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Click and dig in. Trailer is live. Now streaming. Exclusively at Upstream.ph.

Poster's up. Said this before will never get tired of saying it again and again. Working with Jasmine Curtis-Smith and Glaiza De Castro was a gift. Someone said they're two of our most underrated actresses. They are. They're also two of our best. Together with Anthony Falcon (one of my old favorites), Dino Pastrano (my stunt-casting coup) and Bing Pimentel (finally), they made me look good. Forget "directing". With a cast this talented and really, this smart, all I really had to do was sit back and watch. You should too. Midnight In A Perfect World streams worldwide exclusively on Upstream.ph starting today, 1. 29. 21. Pre-selling is live at: http://bit.ly/midnightinaperfectworld Art by the amazing Jethro Ian Lacson. #MidnightInAPerfectWorld #GlobeStudios #Epicmedia

Getting rid of old books to make room for new books Bookporn with Maxx/Tintin cameos

Double negative sa swab slash snort at bawas praning plus three days of calm with my favorite person and some of my favorite people not to mention nakahawak ng barbell after 280 days at nasubukan mag-colonics. Salamat Epicmedia. Quarantine slash hibernate lang tapos game na ko sumabak sa Faith-based Rom Com 2021. Also joke lang yung colonics

We shot something remotely a few weeks ago. Difficult at first but quick to get the hang of. Question is if it's a sustainable way to shoot and if there are any more fresh stories to tell that justify this mode of production. Locked-in shoots are coming back in vogue anyway. But I'm an immuno-compromised hypochondriac with a lifelong history of pulmonary troubles, which means that locked-in shoots during a pulmonary pandemic are my haunted house, IGA protocols notwithstanding. I'll be spending more time jumping at shadows or stewing in paranoia than actually working if I were in one. All eyes are on the vaccine but that's only if the government doesn't pocket the budget meant to get us some (if they can get caught stealing 15 billion and go unpunished, what's going to stop them from stealing a few billion more?) Let's hope this pandemic calms down, then, or I grow an extra set of balls or my immune system armors itself from all the eating right and working out I should be doing more of but haven't. Whichever comes first, really, but I'll take them all, because I don't really fancy sitting 2021 out, shootwise, but chances are I will if I must, livelihood be damned. I'll still be writing, though, two maybe three four times more than this year, prose and films both. Decided to stop waiting for the literary overlords to validate me, I'm an impostor in my chosen fields of "expertise" anyway, too late to change horses, middle of the stream and all. Most of this is for myself but hopefully for others, too. Hire me friends. LOL.

Photo was taken by Geric Cruz on the set of Midnight In A Perfect World in 2018. Wala pang Covid n'yan.

Midnight In A Perfect World was LITERALLY a dream come true but in the sense that, like If You Leave, the entire premise came to me in a dream and came to life through a confluence of old, longstanding friendships--- Gian, Bianca, Brad, Quark, Armi, Carljoe, trickling down to production with the merger of my OG posse, also longtime friends (Albert, Gym, Timmy, Corinne, Lawrence, Vlad as well as H, Geric and the Contagious peeps) with a new posse, now friends (BenCar, Remton, Kulas, April, Arman, Kira, Mikee) not to mentiion my lovely LP Patricia, who turned out to be the love of my life. I also had the privilege of working with five people I've always wanted to work with and will work with again in a snap (Jasmine, Glaiza, Dino, Miss Bing, Soliman) as well as three of my all-time favorite "regulars" (Anthony, Miss Dolly, Charles). This was also my first time to work with Brian, DMs, Richard, Kren, Erwin, Malek and Juan Miguel. But it sure as fuck won't be the last. Midnight coming out after a year in post-production/pandemic limbo at the tail-end of the year the world shifted its axis, feels fated and brings with it a sense of a circle being closed. Catharsis, relief. I wish people had seen it in cinemas but you can't be too precious about things like this at a time like now. Our plague year has been a vast, murky, turbulent ocean and these are mere drops of water . . .but they ARE grace notes. You bask in them, let them quench your various sorrows, then you say thanks. To QCinema for programming and Upstream for hosting us. To Globe Studios and Epicmedia. To all my friends who re-posted and re-tweeted and watched too. To my oldest filmmaker friends who know who they are for constantly having my back and pushing me to push myself. But most of all, to everyone who I didn't know personally but watched anyway. The Midnight run is over for 2020 but the circus will roll into town again sooner than later. Have a safe holiday. Wash your hands, wear a mask, stay apart. Remember that the only currency worth spreading these days is kindness. Be a super-spreader. Always and with no quarter.

QCinema made If You Leave possible four years ago. It's good to be back. Midnight In A Perfect World is part of the Before Midnight section and you can watch it only on Upstream, from December 2 to December 6. Buy tickets here

These days, the stories we tell each other are sometimes the hugs we can't give, sometimes wills to power, sometimes proof of life, and sometimes, oftentimes, the songs we sing to ourselves to make going through the long dark days ahead feel like at the end of it there would at least be the possibility, if not the promise, of light. *Photo by Raul Dayao. That would be Dad. <3

I can't play for shit and I can hardly sing, but for years, I've been trying to actively grasp the inner workings of music, the mathematics if you will, not that I've been taking music lessons, no, just learning the language of how it works, mostly because it's such a beautiful language, but also because I am still foolishly attached to the belief that this is the only creative workshop I need to sharpen my disciplines, my writing, my feelmaking, my painting. (Yeah, Kubrick was 100% right about film being closer to music than theater) John Coltrane was fired from Miles Davis' band because of his heroin addiction. He quit cold turkey after that then isolated himself from the rest of the world as he went through the hell of cleaning up before re-emerging with some of the finest music of the 20th century. I am, of course, aware, perhaps TOO aware, that Coltrane was a celestial genius and I'm. . .not, at best an impostor with a hell of a grift and a shitload of luck. But who's to say it's not applicable to ordinary mortals like us. Rehearsal was also Coltrane's regimen, rehearsal and a pure and deep and clingy love for his horn that turned practice into playing, habit into addiction, enthusiasm into transcendence. I remember when we used to make things (films, writing, music) out of a similar heretic joy, not exactly knowing how to do it but somehow better off for it, breaking rules because we like the sound of breaking glass (and sometimes we put the broken glass in the work, too, even if you're not "supposed" to do that), floating in the peripheries inside this bubble of anonymity, petrified almost of how the blare of the vainglorious spotlight might burst it. Turns out that's exactly what it does, now that fancy decorative recognition and influencer adoration have become not only the sole measure of the worth of your work but sadly the prevailing motivation to do it. Fame fame fatal fame, all that. I miss those days. But it's not as if they're necessarily gone. That's the space I may need to find for all this creative dissonance to harnonize. Cold turkey in quarantine, somewhere between an excess of praise and a lack of love* wherever that is.

I tend to define my 2019 into two halves, the first half when Dad was still alive but gravely sick, the other half when he finally left us. Terror/Grief. Something like that. But i also define 2019 as the year Patricia and I came of age as a couple, remembering how she time and again pulled me out of my ongoing sorrows, propped me up whenever I verged on collapse. She's blonde here. This was from the terrifying first half. My mother and I would take turns taking care of Dad but also take turns to briefly escape our duties, because at some point the only answer we could give when he asked what was happening to him was an answer that would make him very very angry: we don't know and we should see the doctor. Ma had her co-op job at school. I had nights out with Patricia, mostly prowling for food, as we were here. We didn't find anything we liked and ended up eating at some other place, but I couldn't resist taking a picture of her, how resplendent she looked, blending the way she did with the sugar-bright K-pop pastel, coming on like all the hope I needed to milk for sustenance, which turned out she was. Hope is a rare commodity these days and what used to come in surges is often now drip-fed, if at all. Oh, it can be quite the endorphin blast when we settle into old routines from our old life, even if we have to wear face masks when we do: we're about to work again, we do get to drive around and do errands from time to time. But its nights out like this I miss and often wonder if we'll ever get to do again, or should we get used to whole new itineraries and routines for the rest of our lives. We look back all the time now, to days not too long ago when the world was a safer place, and sometimes I think we do it to re-acquaint ourselves with the hope we lost to the fire that is the world burning now and to slowly regain the courage to brandish it like a sword again.

I had this first as a cassette I proceeded to wear out, then later bought a CD from CD Warehouse. Each iteration came freighted with memories. I bought this record on a trip to a cold place three years ago. Don't remember if I was with Chard (Bolisay) when I did or we just went back to the same shop on our last day. It was an emotionally and professionally traumatic time in my life, the cold weather I used to love turned out to be punishing when it drops below zero and you forgot to buy thermal wear, and I spent half the time getting lost, at some point waiting for a bus in what looked like the middle of nowhere in the dead of night. But despite all the static and baggage, I remember those two weeks as a joyful, blissful hum. I wonder if I'll travel that far away from Manila again in this lifetime. Hell, I wonder if I'll ever travel again period. Or, indeed, make it to the end of this pandemic. There's a lyric here that goes "I don't know where I'm gonna live, I don't know if I'll find a place" that nails the debilitating uncertainty that dogs me these days. We're all looking back now more and more, at better times, at past lives, at another world that will be gone soon, if it isn't already. Aching for nostalgia, desperate for souvenirs, looking at the sun.

Been revisiting Marble Hornets from the beginning with plans to see it through 'til the end and it really is the gold standard of these things still. (Going through Tribe Twelve, too, and while it's rather fun and hooky, it is from time to time wearily derivative of Hornets and the acting can be atrocious much as it does get sufficiently creepy and the EverymanHYBRID cross-over was neat). Also stumbled on two more recent shows that expand and evolve the Hornets aesthetic. Only four episodes deep into Just Acquaintances but something must be said for the naturalistic performances adding the meta layer you start to miss but didn't know you did after one too many subpar ensemble perfs, and while the implications that this is about ghosts could well be misdirection, I'm willing to be taken wherever, if only because these dudes are spot-on on a nuance level, nothing outright creepy yet though. I'm maybe a dozen episodes deep into This Room Does Not Exist and it's already my favorite, easily the most "cinematic" of these things, and aptly so, seeing that its protagonist is an amateur filmmaker, and the most sleek and abstract (it's made by Brits but set in Australia) I don't know what the hell is going on outside of a' missing person, rogue transmissions and that one haunting and rather prescient line ("the earth isn't safe anymore") but I'm hooked.

I've already bookmarked shows about bio-engineered monsters (HOOH), abandoned naval bases (The West Records) and haunted TV stations (ECKVA) that Iook terribly promising.

Then there's the truly wonderful but utterly indescribable genre-less shows like the disturbing stop-motion Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared, the meta-comic The Show About The Show and the thoroughly soothing and occasionally life-affirming (something we all need a lot of these days) Joe Pera Talks With You (Actively on the prowl for something from Japan to add to the pile.)

A lot of this is prompted by "research" but I also haven't been on Netflix for months now (my mother is using my account binge-watching her quarantine away) mostly because a lot of it feels a little removed and distant I subsist instead on rewatches of old favourite/comfort TV like Endeavour, Detectorists, Life On Mars, Ashes To Ashes, Doctor Who, River Cottage, most of which are set, not coincidentally, in the recent past.

But I've also been actively looking out for new fictional/narrative textures that feel more resonant (to me at least) with our emergent new world and psyches, a new (un)orthodoxy of content, if you will, that speaks to our new modes of anxiety, our apocalyptic melancholia, our utopian longing. Most of these are DIY and non-professional local productions shot and scripted non-traditionally, the sort of thing that gets you into arguments if you praise them too much in the context of "future cinema" but DON'T FIGHT ME please, the world is burning, I say, watch and let watch :D

But really, these are the only things that have had any sort of visceral pull on me of late, stoking my deep-seated sense of hopelessness while also igniting leftover strands of optimism that there may be a world to come where we get to make more of these things to process what we've been through.

When one of my oldest friends suddenly passed some weeks ago (not of covid) one of my first thoughts was that we couldn't go to the wake if there was one, couldn't send him off properly. When my Tita (not by blood but somehow running deeper than that given how she's been a family fixture for the last couple of decades give or take) suddenly passed yesterday morning (also not of covid) one of my first thoughts was how future family wakes would not be as lively without her. I suppose this was a nostalgic reflex, my mind's way of cushioning the shock. But this persistent sense of dwindling has been the ghostly tingle sharking almost my entire quarantine season and it's only gotten more insidious as things get more bleak and debilitating. The world is burning, my world is burning, and all I can do is watch. There was this almost communal euphoria at the start of all this, we were all in this together, after all, we were the world. But other countries have found their own varieties of out, while we pour gasoline on ourselves on a daily basis (pun intended) and walk around flicking a lighter. I'm remembering a favourite John Byrne Fantastic Four comic about a race of aliens who have lived for hundreds of years inside this massive spaceship roaming the galaxy for a planet they can inhabit. When they eventually land on paradise they flinch in sheer terror and run back to the only planet they could inhabit: the cold expanse of their spaceship. Every day has been for most of us a mad scramble for the light at the end of this tunnel we're in but there are days when I wonder if the tunnel is as good as we'll get, if it was our own massive spaceship searching for a world that will never come, fueled by the promise of some day being able to again say goodbye properly to a lost loved one but somehow knowing we never will. RIP.

give up tomorrow

As if reading about ABS friends losing their jobs wasn't crushing enough, I'm also reading about friends losing their grip on things, too. I thought I lost mine the other day, too. I still might lose it eventually. Meanwhile, there are still morons on the fringes of the internet gloating or normalizing these tragedies as if they were comeupannce. I'd ignore them if I were you, even if it's sooo tempting to jump into the fray with these bone-headed shit-sticks. Just remember they wouldn't have to say anything if they didn't know this is broken when it shouldn't be, if they weren't aware they're all puppets dancing to one petulant man-child's tantrum, if they weren't scared. I'm old enough to have witnessed two upheavals. One took an assassination to light its fuse. But all the other one took was an envelope they voted not to open. An envelope. And we weren't in the middle of a pandemic or under threat from a bill curtailing our freedoms back then either. We were, in fact, doing rather fine-ish. Mabilis lang tayong maubusan ng chill noon. Everybody I know's angry. Anger gets channeled. Or it explodes. That's the science of it, at least, and comforting to a degree, Telling anyone hanging on by their fingernails to keep hanging on may seem terribly insensitive and woefully generic, but hang on anyway, friends. Give up tomorrow, then tell yourself that tomorrow then again and again. This isn't over. We're all in this together now, something's got to give and it shouldn't, it won't, be us.

"As I Was Moving Away Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty" (apologies to Jonas Mekas) Two things I'm not too keen on are nostalgia BUT only if it traps me in my past and stunts my obsession over new things, and migration as a cop-out for when the country jumps the shark and goes off the rails, probably because it's not that easy for me. Conversations of late, with Patricia, with my mother, with the rest of our dwindling household, with my fellow screenwriters, with filmmaker friends, with my producers, with my closest and dearest cohorts, all revolve around the state of our mental health and various attempts at coercing prophecies into a fulfilment of its terms, that is, believing in a future and making plans for it, plans of renovation and organization and production and creation and restoration mostly, but also sketchy plans of possible migration. But once the conversations are over, I repair to nostalgia as my salve, sifting through artifacts of all my past lives, like palliative escape pods of lingering relief. This week has been travel photos, from recent trips that now have even more of a soothing effect (Macao, BKK, Davao) but mostly from 2015, the year Violator underwrote a world tour I never thought I'd embark on in my lifetime. Karlovy Vary was my first time to Europe EVER and I took a shitload of pictures that were . . . focused at least. But these blurry shots of random nondescript pockets of a country I've only spent less than an hour in at this point, taken from the back of a fast-moving vehicle, tend to trigger the most ambivalent soup of emotions, longing and loss and euphoria too, partially because I wanted to stop the car and walk around these places more than go to the festival which of course I couldn't, but mostly because this is what life feels like these days: constantly moving away and slipping from my grasp.

Two years ago, making a film no one has seen yet, meeting the love of my life, in the grip of the miracle that brought my father back from the dead for nearly a year. Nostalgia for drowning in. Surviving the pandemic may be paramount but surviving to do what exactly is an equally vital question that doesn' t have an answer yet, because something tells me after all this blows over that I'll never step on a film set again in this lifetime.

“Times of great sorrow have the potential to be times of great transformation. But in order for transformation to happen we must go deep, to the very roots of our pain, and experience it as it is, without blame or self-pity." (Osho) You taught me how to draw only not really, a little bit of your gift merely trickled down the gene pool. But you did refuse to draw for me, rather you pushed me to hone it, to make it something I do without being asked to, do out of the joy that surges through me. You didn’t teach me to write either but your pushing me inspired me to push myself there, too. It was almost like throwing me into a pool to teach me how to swim only we both don’t know how to swim which makes the metaphor a little iffy. I’m not sure how far I’ve gotten, with the drawing, with the writing, I’m not sure if I got as good as you hoped I would. But the joy has been constant and undeniable specially these last few months. I've been making things for you and making things from you and making things about you, and it's been like making your acquaintance over and over, having middle-of-the-night conversations with you, putting you back together. It’s become my way to make sense of what happened. I eventually fail but at least I fail beautifully. It’s been a year since you went away, Dad, and my friends were right, the hole you left didn’t go away with you, didn’t go away even after all this time, doesn’t look like it’s going away anytime soon but that’s fine. It’s been a year and I’m still in the ER watching your body start to crumble and you start to fade as you cup your hand to your mouth and call out to someone I can’t hear while I wipe your face clean and tell the nurse to “ make my father comfortable please” knowing you won’t be coming home and wishing I had time and you could hear because there was still a lot I wanted to say. It’s been a year, to the day, almost to the hour, and the degree with which I miss you is like being hollowed-out, the chest tightens, the eyes burn. It’s been a year and it still hurts. I’m sorry for letting you down, Dad. But I promise never ever to drop you again. I love you.

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