Tag Archives: Netflix

Penman No. 425: Red Light, Green Light

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Penman for Monday, October 11, 2021

THOSE OF you who smiled when you read the title know what I’m talking about: none other than Squid Game, which is set to become the most viewed Netflix production of all time.

I’m still groggy from two nights of binge-watching, after making sure that my wife Beng was already asleep. She’s a Korea-novela fan—and I guess you can call me a reluctant convert, having little choice but to follow the travails of star-crossed lovers getting wet in the rain, slurping ramyeon, or running slow-motion into each other’s arms on a beach at sunset. But for some reason, Beng likes romance, not gore, and she steadfastly refused to reciprocate my constancy by watching Squid Game with me. 

She can’t understand it when I explain that violence relaxes me, releases the lion in my pussycat, exhausts my latent desire to pulverize my enemies and split a few skulls, and leaves me refreshed for another day of, well, typing. Beng’s favorite expression—which she uses several times a day, usually when watching the news or some TV drama, or when we’re driving past a mangy dog—is “Kawawa naman!” If she were a street in UP Village, it would be “Mahabagin.” 

That’s why, you see, she couldn’t possibly get through even one episode of Squid Game. The violence hadn’t even begun—Gi-Hun was just getting warmed up as the quintessential loser, trying to play good dad to his 10-year-old daughter—when I heard Beng mutter her first “Kawawa naman!” Rather than subject myself to a night-long litany of laments for pitiful souls, I agreed to switch channels and watch contestants try to outdo each other in applying hideous makeup onto hapless models. Beng couldn’t see me wincing in the dark, my tender aesthetics feeling the vicious assault of mascara wands and lipstick applicators.

But let’s get back to the show. After its release less than a month ago, Squid Game became a global sensation in no time at all, and it’s easy to see why. Even the venerable Washington Post intones that “Squid Game (is) much more than a gory dystopian thriller. It’s a haunting microcosm of real life, unpacking the many implications of inequality, which has in some way drawn each of the players to this battle for their lives.” 

Parents will be horrified to find that their kids can buy Squid Game soldier outfits online, complete with black masks and pink track suits, submachine guns optional. (When I clicked the link, I got a message saying “Sorry! This product is no longer available.” That can mean only one of two things: first, that the seller developed a conscience and pulled the item out, or second, that stocks were sold out—you win a prize of a trip to Busan if you guess the correct answer.)

So let’s get this clear, especially if you’re thinking of gathering the family around the TV for some quality time watching people’s shirts turn a splotchy red: Squid Game isn’t for kids, okay? The whole point of it is that it wants people to think they’ll be playing kids’ games—which is true, except that (this is hardly a spoiler now, after all the publicity), the losers die.

I’m not going to go into the kind of sociological soul-searching that will be the stuff of dissertations over the next five years, with titles like “Competition Theory: Neoliberalism, the State, and Squid Game in the Philippines, 2016-2022.” (If you want an honest-to-goodness, semi-academic chat about the show, the UP Korea Research Center will be hosting an online forum on Squid Game on Friday, October 15, at 3:30 pm.) 

I’m tempted more by the idea of staging our version of the game here, with life’s “winners” instead of losers as players, for a change. The reward will be—let’s see, what might the rich and powerful still want that they don’t already have? More money? Too easy; they have enough stashed away in the British Virgin Islands (legally, mind you—they did nothing wrong) to last three lifetimes. More happiness? Which means what—more likes on Instagram, more cover shots in the glossies, Ivy League placements for the kids, one mistress more, a new Lamborghini Huracan, another Patek Philippe, a new calling card saying “Senator of the Republic,” or something even loftier? Eternal life? Some families already have that—35 years after EDSA, you-know-who are still around.

How about this: the prize will be absolution for one’s sins, which technically will qualify one for entry into heaven, no matter what terrible things one may have done in life—stolen billions, murdered thousands, lied 90 percent of the time, cursed God and half the saints, you supply the rest. 

It could be voluntary, of course, because most of the players we’d like to nominate will never admit to sinning nor to needing forgiveness; they have willfully accepted damnation, and their choice must be respected. But I think it will be more fun if, in the 2022 elections, we took a special poll to vote for 456 politicians, public officials, generals, bigtime drug lords, profiteers, car-loving pharmaceutical executives, troll masters, and other crooks to constitute the players. 

How thrilling it would then be to put on a black mask, look over the track-suited multitude, appreciate the anxiety in their puzzled faces, and announce: “Green light!… Red light!” Boom. Boom. Boom. Sorry, Beng, hindi sila kawawa, and I could watch this all day.

Penman No. 413: My YouTube Playlist

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Penman for Monday, May 10, 2021

WITH A lockdown stretching well into its second year, I came to the crushing conclusion some time ago that I had practically exhausted everything I wanted to watch on Netflix, at least until Season 5 of “The Crown” and Season 3 of “New Amsterdam” show up. I’ve even signed up with other streaming services like Curiosity Stream (a great trove of fascinating documentaries, for a small fee) and Tubi (free, but basically B-movies with stars you never heard of). But even there, as with Netflix, I’m close to hitting “Watch it again.”

That’s when I rediscovered YouTube, which had been there all along—it was founded in 2005—but which I’d always looked upon as a depository for mostly juvenile and silly or funny videos. Five years ago, I uploaded a video I took of the aftermath of the Faculty Center fire in UP, but most often, I’ve gone to YouTube with our apu-apuhan Buboy to find his favorite Mr. Bean or Spiderman cartoons. (A digital native, this tyke can’t even read yet, but knows his way around buttons and icons; “Tatay, press X!” he’d tell me.)

It’s estimated that 500 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube per minute. Its stock of 800 million videos gets 1 billion views per day. That’s an awful lot of things to watch, and we’d have died of old age before we finished exploring even 1 percent of this platform. 

My fascination with YouTube began when I discovered that Beng and I could watch hours and hours of Broadway musicals and old movies on it. I guess that’s what old folks like us think of as “entertainment,” especially in these dreadful times—a singalong marathon that ends with an uplifting tune like “Somewhere” or “You’ll Never Walk Alone.” (Think of it as 1950s TikTok, only 360 times longer.) I also realized that YouTube’s a good place to exorcise your worst fears—such as when I had to have my gall bladder taken out; watching the whole procedure first on YouTube calmed me down. 

But certainly there have to be more pleasant subjects than a cholecystectomy to enjoy on your big TV. Over the past few months of YouTubing, I’ve settled on a few favorites—my YouTube playlist, shall we say—that fill up my bedtime hours while I’m working on my laptop, until I actually shut my eyes around midnight. In no particular order, they are:

1. Crime and punishment. It’s a horrible truth, but few things are more absorbing than why people go bad—very bad. Real-crime and forensics shows indulge our curiosity about evil and its discovery—which, let’s admit, can be strangely satisfying. (A Pinoy version of “Unsolved Mysteries” can go on forever.)

2. Mudlarking. Beng and I have had this longstanding fantasy of foraging for coins, bottles, and Churchill’s pen on the banks of the Thames, but a plethora of mudlarking channels will do for now. (We’d probably die of sepsis if we did that on the Pasig.)

3. Car restoration. This includes barn finds, car auctions, junkyards, and the perennial question: “Will it run again after 50 years in the mud?” I’m convinced that in some old bodega on some southern island, a dusty Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost or Bugatti Atalante lies waiting—if it hasn’t been converted to a jeep yet.

4. Antiquing. I could spend another year in lockdown just watching “Antiques Roadshow” and “Salvage Hunters,” guessing at the prices of lamps, vases, oil cans, and trinkets. So far, I haven’t spotted any “Weapons of Moroland” or oversize spoons and forks.

5. Art forgeries. Repeat these names after me: John Myatt, Tom Keating, Han van Meegeren, Elmyr de Hory, and Walter Beltracchi. You may never have heard of them before, but you won’t forget them once you see what they were able to do, which is what we all secretly dream of: fool the experts. 

6. Military excavations. Must be the boy in me that can’t help gawking at helmets, medals, machine guns, ammunition belts, and yes, human skulls and bones coming out of the mud in some corner of Latvia or Poland. War is terrible—and mesmerizing.

7. Royalty. Q: We all know they’re flawed human beings and probably an unhappier lot than us—so why do we keep following the travails of the royals? A: Because we want to be sure they’re flawed human beings and probably an unhappier lot than us.

8. Gemstones. Seeing all those fist-sized opals and emeralds makes me want to rush out to our backyard with a shovel, but all we ever get there is dog and chicken poo. 

9. Old Manila. You can feast on many videos showing Manila at its prewar prime and in the postwar ‘50s—with clean, wide streets, graceful architecture, and well-dressed, well-behaved people—and weep.

10. Abandoned houses. They call it “urban archeology,” presumably a semi-legal form of housebreaking, as long as you don’t take anything but pictures. Beng and I are always astounded by what people leave behind—knowing that if our akyat-bahay experts went through the place, they’d leave it clean as a whistle.

Penman No. 383: Crash Landing on Me

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Penman for Monday, March 16, 2020

 

I SHOULD have better things to do—and Lord knows I do—but I have to admit to splurging an inordinate amount of time and attention last week on a Korean confection strangely titled “Crash Landing on You.”

It was my wife Beng’s fault. I was snug in my La-Z-Boy, pecking away at my laptop on a book project, figuring out how best to explain how iron ore becomes high-grade steel, with the TV open to “Formula 1: Drive to Survive” on Netflix. That’s how I often work, toggling between the job and entertainment, with one foot on the ground and another stepping on the gas, Walter Mitty-like, for Scuderia Ferrari. She came up to me and said, with the sweetest smile she could muster, “Can we watch ‘Crash Landing on You’ instead?”

“Can we watch what?”

She went on to explain that it was currently South Korea’s most popular telenovela, and as soon as I heard that, I knew that my Formula I viewing was done for, at least for the evening. For the past 46 years of our marriage, Beng has endeavored to get me to try things I passionately abhor—like cheese, artichokes, alugbate, and sappy movies—and while she’s gotten nowhere on the food front, now and then I relent on the entertainment, because it gives me a bargaining chip, and I can play poker all I want. Besides, International Women’s Day was coming up, and it seemed like a good present to mark the occasion.

That’s when I remembered that I could’ve scored more points by bringing it up myself, before she did. I was waiting last month for an important meeting with a high university official; on the sofa beside me sat a friend, the director of our Korean Studies Program, whom Beng had met before. We had all once been at a big party to celebrate Philippine-Korean relations, where Beng and I found ourselves seated at the same table with the very affable Korean ambassador and his wife. Beng struck up an instant friendship with the madame, upon discovering that they were both telenovela fans. My friend remembered that, and on the sofa whispered instructions to me that might as well have been a state secret: “Please tell your wife to watch this new show called ‘Crash Landing on You.’ Right now, it’s the biggest hit in Korea.” Of course, I promptly forgot about it—until Beng told me to hit the switch-channels button.

Now, unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ll know that “Crash Landing on You” is about—take a deep breath—a rich and stylish South Korean heiress who somehow accidentally lands in North Korea and who falls in love with her savior, a soldier who also happens to be (aside from a concert pianist) the son of a high-ranking government official, and who follows the heiress back to Seoul, trailed by an assassin and supported by a posse of faithful North Korean friends. Makes total sense, right?

As Beng settled into her show with a bag of chips, I continued working on my steel-industry epic while keeping one desultory eye on the unfolding TV drama. Soon I was sucked in by what I had gleefully expected—absurdity galore, silly coincidences, the ridiculousness of towing a piano dockside for an impromptu concert and of a girl (yes, another Korean on the same lake in Switzerland) on a boat gliding by and memorizing the melody at one pass, and so on.

By Episode 5 I was making snide remarks, like “Why do these Koreans always argue then kiss in the rain?” But alas, by Episode 8, I was laughing like crazy over the five North Korean operatives reconnoitering Seoul like country bumpkins, taking in the wonders of fried chicken, soft beds, and vending machines. Even worse, I got teary-eyed when Ri Jeong-Hyuk told Yoon Se-ri, “I want to see you with gray hair, and wrinkles…. I want to see you grow old.”

I began setting up post-dinner watch parties with Beng, and because we seniors doze off after an hour even if there’s a war or a volcano erupting outside, we’ve been able to hold off watching the two-hour finale for our quarantine treat.

Meanwhile, I had to chuckle when the BBC reported that the North Korean media went into overdrive denouncing “Crash Landing on You” as an attack on its cherished values:  “Recently, South Korean authorities and film producers have released anti-republic films and TV dramas that are deceptive, fabricated, absurd and impure, putting all their efforts into making strategic propaganda. The South Korean government and production houses will pay the price for making and distributing such movies and programs which are full of manipulation and fiction that insult the reality of the bright situation of the North.”

Even some South Koreans were equally unhappy, accusing the show of making North Korea look good: “tvN’s ‘Crash Landing on You’ has been accused of violating the National Security Act for glorifying North Korea. On January 22, Seoul Metropolitan Police Agency revealed that they were reviewing an accusation made by the Christian Liberal Party against tvN on January 9. In a statement released on January 10, the Christian Liberal Party explained that ‘Following the National Security Act, one should not praise or follow any anti-national organizations that compromise the existence of South Korea.’”

Come on, guys, drop the missiles and watch the show! See each other grow old!

 

 

Penman No. 185: Wired for Fun

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Penman for Monday, February 1, 2016

 

 

SOME INTERESTING changes took place in my home-office environment over the recent Christmas break. First, as a gift to the household, especially my movie-loving mom, I got a multi-user subscription to Netflix. Second, because of Netflix, I signed up with a lifetime Virtual Private Network (VPN) service, which, among other benefits, allows users to watch US-based offerings (like Netflix, which very recently opened a limited Philippine operation, largely dispensing with the need for VPN). Third and perhaps most importantly for the long run, I ramped up our Internet connection, from the old 5 Mbps to a whopping 100 Mbps fiber-optic line that had just become available in our Diliman neighborhood. The setup then prompted me to acquire an Apple TV unit, which streams Netflix shows, among others, from the Internet to your HDTV set, completing the home-movie experience (well, throw in some popcorn and Coke for the full effect).

If you’re not too tech-savvy and if I’ve left you hopelessly confused by that exasperatingly jargon-laden paragraph, let me unpack it for you, as I’d explain it to someone like my mom. (I should add that my mother is unlike most 87-year-olds. She doesn’t have a computer, but she’s otherwise glued to four devices—her TV, her iPhone, her iPad, and her Android tablet. She loves playing vocabulary and bubble-type games, which keep her brain cells humming, on top of the 20-minute walk she takes every afternoon.)

“Home office” refers to the fact that over the past three decades, with the rise of the Internet and indeed its indispensability to modern living, more people have been able to work at home, or to bring much of their work home. I teach at the university, but most of my writing is done at home. My wife Beng also has her art-restoration studio at home. This means that we have to invest in equipment and technology that will allow us to get our work done, and done well, right where we are.

For me, that means several computers—I use a small MacBook Air as my main workhorse, portable but powerful, with a very fast processor and a large hard drive; for a backup, I have an older, larger MacBook Air, a bit slower, but good to have around just in case the main machine falters or is in repair; I also keep an iMac on another desk for when I need to see larger images, or to have fun surfing (or playing online poker) while I work. Yet another screen is almost always open at my desk: a tabletop TV, on which I keep up with the news.

All that hardware would be of little use without a fast and reliable Internet connection, and here I was lucky to be living in an area now covered by PLDTFibr, which ran a promo over the Christmas break offering a 100 Mbps service for six months (it’ll slide back down to 50 after six months, but you can’t sneeze at 50 Mbps either—and no, I’m not getting anything from the company for this plug, not even a coffee mug).

What does “100 Mbps” mean for the consumer? Webpages load in a snap, instead of crawling down the screen as some circular icon keeps spinning; you can download a 1-gigabyte software update in minutes rather than hours or overnight, as I used to be resigned to; and you can upload large files, say to DropBox or YouTube, without having to knit a doily while it loads. Is it expensive? It cost me only P500 more to level up from my old 5 Mbps service from another provider, which I had been a faithful client of for over ten years.

The best beneficiary of a fast Internet connection, however, is streaming, which is the way those who sell movies and music, like the iTunes Store and Netflix send you their material over the air—in one continuous flow, like you were watching a movie at the theater. But that’s more hopeful than achieved for most Pinoy consumers, because, as of a year ago, the Philippines had the third-slowest average Internet speed, at about 2.8 Mbps, in Asia, according to the folks at Akamai, who keep tabs on these things (No. 1 Korea averages 23.6 Mbps).

That means that your screen will very likely freeze just when things get really interesting in the movie, as your provider struggles to bring up the rest, like those guys who ran reels between theaters in the old days. (Lilia Ramos Shahani wrote a great piece on this for the Star, “Why Is Our Internet So Slow?” last August.)

And there’s nothing better to do with streaming than watch movies and TV shows from where they’re stored—the servers of US-based Netflix, for example, which we used to be able to access only through VPN. (Netflix didn’t want people in countries it didn’t serve—like the Philippines, until recently—to see Netflix shows. The Internet being what it is, some smart folks found a workaround, VPN, which tricks the Internet into thinking that you’re in Tampa, Florida instead of Tuguegarao, Cagayan.) There’s been a lot of argument over whether VPN-enabled Netflix is illegal, but it isn’t piracy—you still pay for Netflix, but are simply diverting its stream to your barong-barong. (I pay about $12 or less than P600 a month for a four-user license.)

That argument is now moot, as Netflix has officially added the Philippines to its serviced countries, albeit with a thinner menu; you’d still need to turn on your VPN to get the full US package (Netflix, however, has rethought its toleration of VPN, so that option might not last. I’m not too bothered, as I value VPN more for the PBS documentaries I like to watch on my iPhone in some traffic jam or over long, boring meetings. VPN is also good for your digital security, masking your real IP address from snoopers.)

The piece de resistance in this upgraded setup is the Apple TV, a small black box that uses wi-fi and your TV’s HDMI port to let you enjoy Netflix, YouTube, and other Internet video—even your own library of movies, music, and photos—on your big TV, instead of squinting at them on your phone or laptop. It isn’t cheap—the gadget costs a bit less than P9,000 for the basic fourth-generation model—but there are alternatives. Chromecast, a thumb-sized thingy made by Google and marketed by Globe for about P2,000, will hook you up to Google Play Movies, YouTube, Spotify, and other entertainment fare.

I’ll admit, it’s hard to think of work when you’re this wired for fun, but you can also say that this what makes all that work worth it—digital Disneyland at the click of a remote-control button.