felt much of a need to write about foreign (non-Filipino) movies--though I'm often asked to, and mostly of Hollywood fare. While I love cinema in general, a passion that has grown exponentially over the years, I feel no need to put myself in service of that which doesn't need it. The feeling has always been: why write about Juno
when I've hardly read anything incisive put to print about the great animation of Roxlee? Why write about No Country For Old Men
when there's the brilliantly charming films of Antoinette Jadaone waiting to be discovered by readers?It's been a week since, but it's still hard to accept we've lost such a great critic in Alexis. I'm sure cinephiles in Slovenia feel the same way about losing Nika. For the longest time, people have been saying there's no hope for Philippine cinema. Alexis could have done so much more for it.
The thing is, I've never even heard of them before--although I have a feeling I've seen them in one of the film fests I've been to.
If there's one thing I hate, it's missing something I've never had--or in this case, people I've never even met.