#it is very cool to know other filipinos follow me …. very epic even ….

[xxplastic-cubexx]

I DIDN'T KNOW YOU WERE KABABAYAN!! I noticed that there's so many Filipinos who ship Cherik (me included) and I think that's very cool :) <3

Filipino gang knows whats up ………. We all got that mind link to know the BEST strain of yaoi ……

[the-lazyyy-artist]

(tumblr ate my post, let's do this again)

ALOCIA 🥺 YOU SWEETHEART!! I love you! I'm really glad we found each other, not only in the BLLK fandom, but also in the Epic fandom! Im so glad we bonded thru these things, and Im so so excited to talk to you during and after the Ithaca Saga!! I hope you'll watch the listening party on the 25th!! Aahh!!

Now let's do this in order (in my mind lmao):

@someprettyname - it's such an honor to be followed by you, and much a greater honor to be friends with you. You've been one of the people who replied to my very first bllk post. Proof:

I just didn't know you'd be one of the warmest people I've met here. You welcomed me with open arms and I'm so glad we bonded and talked here a lot. I know you're busy most of the time and I don't really mind, but everytime we talk, it feels like I'm talking to a sister of mine. I love you so much, Nami!

@i-am-so-strange - it's so strange that I found you then followed you after you reblogged my post about a bllk chapter being so "nakaka-putangina", i knew you were Filipino 😭 it's rare to find a Filo moot in a fandom, and I rarely find at least one. But after you, I met three more! I'm happy we met, even happier when we started talking, and happiest when we kept talking on three platforms now! Haha! I love you so much, Jei!

@nikonautic - out of everyone, you easily became my favorite since the day we became moots. I know we talked to each other in a... Weird indirect way (in parentheses and under the tags because yaknow). You're the first Shidou fan I met after I realized I liked Shidou too, and I just really, really think you're so cool! I love you so much, Niko!! I really really do!! (And i just like you too much!! Is it weird to say you're my platonic Tumblr crush????)

@biggestcharleskinnie - my sweet baby, my lovely peach, you easily crawled your way into my heart and you stayed here for good. I really appreciate how you always check up on me almost everyday, sending me asks or pictured of Charles Chavelier (i really find it so cute!), and it makes my day all the time especially when I'm slumped at work. I wanna hug you all the time because you always activate my motherly AND sisterly instincts. I love you so much, Charles!! My baby!!

@merlucide - one of the coolest people I met! The first time I found you, I just really thought you were so cool because of your theme 😭 then we became moots! Thank you for playing along with my Aiku delusions (i miss him) and for always supporting my works. I wanna write for you again because I liked writing that Aiki fic for you haha! Baby girl, I love you so much!! I love youuu!!

@fishii28 - one of the bests, thank you for welcoming me in the channel, for talking to me, for being a friend. Thank you for supporting all my works, even if I feel like some of them are mid! Haha! I really appreciate you, and I'm glad I met you 🥺 i love you so much, Fishii!!

There are so much of you!! Especially in the DC channels!! I couldn't mention every one of you, but just know all of you are so dear in my heart!! I love you all so much and I'm so glad I met every one of you!!

Let's still be friends in 2025, and even if we begin to like other things, I hope we'd still talk and be friends!!

[natsthinkitythinkthinkthonk]

3rd Seiyuu Awards (2009) - Thoughts

Unfortunately, I still haven’t been able to find a full list of both nominees and winners, so I will just be commenting on the winners. I noticed that they introduced an “Overseas Fan Award” as well, so even though I didn’t get an image for it, I’ll list who won it below. For the full list of award shows (via Wikipedia), here’s a link. I’ll put everything below the “keep reading” line because a lot of my favourite seiyuu won awards in this show.

Best Lead Actor: I’m proud of Hiroshi Kamiya for getting this one. Natsume is a character that isn’t over-the-top like a lot of Hiroshi’s other roles, and he’s much more understated. The rest can be said about the series. It’s not the thrill-ride that gets you hyped like My Hero Academia or something; it’s the type of series where you sit back and watch these characters grow as they share their stories, and I thought Hiroshi Kamiya did a great job in that role. I wouldn’t have wanted to character to be portrayed by anyone else.

Best Lead Actress: YES. RIE KUGIMIYA. The Toradora dub isn’t bad. Let me get that out of the way. But Rie Kugimiya was such a standout role. It’s one of her most iconic, and nobody can nail that tsundere voice as much as she can. She portrayed her to a perfect standard, and unfortunately, the dub doesn’t do it quite the same way (partially because her voice is really unique). She portrays her sadness, anger, and cuteness really well, so I’m proud that she won an award for that. I haven’t heard of her other role.

Best Supporting Actors: Tomozaku Sugita has my respect, but I don’t know any of those roles. None. Haven’t even heard of most of those. I would’ve liked to see his speech though because I really don’t see him as the type to be good at formal speeches. He can barely keep a straight face at events. Kazuhiko Inoue deserves this though because Madara is a character that goes from a cute plushie cat to an epic wolf-creature-thing (don’t know the word for it). He’s epic and has quite the attitude which is different from most of his roles, yet he pulls it off really well. Plus, Kazuhiko is just a good dude altogether. He has been known to raise money after the earthquake that happened and does other work.

Best Supporting Actresses: I’ve somehow managed to skip all of Aya Endou’s lead roles. She plays a lot of cutesy characters though and is very accomplished. But I surprisingly haven’t watched any of these Miyuki Sawashiro roles in their entirety. BUT SHE STILL DESERVES THE AWARD.

Best Rookie Actors: YES. THESE TWO ARE BOTH AMAZING. YES. I CAN’T BELIEVE THEY WERE STILL “ROOKIES” BUT YES. Nobu did a spectacular job nailing the Accelerator’s craziness. The fact he still has his voice too. He’s also the lead in that Persona anime. If it wasn’t so lowly rated and if the series was easy to follow, I would jump on the chance to watch it. Miyuki Sawashiro and Nobuhiko Okamoto? Now that’s cool. In terms of Yuki Kaji’s roles for this award, I haven’t watched Black Butler (Kuroshitsuji), but I’ve watched a few scenes with Finnian in it. He’s such a pure dumb idiot. I haven’t heard of the other anime, but I searched it up. Looks like a superpower shounen harem.

Best Rookie Actresses: These two are both really cool. Kana Asumi usually plays a little girl or things like that. Haruka Tomatsu plays practically everything from Morgiana (Magi) to Asuna (SAO, which I will never ever watch entirely) to Genderbent Gintoki (Gintama). I have a hard time recognizing her because her range is so vast. I weirdly don’t know these roles (for the both of them). But I respect them both.

Best Personality: Dear Girl Stories (DGS) can be funny at times especially when they are at the hosts’ (Hiroshi Kamiya and Daisuke Ono’s) expense. For example, they tried a durian, and it was hilarious. Or when they semi-broke into Hiroshi Kamiya’s house for his birthday and Nyanko-sensei made an appearance on the show (not the character; that’s Hiroshi’s cat’s name). To be honest, I haven’t watched him host a show without his counterpart (Daisuke Ono) so I wouldn’t know. 

Best Musical Performance: I haven’t watched a lot of Megumi Nakajima’s roles partially because she is more of a singer than she is a seiyuu. I haven’t listened to a ton of her songs either, but I like the OP of Net-juu no Susume. I also respect her a lot because she acknowledges and embraces her mixed heritage. She’s half-Filipino (from her mom) and half-Japanese (from her dad). I never noticed this growing up, but I find that sometimes in foreign countries, being Filipino isn’t the greatest thing. 

Overseas Fan Award (no image): Jun Fukuyama deserves it. He has so many lead roles in anime that have been a hit overseas from Code Geass to Assassination Classroom. He has a distinctly unique voice, and I truly think that he’s a big name in the industry.

On a small side note: I was talking to my sister who was watching a Korean reality series where they follow mixed-race couples and families because it’s so taboo and rare there. I kind of looked oddly (being the sheltered Canadian I am) because I never thought how weird it was being mixed-race. You sometimes go through a little bit of an “identity crisis” because you don’t know where you fit in, and it’s one of the reasons why I don’t know a second language. The outside world speaks English, and my parents speak English because one was born here and the other has been here most of her life. Not to mention, it’s common ground between the two of them (since my mom doesn’t know Cantonese and my dad doesn’t know Tagalog). Filipinos are known for taking “low-status” jobs and such too. I was recently reading an article on the adversity that Filipino and Filipino-Japanese people go through. For a foreign race that takes up such a large number of the population (4th overall), I found it surprising. I was never ashamed of my heritage growing up because I was surrounded with people who weren’t majorly racist, but I’m starting to learn more and more of the racism that occurs outside of my own life.

[iris-sistibly]

So after Enca I decided to take a long break because, updating five times a week for ten months straight wasn’t easy as ABC, and I wasn’t really interested in any of the upcoming shows although I did consider following Mulawin vs Ravena but Mulawin is not really my thing eversince so I passed, La Luna Sangre was pretty interesting too but I was reluctant since it was a sequel to Lobo and Imortal and I never watched any of those, so baka hindi ko ma-gets ‘yung story, and the rest were either too pabebe for my liking or too cliche and overly dramatic af (in short, boring) so I just went back to binge-watching Kdramas UNTIL @9ri sent me a photo about an upcoming LizQuen show called ‘Bagani,’ and even before ABS dropped it’s trailer the show was already receiving a lot of backlash because: 1. Bagani allegedly copied the story of Enca, and 2. the cast were too mestizo/mestiza and do not look “very Filipino” at all, now here’s what I have to say:

Bagani and Encantadia are two DIFFERENT stories, although I have to admit when @9ri sent me the photo of LizQuen’s new show/Bagani’s launch, I did sense some Encantadia vibes in there because who wouldn’t? The concept is quite similar but it’s not entirely the same you know what I mean? When someone writes a fantasy story inspired by Filipino folklore and myths, expect to meet gods, giants, etc. and it [almost] always involves the elements of nature so what’s the big deal? Surely a lot of stories in this world do have some similarities but that doesn’t mean they copied each other’s ideas, at the end of the day sa story-telling ‘yan nagkakatalo mga bes! I watched Bagani’s first set of episodes and it’s completely different from Encantadia, trust me. So please stop ranting about who’s copying who, just enjoy the show and appreciate the fact the Filipino show’s are really bringing their A-games to give the viewers the kind of entertainment we deserve.

Now with the cast ensemble, I have to say when it comes to honing their artists, ABS-CBN does it waaaaaay better which is why when a new show comes out especially in Primetime, I’m not worried about the actors messing up. They always, ALWAYS cast the best of the best, and the newbies CAN keep up with the veteran actors (in general) which is why I admire a lot of actors from ABS. There’s no questioning about the performances of Bagani’s cast, everyone is doing great so far even the newbie Sofia BUT the fact they fake tanned the actors just to make them look more “Filipino” or “Tribal-looking” or whatevah is not cool, some actors like Quen and Rayver look orange-y and sometimes yellowish, like…wtf? I know people from the desert region are supposed to have dark skin, but hey they don’t look brown or tanned, I don’t know if it’s the lighting that’s making them look orange, but it’s not cute. I personally prefer an actor who’s much more Filipino-looking than LizQuen, Matteo and Sofia (excluding Makisig of course). But then again, take Amaya for example, the main character was portrayed by Marian Rivera who’s by the way half-Spanish, but why wasn’t that a big deal back then considering that it was clearly inspired by the Philippine history specifically during the pre-Spanish era? Surely there weren’t any Filipino mestizo during that time. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not bashing Amaya, I just used the show as an example and I hope everyone gets the point. What I’m trying to say is, I would rather go for someone who’s features do not fit the character description but can deliver so well and give justice to the character than someone who looks perfect for the role but fucks up in the end, remember: a bad make-up is easier to fix than a bad performance.

Now for Bagani’s pilot week:

So the story opens with a young man fighting a dragon and from a distance was a boy telling the viewers the story of his “pinaka petmalung lodi” Lakas and the story of Bagani unfolds.

The Petmalu:

-The cinematography, like I said in the trailer was A-MAZING, it was breath-taking, each region has their own unique feels to it which I really really like, my favorite so far is the Patag region what’s yours?

-The backstory is fast-paced without neglecting every details that we need to know, a lot of shows usually fuck up in this area but I must say they nailed it.

-Great performance from the stellar cast, as expected, they did not disappoint. It’s only the first week and they already set the bar high, there wasn’t anyone who showed a ‘waley’ performance, even their extras can act quite well.

-The fact that they did a legit outdoor taping is more than enough to show the viewers that they are dead serious about this show, and they are really working hard to make this show an epic one. It’s not easy to film under the scorching heat of the sun but, they did it! And for that, I have such high respect to each and everyone, hands down! Definitely A+ for efforts.

The Waley:

-Please fix Enrique’s fake tan because I cannot stand it, oh wait, not just Quen’s but the rest of the Disyerto tribe. Thanks!

Lodi of the Week: Christian Vasquez

~I couldn’t say much about the show yet because it just started, and I haven’t really fallen in-love with Bagani…yet, but I’m really, really liking it so far.

Rating: 9 out of 10

[recentanimenews]

The Anime Explanation For One Of The Biggest Fight Scenes In Superhero History

  2013's Man of Steel was a Superman reboot that was both desperate to evoke the "I'm not sure what kind of hero I'm supposed to be" pathos of Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight films and also be a fresh, explode-ey introduction to a new DC Universe, one that would be able to potentially keep up with the burgeoning Marvel Cinematic Universe. But no one seemed quite ready for what would cap off the film—a fight between Superman and General Zod that was epic in length and decimated an entire city.

  A LOT has been written about this fight and what it does to the Superman character. Does Superman causing that much collateral damage in Metropolis somehow make him less of a Boy Scout? Should Superman have taken a quick second to rescue some folk before he went back to punching Michael Shannon's skull off his skeleton? Should Superman have found another way to end the fight that wasn't snapping Zod's neck? I don't really care about answering any philosophical questions about the fight (Especially since Batman vs Superman spent about ninety minutes dealing with the "But what if Superman IS bad?" thing, and I don't want to add one more essay to the pile.) Instead, I want to focus on the fight itself and what went into it.

    It's pretty much unlike anything ever seen in a DC superhero film up to that point. Even the most physical of Superman fights (His brawl with the three Kryptonians in Part 2 and with Nuclear Man in Part 4) were pretty fleeting. And most of Batman's onscreen fights at that point had consisted of 1) Him getting slaughtered by Bane, 2) His quick duels with various ninja or ninja-esque folk, or 3) Michael Keaton backhanding clowns so hard that their spines got rearranged. So to have a fight that lasts nearly a full act of the movie, incorporates most of Superman and his antagonist's powers, and leaves both combatants and the city around them brutalized and barely standing is borderline revolutionary.

  And it was all due to anime. 

   Filipino-American storyboard artist Jay Oliva is no stranger to superheroes or fight scenes. He worked on things like The Batman, Teen Titans, Jackie Chan Adventures, and The Spectacular Spider-Man, all series with a very clear anime influence in their battles. He's also directed a bunch of recent DC animated films, with my favorite being the adaptation of The Dark Knight Returns, which retained the brooding nightmare of the original comic, while adding some great stuff like this: 

    But Man of Steel was Oliva's first live-action film project, and both he and Zack Snyder were obviously eager to create something fresh. So Jay Oliva was determined to "come up with something I've never seen in live-action American cinema and only in anime." And if there's one show that you can count on to put together beautifully orchestrated, long battles, it's Dragon Ball Z.

    And while, obviously, the characters of Superman and Zod predate Dragon Ball, there's a lot of Goku vs Vegeta in Superman vs Zod. First off, the characters: Goku is a good guy Saiyan that's nearly indestructible, and Vegeta is a Saiyan that believes ruling the universe should be his birthright. Superman is a Kryptonian that's trying to reconcile being a solid bro to earthlings and Zod is all "But what if we, like, weren't nice?" 

    Then you have the fight itself, which includes a lot of punching, a few lasers, and copious flying through buildings, both on and against a character's will. Goku's fight with Vegeta includes quite a few instances of all of those things (Well, replace the buildings with some mountains.) The only difference is that while Superman finds  he has no other choice than to kill Zod, Goku lets a battered Vegeta live because he knows he wants to fight Vegeta later. I can only imagine that the Justice League would put up a little more of a spirited debate over Superman letting Zod live than Krillin did with Goku's decision.

    But it wasn't just Oliva that felt inspired by anime, but director Zack Snyder himself who, during a press conference, cited that he's often influenced by Japanese cinema and anime when making his own films and that late 90s OVA series Birdy the Mighty was especially influential on Man of Steel. 

  In short, it's pretty cool to see adventure filmmakers and storyboard artists openly talk about anime being a huge influence in their work. And it seems to have shown up in Zack Snyder's later films, too (Batman's warehouse fight in Batman v Superman feels more like something out of Naruto than any previous brawl in a Batman flick.) And considering the growing popularity of anime in the West, I doubt it's an influence that will slow down anytime soon.

  Were you a fan of Man of Steel? What other series could benefit from some Dragon Ball Z influence? Let me know in the comments!

  --------------------

  Daniel Dockery is a Senior Staff Writer for Crunchyroll. Follow him on Twitter!

  Do you love writing? Do you love anime? If you have an idea for a features story, pitch it to Crunchyroll Features!

By: news+feed@crunchyroll.com

[mrmichaelchadler]

NYFF 2018: La Flor

I stopped playing sports of any kind at about age eight. I had asthma, I hated running, I didn't like being in extreme heat or rain for a goal I didn't understand, and most of all, I hated competition. Film always made more sense to me. You only had to watch what you wanted and there were a million ways to view any given work. Right around the end of high school something funny happened. I started making a list of all the films I thought I should see, the ones regarded as classics, or that kept cropping up in the magazines and books I was reading. The one constant were the films of almost inconceivable length. “Shoah,” “Heimat,” “Sátántangó,” “Berlin Alexanderplatz,” “Empire,” “Out 1,” and more exceeded five hours of viewing. What could possibly happen in such a runtime? Were these films simply elaborate dares? It seemed to me like they were competing with each other, and by extension with the viewers foolhardy enough to watch. Suddenly I found the kind of competition I liked. 

In college I first dipped my toes in the absurd challenge of watching the longest movies ever when I found myself between a Kentucky Derby party happening in the house in which I lived, no car to drive anywhere, and the director's cut of "1900." I opted for the movie, the way I always do. The film nearly defeated me as it refused to end well past the point of having anything new to say about fascism or the direction of Italy's intellectual radicals. Struck me that Pasolini, his teacher and friend, was dead and Bertolucci wanted us to know what Italy, and the world lost, every time someone like the great poet died. And maybe if the film never ended Bertolucci never had to return to a reality without him. 

“La Luna,” his next film was two and a half hours and begins with the death of a father, which bore out my hypothesis. There was something about the length that felt like a plea. I watched the 13-hour “Berlin Alexanderplatz” a few weeks later, split over two days, and loved it. The length made sense. The novel Rainer Werner Fassbinder was adapting was baroque and intricate, and he had to convey with completeness the mindset of a German before Nazism crawled into his and every other German's consciousness. There was also that it was nearly the last thing the enigmatic wreck directed before his death in 1982. 

I've since watched too many films to count with epic lengths, several of them by Lav Diaz, and it's rare that they earn their length. Diaz's work is about wearing you down because he has chosen to make movies about the perpetually worn down. He gets us, or tries to, to see life as a pregnant Filipino woman would, screaming for better fortune and empathy from a cruel and empty world. When the six-hour “A Century of Birthing” ended I don't know that I felt anything except the peculiar sensation that if I went outside I might find myself in the Philippines. A herculean duration is not to be abused, because at its best, a long movie, or even just a very long shot, can teach us to form a relationship with an image. Chantal Akerman's three-hour “Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles” teaches us to question the purpose of a camera, its placement in a room, its function as a capturing mechanism, and what it can teach us about ourselves. Jeanne Dielman, like nearly every Akerman film, tells an audience what the life of its female protagonist feels like. The monotony, the repetition, the silence, it's still unlike any film about domestic femininity and objectification ever made, and part of that is its fearless patience. 

I don't usually have cause to sit and think about the relative productivity of runtime but for a fellow named Mariano Llinás. I haven't seen his breakthrough, "Extraordinary Stories," which runs a cool four hours, so had never thought about him or his work, until suddenly they were all I could think about. His new movie “La Flor” was playing New York Film Festival, and it was 14 hours long. Calum Marsh said it might be his new favorite film. I was intrigued. The competition returned. I had to sit through it all in one go, there was nothing else for it. But what kind of long movie was this to be? Llinás himself appears in the beginning to explain: six parts, four without endings, one without a beginning and one with everything. Each would star the actresses Elisa Carricajo, Valeria Correa, Pilar Gamboa and Laura Paredes, and each would be in a different genre. Alright, pal, game on. 

The first part of six was no help in divining the film's purpose or meaning. It's a (perhaps purposely) shoddy b-movie, a story about a mummy's vengeful spirit possessing an archeologist after she steals the old fossil's eyes. The film is (perhaps purposely) a collection of hysterical actions, from the long and busy conversations caught in minutes-long steadicam shots, the frequently howled dialogue, the preponderance of murderous cats and the red glowing eyes of the mummy. I thought it wouldn't have been such a bad VOD horror movie if it'd cut about thirty minutes off the hour and forty minute runtime. It felt self-indulgent for such a (perhaps purposely) slight genre movie. Part 2 muddied things even further. A couple going through a terrible break-up have to reunite to write and record a new album. Their early recordings, when they were together, were massive hits, and now their songs are loaded with bitter, barbed portent. A mutual friend of theirs hears both sides of their story, but she's not without ulterior motives. She's in deep with a strange scorpion-worshipping cult with nefarious designs on the songwriting duo. Just what they plan is never divined because the film ends right when everyone's about to confront each other. 

Part three is many hours itself and concerns rival spies and their shared mission to kidnap a rocket scientist. It's a parody of spy movies but finds time for grace in its empathetic look into each member of the team's outlook on life and the violence that brought them together. This film ending before it's reached its conclusion is less a problem as it's quite plainly just about the puppet strings pulled by fate and the little left to us to contemplate. The fourth part is perhaps the most successful, following the crew of the movie we're watching as they try to create the segment we're watching. It goes haywire as Llinás get obsessed by filming Trumpet Trees and then he and his crew are in some kind of accident that drives them all mad. A paranormal investigator is dispatched to deal with the aftermath of their calamity. The fifth part is a silent remake of Jean Renoir's "A Day In the Country." The sixth part is shot like a series of tintypes, a telling of the struggle of four indigenous women. Then there are 40 minutes of end credits over an upside shot of the crew cleaning up after the last shot. 

There are long movies and there are long movies. Llinás it seems, is just as competitive as I am because there is, quite frankly, no reason this film had to be 808 minutes long. He did it because he could, because how many 13-and-a-half-hour movies are there in a calendar year? Very few, and this film reminds us, there's good reason. He shows up in the middle of the third episode to tell us there are three and a half hours left in the chapter. To put it bluntly, he's fucking with us. When it was revealed in hour ... ten? Maybe? that I would be watching a pointlessly silent remake of one of the most perfect films ever made, I almost threw my shoe at the television. Part of the problem is that Llinás, in his hubris, imagined that he could dictate how the film would be consumed. He put in a dozen intermissions and requested it be broken up at such and such a place. That's all well and good but when a movie is done it's out of your hands. It's not a symphony that has to be conducted at a certain speed, it's a movie that will some day wind up on streaming services, likely watched in half-hour chunks like it's "Fuller House." I watched it all in one day and this movie is not designed to be watched in one day. If anyone involved in programming or making it had done what I did they would never have made this film this long because it has no rhythmic coherence. And if a film cannot be watched whole it cannot be watched at all. 

The various extravagances of “La Flor” could be pardoned or loved in smaller doses, but recommending a day of one's life for an hour of reward seems like just as much a trolling as popping up to tell your audience how much longer they have before they then have five more hours left of a movie. Which is not to say I only enjoyed an hour of the movie, but I'd say in the context of each passage, there were sections that made each chapter worth watching (except perhaps in the unconscionably dull second part). "The Day In the Country" remake is basically numbing and pointless, especially since I'd been on a couch for an entire day before it began, except that near the end a section of audio from the original film appears on the soundtrack and Llinás starts filming single propeller planes in flight, dancing with each other in the sky like synchronized swimmers and I'm struck dumb. In that moment it's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen, I want to cry. Has the whole enterprise been worthwhile? A director with some idea of the shape of his opus would stop now but on we go to a superficially beautiful but deathly boring text-driven final act. Llinás does not know what he's done, does not know what the competitive cinephile will have done when he's heard there's a 14-hour movie calling to him from the annals of history ... or at the very least the wikipedia entry on the longest films ever made. 

The thing that galls me still, weeks after I've seen it, when I've successfully reduced it in my memory to the best parts--the side-splitting Monty Python-esque digression about trees, the planes cutting across the grey sky--is that it's patently selfish to ask anybody to spend more than a day watching a movie. I was not transported, I was not let in on the secrets of its creator, I was not told about the mindset of the average anybody. I did learn a few important things: “La Flor,” I truly believe, cannot be called a film. It is six films and a middle finger of a credits sequence, stitched together like the "Bride of Re-Animator" for the purpose of making a raving fool out of me, the viewer who took his intentions at face value. Some of these movies are better than others, but none of them justifies the other, and no single element justified my spending 13 and a half hours watching this. I look back on those moments of transcendence, where Llinás gets out of his own way, stops taunting me, and lets the movie be a movie, and wonder if they'd have been as remarkable in a standalone 90-minute work. 

I watched “La Flor” because “La Flor” dared me to watch it, and I have never shrunk from such a thing yet. This is what competition brings out in me and now I'm stuck with the secrets only a full day of movie can hold. A lifetime has passed since I scowled my way through soccer matches, praying to be taken off the field, and I haven't learned a thing. If nothing else, “La Flor” taught me that. A terrible price for a terrible truth, but the planes were lovely. 

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