Sakai Diary: A Prelude

Something big is going to happen in the next couple of days. After 34 years I will finally have my first overseas experience. Yay! Long overdue in this day and age of travel packages and piso fares.  But the most awesome part is, it’s going to be on someone else’s tab. So double yay!

The destination is Japan. I will be one of the three Filipino media representatives for this year’s Sakai Asean Week. We’ll be in the Land of the Rising Sun for six nights, seven days. I look at the itinerary, I see activities galore, and I’m stoked. And also nervous as hell.

I guess it’s only natural for a first time long-distance traveler to feel antsy at this stage. I think about the four- to five-hour flight, trapped inside a huge-ass metal tunnel hovering thousands of feet above ground with nothing but air between me and the ocean — it’s just too much for a paranoid freak like me!

I’d make a poor globe-trotting rock star.

But countless have done it and countless have survived and I’ll be okay.  I just need to relax, breathe easy, get out of my safe mental cocoon. After all, where’s that fucking sense of adventure that fueled me in my youth? Where indeed?

Anyway, I’ve been told PAL serves unlimited wine. Yay for that!

No punch in this rum

A viewer can only appreciate The Rum Diary if he/she:

• is a die-hard Hunter S. Thompson fan who will suck up anything associated with the late gonzo journalist,
• once worked in a newspaper and wants to relive the mayhem — nay — experience,
• wants to ogle Amber Heard/Johnny Depp for at least two hours,
• is a chain-smoking booze hound who wants to see his/her pathetic lifestyle romanticized in film,
• hasn’t seen a single movie in 10 years

The only part of it that got a reaction from me is that one where Paul Kemp (Depp) and Sala (Michael Rispoli) got chased by a bunch of wild Puerto Rican drunks. That shit is hilarious, man. Some brownie points for the dialogue too, but not much. File it under watch and delete. You’ll be needing that extra space in your hard drive for something better.

The producers (which included Depp) shouldn’t have tried to court the mainstream. I think that’s where the problem lies.

Coming soon

Still no word yet if this is going to be shown here, but I’m keeping my fingers crossed. It’s Johnny Depp, after all. Lots of girls here wet their panties at the mere mention of his name. And I know of guys who would look at the mirror and hope to see Depp’s face in it. Yeah. Talk about poor hopeless bastards.

Me? I’m going to watch this because it’s based on a Hunter S. Thompson book. I read that book in 2005, and until now my mind is still conjuring up images of warm Caribbean nights and parties. It’s his best book, methinks. Better than Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas…

Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas Pt. 2?

 

The official trailer for The Rum Diary, the movie based on the Hunter S. Thompson book of the same title, is out, and after seeing it, I’ve to admit that my excitement went several notches down. My first impression is that the producers had turned it into something like a Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas sequel rather than treating it as a whole new different and totally separate and unrelated project. I hope I’m wrong.

That aside, the movie seems to be a riot, and I’ll still watch it despite its apparent infidelity with the book. I’ll just avoid comparisons and expect less, which I think is the key to enjoying movies based on bestsellers.