The Manila Times College (TMTC), formerly known as The Manila Times School of Journalism, used to be the only specialized Journalism school in the Philippines. Until two undergraduate courses were added last year—Bachelor of Arts in English (AB English) and Bachelor of Arts in History (AB History).
The TMTC is the brainchild of Dr. Dante A. Ang. It opened in 2003. The main objective of Ang was to produce “good journalists”. Ang stepped down as president and CEO of the paper in 2004 to take a Cabinet position as chairman of the Commission on Filipinos Overseas. His son, Dante “Klink” Ang II took his place.
The school offers its students a three-year bachelor's program with hands-on training in print journalism and other subjects. Experienced journalists are among the school's instructors, and students have access to the Manila Times newsroom. It is the only school run by professional journalists. Its faculty is composed of print and broadcast personalities headed by veteran print journalist Benjamin Defensor as the dean.
Among those who have recently lectured in the school are Alice Villadolid, former New York Times correspondent; Geronimo Sy, state prosecutor of the Department of Justice and columnist at The Manila Times, and James Richard Dickenson, former New York Times reporter.
Monday, February 25, 2008
Sunday, February 24, 2008
Example of a Good Feature Writing
The Current Cinema
Beamed Down
“Jumper” and “Be Kind Rewind.”
by Anthony Lane February 25, 2008
Bring back James Cameron. An unlikely sentiment, I realize, given the animosity that millions still nourish toward “Titanic” and its creator, who seems to regard himself, if the 1997 Academy Awards are anything to go by, as a mixture of Moses and Erich von Stroheim. Yet there is no gainsaying his strongest work; the Cameron who made “Aliens,” “The Abyss,” and the first two “Terminator” films remains one of the few directors capable of shouldering an outlandish concept and bearing it onward to its coherent end. In his hands, science fiction assumes the hard, metallic sheen of plausible fact, whereas the longer I suffer each new configuration of “Spider-Man,” “Fantastic Four,” “Batman,” and “X-Men” the more I sense a reluctance, on the part of directors, to think their narratives through, and the louder the hiss of deflation as a neat, amusing idea runs out of puff.
Nowhere is the comedown more depressing than in “Jumper,” directed by Doug Liman, which features Hayden Christensen as a master of teleportation named David Rice. For those of you unfamiliar with the basics of teleporting, here’s how to do it: taking your cue from Maria von Trapp, you simply remember your favorite things, or at least your favorite place on the planet, and, letting off a little bwoompff sound, you’re there. I tried it several times in the course of this frantic film, hoping to land inside a calm sanatorium in the Swiss Alps, but no dice.
David’s initial jump, when he’s a teen-ager, leaves him beached and gasping like a fish on, of all places, the floor of the Ann Arbor public library—a witty detail, for so unbookish a film. “How does this thing work?” he asks himself. “How can I control it?” These questions are never satisfactorily answered. Instead, we ourselves leap ahead to the adult David, who by now is jumping purely for pleasure. His idea of a sweet night out is to teleport himself to London, pick up a girl, sleep with her, then breakfast the following morning atop the Sphinx, before hopping off to Fiji for a healing surf. All flesh is as grass, however, and David’s delights are about to be cropped short by Roland (Samuel L. Jackson), one of the Paladins—an élite squad of killjoys, trained to hunt and destroy all Jumpers on earth. Lord knows what drives the Paladins, aside from a Calvinistic scorn of man as epicure. Once they’ve finished with the Jumpers, presumably, they’ll get to work on the smokers.
“Star Wars” fans will remember Hayden Christensen as the young Anakin Skywalker, or, to be accurate, as a kind of handsome void where Anakin was supposed to be. (In the new film, he and Jackson, himself a former Jedi, grapple with what looks like a sawn-off light sabre.) One day, I feel sure, the rich mantle of charisma will descend upon him, but “Jumper” is not that occasion. In any case, the fault lies with Liman and his screenwriters—David S. Goyer, Jim Uhls, and Simon Kinberg—who cheerfully beam their hero around the globe and then have no clue what to do with him. David has a wall of picture postcards in Manhattan; one glance at the location on a card, and he can spirit himself there. (Needless to say, the movie quietly drops this visualization theme when it becomes a drag.) Such restlessness, I would argue, does not ipso facto make him a dude, or a man of the world; it simply makes him an accelerated tourist, and the whole of “Jumper” comes across as vastly incurious about the cultures at its command. When David takes Millie (Rachel Bilson), a school friend from Michigan, for a dirty day out in Rome, she stands in awe before the Colosseum. “This place is amazing,” she declares. “It’s so cool.” I wasn’t expecting Ernst Gombrich, but surely three writers, among them, could inject a touch of class.
The two reasons to see “Jumper” are Michael Rooker, who plays David’s father (and suggests, uncannily, what Heath Ledger might have looked like in middle age), and Jamie Bell, in the role of a fellow-Jumper named Griffin. Where David is semi-suave and hedonistic, Griffin is hurried and hirsute, zipping back to his grungy desert lair whenever danger looms. The film pretty much evaporates at the close, as if the production had to wrap early in time for lunch, and Griffin’s character is left shamefully dangling, but not before he and David have enjoyed a strenuous fight, jump-cutting from war zone to road to river with every punch. The result is more or less a remake of the great scene in “Sherlock Jr.,” where a dozing Buster Keaton dreams himself through a shuffled sequence of backgrounds. “Jumper” is ten times as brutal, maybe a thousand times more costly, and eighty-four years late, but it’s a start.
The new Michel Gondry film, “Be Kind Rewind,” is set in Passaic, New Jersey. It stars Jack Black as Jerry, a shambling, logorrheic loser who lives in a trailer and idles his days away in a local video store owned by Mr. Fletcher (Danny Glover) and staffed by the benevolent Mike (Mos Def). One day, after an unfortunate incident at a power plant next to his trailer, Jerry finds himself magnetized—these things happen, I guess—with the result that he unwittingly wipes every tape on Mr. Fletcher’s shelves. The solution is perfectly obvious: Jerry and Mike will shoot their own versions of popular films, beginning with “Ghostbusters,” record them onto the blank tapes, rent them out, and hope that regular customers—like the daffy Ms. Falewicz (Mia Farrow), who looks like she got wiped years ago herself—won’t notice the difference.
Beamed Down
“Jumper” and “Be Kind Rewind.”
by Anthony Lane February 25, 2008
Bring back James Cameron. An unlikely sentiment, I realize, given the animosity that millions still nourish toward “Titanic” and its creator, who seems to regard himself, if the 1997 Academy Awards are anything to go by, as a mixture of Moses and Erich von Stroheim. Yet there is no gainsaying his strongest work; the Cameron who made “Aliens,” “The Abyss,” and the first two “Terminator” films remains one of the few directors capable of shouldering an outlandish concept and bearing it onward to its coherent end. In his hands, science fiction assumes the hard, metallic sheen of plausible fact, whereas the longer I suffer each new configuration of “Spider-Man,” “Fantastic Four,” “Batman,” and “X-Men” the more I sense a reluctance, on the part of directors, to think their narratives through, and the louder the hiss of deflation as a neat, amusing idea runs out of puff.
Nowhere is the comedown more depressing than in “Jumper,” directed by Doug Liman, which features Hayden Christensen as a master of teleportation named David Rice. For those of you unfamiliar with the basics of teleporting, here’s how to do it: taking your cue from Maria von Trapp, you simply remember your favorite things, or at least your favorite place on the planet, and, letting off a little bwoompff sound, you’re there. I tried it several times in the course of this frantic film, hoping to land inside a calm sanatorium in the Swiss Alps, but no dice.
David’s initial jump, when he’s a teen-ager, leaves him beached and gasping like a fish on, of all places, the floor of the Ann Arbor public library—a witty detail, for so unbookish a film. “How does this thing work?” he asks himself. “How can I control it?” These questions are never satisfactorily answered. Instead, we ourselves leap ahead to the adult David, who by now is jumping purely for pleasure. His idea of a sweet night out is to teleport himself to London, pick up a girl, sleep with her, then breakfast the following morning atop the Sphinx, before hopping off to Fiji for a healing surf. All flesh is as grass, however, and David’s delights are about to be cropped short by Roland (Samuel L. Jackson), one of the Paladins—an élite squad of killjoys, trained to hunt and destroy all Jumpers on earth. Lord knows what drives the Paladins, aside from a Calvinistic scorn of man as epicure. Once they’ve finished with the Jumpers, presumably, they’ll get to work on the smokers.
“Star Wars” fans will remember Hayden Christensen as the young Anakin Skywalker, or, to be accurate, as a kind of handsome void where Anakin was supposed to be. (In the new film, he and Jackson, himself a former Jedi, grapple with what looks like a sawn-off light sabre.) One day, I feel sure, the rich mantle of charisma will descend upon him, but “Jumper” is not that occasion. In any case, the fault lies with Liman and his screenwriters—David S. Goyer, Jim Uhls, and Simon Kinberg—who cheerfully beam their hero around the globe and then have no clue what to do with him. David has a wall of picture postcards in Manhattan; one glance at the location on a card, and he can spirit himself there. (Needless to say, the movie quietly drops this visualization theme when it becomes a drag.) Such restlessness, I would argue, does not ipso facto make him a dude, or a man of the world; it simply makes him an accelerated tourist, and the whole of “Jumper” comes across as vastly incurious about the cultures at its command. When David takes Millie (Rachel Bilson), a school friend from Michigan, for a dirty day out in Rome, she stands in awe before the Colosseum. “This place is amazing,” she declares. “It’s so cool.” I wasn’t expecting Ernst Gombrich, but surely three writers, among them, could inject a touch of class.
The two reasons to see “Jumper” are Michael Rooker, who plays David’s father (and suggests, uncannily, what Heath Ledger might have looked like in middle age), and Jamie Bell, in the role of a fellow-Jumper named Griffin. Where David is semi-suave and hedonistic, Griffin is hurried and hirsute, zipping back to his grungy desert lair whenever danger looms. The film pretty much evaporates at the close, as if the production had to wrap early in time for lunch, and Griffin’s character is left shamefully dangling, but not before he and David have enjoyed a strenuous fight, jump-cutting from war zone to road to river with every punch. The result is more or less a remake of the great scene in “Sherlock Jr.,” where a dozing Buster Keaton dreams himself through a shuffled sequence of backgrounds. “Jumper” is ten times as brutal, maybe a thousand times more costly, and eighty-four years late, but it’s a start.
The new Michel Gondry film, “Be Kind Rewind,” is set in Passaic, New Jersey. It stars Jack Black as Jerry, a shambling, logorrheic loser who lives in a trailer and idles his days away in a local video store owned by Mr. Fletcher (Danny Glover) and staffed by the benevolent Mike (Mos Def). One day, after an unfortunate incident at a power plant next to his trailer, Jerry finds himself magnetized—these things happen, I guess—with the result that he unwittingly wipes every tape on Mr. Fletcher’s shelves. The solution is perfectly obvious: Jerry and Mike will shoot their own versions of popular films, beginning with “Ghostbusters,” record them onto the blank tapes, rent them out, and hope that regular customers—like the daffy Ms. Falewicz (Mia Farrow), who looks like she got wiped years ago herself—won’t notice the difference.
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