Sad songs say so much

A documentary aired on the BBC world service several years ago entitled "Getting Older Younger" examined how the mass media through advertising were cultivating a sense of consumerism to younger and younger children. This wasn’t a new phenomenon: The study has been going on since the 1970s. Thus, it might explain of why so many of us dipping our toes in the murky waters of our third decade on this Earth are already facing mid-life crisis.

I can see all around me. My best friend has started going out with girls who are much too young for him and can’t seem to have a nice time going out without consuming copious amounts of beer; while several have tried to take their own lives. (Sadly, one succeeded.) We ask ourselves if we are over the hill and the question of what does it all mean pops up – only to be left unanswered with detours to glory days when we used to rule the school. Everyone’s leaving.

Myself? I spend hours on grouphug.com reading every confession from the silly ("I have bad breath and I don’t care…") to the affecting ("I always laugh at everyone’s jokes because really inside I just want to die.) My favorite song at the moment is the Jimmy Webb-penned MacArthur Park (yes, the one with Dumbledore singing lyrics about the cake being ruined and never having the recipe again). It’s a really good song and the lyrics are quite poetic despite what Dave Barry says. Back in the day, it was a joke: Now I can’t help but see the poignancy of this miserable sod being stood up and the bright colors of the park where he’s waiting melting because of his tears – clever ain’t it? Yes, I am getting old and I’m not even 30 years old.

Whether its because of mass advertising or just the fact that I started listening to The Smiths in the second grade, I can’t help feel a melancholy – oh, darn it, let’s just call it depression, OK? – creeping up on me despite the fact that I’ve never been happier. I’m married to my sweetheart for the past 10 years and best friend for the past 12. Career-wise, I can’t complain and I’ve probably the best people in the world as friends. Yet it isn’t just rainy days and Mondays that get me down. (But hearing Karen Carpenter sure does.)

During our honeymoon in London, my wife and I met chatted with someone on the tube and she told me that she threw away all her Morrissey, Joy Division and The Cure records even if they meant the world to her growing up in some satellite town in England. "I felt that I didn’t need them anymore," she told us. In a sense, I envied her and felt a bit bashful wearing my "Queen is Dead" T-shirt that I had just purchased from Camden the day before. I asked her what she did for a living and she told me was unemployed at the moment but used to work in Woolworths.

During our stay, we saw a play in the London West End, caught gigs by The Apes, Graham Coxon, Gene and The Violent Femmes, got lost in Tate Modern, met the rhythm section of The Smiths, got drunk in pubs, talked to J.G Ballard on the phone, bought books from Alan Moore’s bookseller, met the smallest bouncer in London (originally from Pangasinan) and ate for free just because we were Pinoy and stayed with the best family in the whole of England. We fought only once: My wife insisted on getting us Fred Perry T-Shirts when all I wanted was to buy all the copies of Interzone magazine I could find. Still, it was a grand time.

But the weather and all those videos I had seen of pale English boys walking on moors and deserted beaches kept fluttering in my mind, and despite my glee I sported a dour expression that would have guaranteed me a position as a back-scrubber at YWCA. I wanted to be Laurence Olivier in the film adaptation of Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights as our tour bus passed West Yorkshire and I tried to explain my wife the media hype of someone like Myra Hindley. (Morrissey even wrote a song about her.) Even that turned out to be fun.

Back here, I’ve just interviewed Neil Gaiman and had my books signed. However the malady lingers and I can’t shake the feeling that I just get off on trying to feel down even when there’s no reason to be. Really.

I listen to Interpol non-stop especially tracks like Evil and laugh at the non-sequiturs that litter the song’s lyrics. I find shows like Little Britain very funny and tape episodes of the very feel-good comedy Ed. I bought the complete pirated box set of Friends and laughed very loudly. I occasionally laugh when my best friend talks about how his new girlfriend doesn’t know who Zuma is and about how he uses furry red handcuffs in one of his escapades. I watch The Office and marvel how David Brent is the voice of Seona Dancing. I always sing Always Look on the Bright Side of Life by Eric Idle. All the time.

But I can’t help cracking up whenever I hear Richard Harris’ falsetto singing about that damned pastry in the rain. For goodness sake, buy that guy Nigella Lawson’s cookbook! I hear she’s pretty hot on the cover and that might cheer him up and forget the damned bitch that didn’t show up.

But, really, what’s wrong with me? I’ve just written a piece about MacArthur Park for Christ’s sake and extolled it as poetry! I must be really going through a mid-life crisis…

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Two small-time crooks, the son of the local crime lord and his witless girlfriend are thrown together by circumstance and stand to make a fortune if big poppa decides to fall for the gambit. Now if only were things were so simple…

Mario Cornejo’s Big Time is probably the best time to be had at the local cinema in quite some time. It’s a black comedy – one in which the body count by the end of the film is only matched by the zippy exchanges and gags that keep the audience laughing until its inevitable conclusion. Co-written by Cornejo and Coreen Jimenez, the film is also serious – if you would believe a comedy could ever be – about making its characters’ ambitions palpable and desperate that the only sane response would be to giggle at its absurdity. Cruel as Cornejo proves to be at several points in the film to his own creations, one never feels that he condescends to them, evidently feeling an empathy with their situation and understands their psyches well enough to make fun of them. By the way, did we mention that Big Time is really, really funny?

If not for anything, Big Time is a great relief from verbiage and heavy-handedness that permeates any discussion of Philippine Independent Filmmaking. At times like these, we should all lighten up without, of course, dumbing things down.

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Send comments and reactions to: erwin_romulo@hotmail.com.