Category: Spanish

  • El Peñón de las Ánimas vs. Ram-Leela – FIGHT!

    It’s another double feature!

    La Doña has been in the mood for fighting this week [1], and this time she’s taking Deepika Padukone- or I suppose El Peñon de las Animas (The Rock of Souls) is taking Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Ram-Leela, where both balas and golis are exchanged nonchalantly, and music is spared in between two families that have been warring for generations.

    penon-de-las-animas-ram-leela

    Though Maria Felix is playing much more of a señorita role on this one (than usual), and this western musical (that’s what all rancheras are, right?) gets some pretty nifty cinematography and sassy moments and lyrics, there’s one thing that Ram-Leela has~~~ and that is Supriya Pathak.

    ram-leela-supriya-pathak

    Are! Mashallah, mashallah~

  • Queen Christina vs. La Monja Alferez – FIGHT!

    Oh.mah.gosh.

    queen-christina-greta-garbo-monja-alferez-maria-felix

    It’s a battle of the horse-riding sword-brandishing tough ladies that -actually- existed in real life, with lives brought onto the silver screen, beautified while being personified by THE faces of their own Golden Eras.

    In the case of Greta Garbo, of course, with Hollywood in her most fun and most relaxed Queen Christina, often mistaken for a man and featuring the infamous scenes of Garbo kissing a lady and being romanced by John Gilbert while in mannish get-up. Then there’s the Mexican and Latin movie classic diva La Doña Maria Felix as Catalina Erauso, escaping a convent and dragging it up as Don Alonso, making the ladies of the Peruvian Viceroyalty swoon in La Monja Alferez, with a twist ending to match Some Like It Hot.

    And to quote Toni Collette:

    We’re women dressed as men dressed as women!

    This is a tough one. I do have a terrible Greta Garbo bias, but I think I’m handing it down to La Doña on this one. Maria Felix is like the awesome fusion of everything that’s good with both Greta Garbo and Joan Crawford.

  • How Languages Evolve

    It’s always interesting to see educational (short) clips about different languages; did you guys ever see the one about the guy that could speak like 20 languages? At that time, my niece (6) and nephew (5) were struggling with picking up Italian and English at school, while they spoke Spanish and Swedish at home. That was, of course, on top of their other school subjects like math, because schooling is just incredibly ridiculous nowadays.

    The only bad thing about the clip is the incredibly boring tone of the voice over. In any case, I thought it was funny they lumped Mandarin, Cantonese, etc into one big chunk of Chinese language. I thought the formal label was “Sino-Tibetan language,” even though Tibetan feels more like it would be more like Indo-Aryan, no? Isn’t Sanskrit both part of Tibetan and Indo-Aryan languages? Sighs.

    I don’t exactly understand how branching works with languages, how does Indo-European come about? Isn’t that like stretching things out? What would languages like Spanish, German and Hindi have in common with each other? And how does Japonic or Koreanic come about? And how do they have more in common with Mongolian than with Chinese?

  • The Late 2012-2013 Music Highlights

    amys-2012-2013-music-highlights-yammag

    I think I could work more on the 2013 list, but then it will be 2015! LOL I also hate that I don’t have my font pack at hand because this graphic is UHHHH-GLAY. My Frankenstein Computer is back! I’m so happy~

    Anyway, here are 30 album picks by all different artists that released (almost) full-length albums these last two years. And here are all their covers in gallery form, and here’s a Facebook Gallery, it contains some playlists and iTunes links. And here’s a Xiami playlist, where you can (almost) access all the albums. And a Weibo post in case you’re there.

    And here’s the YAM Magazine list that contains all my ramblings, with playlist/streaming and buy links.

  • Xiami + Chinese Indie Music Compilation Xun Guang Ji

    xiami-xun-guang-ji-seeking-light-collection

    Xiami had been pimping a new project they had going on for the last couple of days, and they’ve just revealed that it’s a 2-disc compilation featuring Chinese-Taiwan-UK Beijing-based indie artists. It’s a pretty good set that I’ve freely translated as the Seeking Light Compilation (寻光集, Xun Guang Ji) or in Español- Colección Buscando la Luz.

    See, this is what happens when you have no official ‘christian’ name.

    Check my English and Español announcements for translated group names and songs. Looking forward to exploring everyone’s discography.

    You can get the album on Xiami.

  • In Progress: 2014 Film Count

    This is the first time in my movie-counting life that I’ve seen over 50 movies by the middle of the year. As a general number, I picked 48 a year, to make sure I -at least- watched one film a week for my end of the year list.

    amys-2014-film-count

    There’s a LOT of bad and meh movies so far, but there’s also a decent Top10. Not unbelievable, but decent. It’s a working one that would do for a Dec.31 or Jan.01 publishing date. LOL

  • Hyde vs. Beto Cuevas vs. Sanam – FIGHT!

    We got a triple FIGHT!

    It was the second half of 2003 when I was listening to La Ley quite non-stop, since it was only one of the handful CDs that I had taken to Canada, when my friend grabbed my headphones and told me, “Do you know l’Arc en Ciel? It sounds exactly like him, but in not-Japanese.” I’d always kept that at the back of my mind until today when I found this new Indian band called Sanam, and had a similar thought.

    Of course, l’Arc en Ciel has over twenty years of history already, so it’s an obvious imbalanced fight. Though I do kinda chuckle whenever people refer to lead vocalist Hyde as a “chibi” person, as well as measuring other people as “one hyde and one inch tall” LOL

    Note: Also love how the fans sing as a prelude.

    Of course, if La Ley hadn’t decided to split mid-noughties, they’d have a couple of years into l’Arc en Ciel, and the image that I have of Beto Cuevas wouldn’t be so quite embarrassing.
    (more…)

  • These Are My Movie Dads of 2013

    … or maybe I’m just projecting too much, but I thought 2013 had a lot of Father/Son-Daughter relationship movies. Even when it wasn’t literally a blood-relation, like in the more clear case between Idris Elba and Rinko Kikuchi (et Ashida Mana) in Pacific Rim, or the more blurred relationship between Jiao Xu with Mr. Go in Mr. Go.

    movies-dads-of-2013

    I cried in a couple of these ones, but I won’t tell you which. LOL

    From left to right, top to bottom: Koreeda’s Like Father, Like Son; Miracle in Cell No. 7; Metro Manila; Pacific Rim; Saving Mr. Banks; Silent Witness; About Time; Police Story 2013; Instructions Not Included; and Mr. Go.

  • 15 Indian Movies for People who Hate Bollywood

    yammag-15-indian-movies-people-who-hate-bollywood

    Partly translated in English~ but fully in Español at Cinencuentro.

  • Tabu and her Languages

    I just ran into this NDTV Walk the Talk interview that Tabu did – should be in between 2004 – that aired in Jan’05 where she gets into the various films that she’s done in various languages. She mentions that she’s got a flare for languages (!!!) and that she’s fluent in Telugu, and had picked up Marathi. She also mentioned she’s done films in Malayalam (which she says she doesn’t understand when doing her lines), Kannada, and Tamil.

    And… and… and… she took three months of Spanish. There. LOL

    From what I’ve been able to see from Hindi, at least, Spanish conjugation won’t be much of a head-scratching problem. I don’t know exactly how much Spanish she could’ve picked up in that period of time, considering I know people who gave up Spanish after a couple of months because of verb conjugation (especially from the ‘to be’ and ‘to have’)- it could be the same from Tabu. xD

    It also depends on whether she tried Castilian (The Spanish with a Spain accent) or Spanish (with any variation of Latin American accent), because the different sounds for ‘s,’ ‘c,’ and ‘z’ may frustrate some.

    So now I wonder how that went for her. xD