Apart from the Sherlock Holmes-inspired storyline, what made “House MD” interesting? Well, one is having a talent like Hugh Laurie play the pain-reliever dependent and unconventional genius named Dr. Gregory House together with his three equally-devoted staff namely Cameron, Chase and Foreman. But here’s the best part – House conversations that could awake the dead in you.

House: “People choose the paths that grant them the greatest rewards for the least amount of effort.”

House: “See that, they all assume I’m a patient because of the cane.”
Wilson: “Then why don’t you put on a white coat like the rest of us?”
House: “Then they’ll think I’m a doctor.”

***

Cameron: “You hired me to get into my pants?!”
House: “I can’t believe that that would shock you. It’s also not what I said. No, I hired you because you look good; it’s like having a nice piece of art in the lobby.”

***

House: “No, there is not a thin line between love and hate. There is, in fact, a Great Wall of China with armed sentries posted every twenty feet between love and hate.”

***

House: “Hello, sick people and their loved ones! In the interest of saving time and avoiding a lot of boring chitchat later, I’m Doctor Gregory House; you can call me “Greg”. I’m one of three doctors staffing this clinic this morning.”
Cuddy: “Short, sweet, grab a file.”
House: “This ray of sunshine is Doctor Lisa Cuddy. Doctor Cuddy runs this whole hospital, so unfortunately she’s much too busy to deal with you. I am a board … certified diagnostician with a double specialty of infectious disease and nephrology. I am also the only doctor currently employed at this hospital who is forced to be here against his will.
That is true, isn’t it? (to Cuddy)
But not to worry, because for most of you, this job could be done by a monkey with a bottle of Motrin. Speaking of which, if you’re particularly annoying, you may see me reach for this: this is Vicodin. It’s mine! You can’t have any! And no, I do not have a pain management problem, I have a pain problem … but who knows? Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I’m too stoned to tell. So, who wants me? ”

***

Cameron: “Sex could kill you. Do you know what the human body goes through when you have sex? Pupils dilate, arteries constrict, core temperature rises, heart races, blood pressure skyrockets, respiration becomes rapid and shallow, the brain fires bursts of electrical impulses from nowhere to nowhere, and secretions spit out of every gland, and the muscles tense and spasm like you’re lifting three times your body weight. It’s violent, it’s ugly and it’s messy, and if God hadn’t made it unbelievably fun, the human race would have died out eons ago.”

***

House: “You mentioned two obscure diseases to Dr. Chase. How’d you know about them?”
Patient: “I read about them on the internet.”
House: “So, what’d you search for? Diseases from Asia that don’t match my son’s symptoms.”

***

Cuddy: “Just enlarged hylar lymph nodes.”
House: “Tiny unicorns goring his bronchial tubes would be cooler.”

***

Chase: “How would you feel if I interfered in your personal life?”
House: “I’d hate it. That’s why I cleverly have no personal life. “

By the way, this is just Book One: Water Tribe. So don’t expect the cool blind earth/metal bender Toph to be there.

Now the bad news.

For Airbender fans who followed the series on Nickelodeon channel, Shyamalan’s movie would prove to be a big disappointment. I am not part of the Airbender cult. But I have seen the series on a 2-week DVD marathon and I could tell the huge difference the movie has from the original animated series. Shyamalan has just massacred the Airbender characters you would no longer be able to recognize them.

The characters in the movie delivered their lines in what seemed to be a monotone adding gloom to an already glum water tribe climate. You could feel the I-see-dead-people undertone creeping from beneath your seat. Aang (Noah Ringer) and Sokka (Jackson Rathborne) were supposed to be carefree lads who also happened to have a sense of mission in life. But Shyamalan’s melancholic take on these two prevailed. There was a world war. Why would he make a happy-go-lucky Aang? Let the Avatar-kid carry the burden together with the rest of the gang. The only consistent person in the movie was the angry jerk named “Prince Zuko” played by Dev Patel.

And for some strange reason, the characters seemed to represent different races and colors – the earth-benders were Chinese, the fire-benders Indians, the airbenders were probably from Dalai Lama’s clan and the water tribe was plainly a white country. The character differences were so pronounced you’d probably wonder why Shyamalan did such a thing. Or maybe it was just something his critics were imagining while mixing irvingia gabonensis into their drinks.

Overall, the Last Airbender movie has a poorly-written script. I have been short-changed like the rest who trooped to the cinemas to have a first look. I want my money back. If its creators would like to make this a successful movie franchise, they should learn from what others did to Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Narnia or even the cheesy Twilight. Stay true to the original; it pays great dividends and much love in the end.

I spotted this somewhere. I couldn’t agree more – Twilight’s newest vegetarian shares his strange look with his hairdresser, Edward Scissorhands. If there’s one person in the cast who wasn’t so secure about his look, it’s Jasper Hale.

The Cullen boy has actually experimented on various hairstyles over the last three Twilight installments. In his first two major appearances, he sported the electrified hair look. Lately, he grew his hair longer as he learned how to care for the ozone by quitting the use spray nets. He’s maturing fast in preparation for the vampire Bella’s baby coming in Book 4. By the way that kid, a hybrid nurtured with human growth hormone, matures so fast that age seven she was said to already look like seventeen.

We know the Bella-Edward-Jacob story too well it already bores us. Bella loves Edward and likes Jacob who also loves her like Edward. In Eclipse, Edward and Jacob’s clan teamed up together to protect their frail human from a mad vampire named Victoria and a bunch of nasties. The plot was predictable as usual – you can tell the end from the beginning. So I went “ho-hum”.

But the good thing about Eclipse is they were able to improve on a lot of things. The computer-generated effects and an okay storyline allowed Jasper (Jackson Rathborne) to shine. All the while I thought he was a creep with a power to turn someone into stone with that strange dilated eye-popping stare. But in this third Twilight installment, the guy we thought to be feeding on 7-dfbx proved that he can kick ass (he was some sort of a Texan general in his past life) and deliver his lines properly. Finally, after past two Twilights, Jasper was talking.

While Jasper enjoyed a little bit of limelight as a Newborn terminator, his other pale brother Edward (Robert Pattinson) was reduced to a mere cast of a silent movie. He delivered few sensible lines mostly topped with melted 100% mozzarella cheese.

Now, I’ve learned from a friend that this particular style of death-defying fast movement is called “parkour”. Parkour is a French word which means l’art du déplacement or the art of moving. It is a physical discipline of French origin with an objective of getting from one place to another using only the human body and the objects in the environment around you.

David Belle, the 37-year-old French guy who created parkour, was hired by Disney to train Jake for his role as Prince Dastan.

Have you seen it? I did yesterday. The digital version.

I already liked Sam Worthington as an Avatar, but lesser as the demigod Perseus in the movie, Clash of the Titans. His role as Perseus was not as intense. He was just an angry guy who refused to acknowledge his godlike origins and plans to kill Hades on his own after his adopting family died on the sea. While all nice things can be said of the movie’s visual effects and actors (Liam Neeson and Ralph Fiennes played major god roles), the story has a major flaw – the story itself.

The movie is totally different from the Greek mythology. If you’re a huge fan of Olympus and have not seen the 80′s movie version like me, you’re bound to a series of disappointments. (But you know how things are like these days. Everyone is entitled to re-write about anything under the guiding light of creative license and some people wearing mens ties who can pull strings. If you want a movie faithful to the story of its dead author, get Peter Jackson.)

Clash of the Titans was basically written fanfic style. What if we get Io to babysit Perseus? What if we kill Danae? What if we put Djinns (originally part of Islamic folklore now depicted as sand-demons) into the story? What if Pegasus would just fly from the sky instead of coming out of Medusa’s bloody head? What if Acrisius (Perseus’ step dad in the movie) was recruited by Hades? What if we dress up Zeus like a knight of the round table? That was how the story’s plot was developed and screwed Greek mythology the way we knew it.

Perseus’ True Origins

Perseus was the son of Zeus and Danaë – daughter of Acrisius, King of Argos. Acrisius was desperate to have a son so he consulted the oracle at Delphi, who warned him that he would one day be killed by his daughter’s son. Danaë was childless and to keep her that way, he had her in his palace courtyard. Zeus came to her in the form of a shower of gold, impregnated her and soon she bore the child Perseus.

King Acrisius cast the two into the sea in a wooden chest fearing the gods retribution should he kill both mother and child. They were washed ashore on the island of Seriphos, and fisherman named Dictys received them and raised Perseus like his own son. The brother of Dictys was Polydectes, the king of the island.

GMA 7′s SOP (Sobrang Okey, Pare) will have its final episode this Sunday, February 28, after 13 years of live Sunday noontime entertainment. SOP lost the ratings war to ABS-CBN’s ASAP over the past few months.

I used to be an SOP fan, until the program’s format slowly became boring and predictable. The program simply stopped evolving creatively from the stage set to their segments. There seemed to be a dearth of new good artists while pioneers Regine Velasquez, Jaya, Janno Gibbs and Ogie Alcasid started to lose their luster already as the years go by. You see them grow old doing those back-to-back segment and one can’t help but change channels. It sort of evolved into like a German Moreno 80′s show, or any program that carry home TV shopping segments selling diet supplements. Now, who wants a recycled show?

What SOP needs is a major makeover – from their creative team down to their hosts. Getting it off the air was a smart move. But the challenge remains – whatever the management replaces it with should be really really good.

If it weren’t for the humongous EDSA traffic yesterday, I wouldn’t be able to watch the movie “Valentine’s Day” in Megamall. Not that it was a great movie. It was an okay movie that allowed room for a few laughs and twinkling thoughts about the beloved. The best part was I had the whole back row seat for myself and was able to stretch my aching legs comfortably.

Back to Valentine’s Day, I can only say that the movie lacked substance. If it weren’t for big name stars like Julia Roberts, Ashton Kutcher, Taylor Swift, Anne Hathaway, Jamie Fox and Taylor Lautner, I’d say it was completely forgettable. I don’t really attribute that to the complex story of a dozen lives in Los Angeles that sort of connect with each other. It’s a Facebook movie plot. Too predictable, a no brainer. It’s like buying a phentermine without prescription. There’s nothing really special about it.

Ho-hum. But the trip to the cinema was certainly worth the time spent waiting for the traffic to die down.

I remain a fan of Lord of the Rings. Set that on stone.

Now back to business, I was able to dig deep into the list of all-time box office hits before memory slips away because someone forgot to do an online backup. What amazes me is the fact that the very films I loved are all together in the list. Sci-fi and fantasy films share seats together in the top 20.

1. Avatar (2009) $1,852,472,387
2. Titanic (1997) $1,835,300,000
3. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003) $1,129,219,252
4. Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest (2006) $1,060,332,628
5. The Dark Knight (2008) $1,001,921,825
6. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (2001) $968,657,891
7. Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End (2007) $958,404,152
8. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (2007) $937,000,866
9. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (2009) $933,956,980
10. Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace (1999) $922,379,000
11. The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002) $921,600,000
12. Jurassic Park (1993) $919,700,000
13. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2005) $892,194,397
14. Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs (2009) $887,773,705
15. Spider-Man 3 (2007) $885,430,303
16. Shrek 2 (2004) $880,871,036
17. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (2002) $866,300,000
18. Finding Nemo (2003) $865,000,000
19. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001) $860,700,000
20. Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith (2005) $848,462,555

As far as I know, Avatar did not receive the same hype accorded to Twilight. At least not on this part of the world.

Having been showcased in cinemas sometime in November, no one suspected that Avatar attendance would pick up the way it did right now. People only have but praises for James Cameron’s second masterpiece, and the news spread through word-of-mouth. Just a few days ago, this recent 3D giant dislodged the reigning billion dollar movie “Titanic”. Avatar earned a whopping $1,852,472,387. James Cameron still remains the undefeated “king of the world” with the two top grosser films reigning the box office worldwide.

The years spent on producing this latest digital masterpiece were certainly worth everything; even that dark circle under eyes you get from watching too much of it. Avatar is still in cinemas. For the nth time, see you there.