Baptism of Fire

After nearly two decades of living a sheltered life (three decades for truants), new college graduates will now enter the "real world," an alien place where people are nastier than the bullies at school (if they were not the bullies in the first place), where cherished values are compromised for the sake of career advancement or keeping one's job, where friendships are lost or forged in the fiery furnaces of the corporate world. Some will realize that they were only prepared academically and not well-equipped to deal effectively with the lunatic personalities that they will encounter.
They will meet the unreasonable boss, the boss who loves to play favorites and the sex-starved boss.
As for their colleagues, they will encounter the Stasi agent who will never fail to convey his bellyaching to the bosses, the power-trapping maniac who swaggers like the CEO owing to his association with the powers-that-be even if he is just the clerk who lights the Boss's cigar and the rumormonger (every office has one).
One of the most bitter lessons that an idealistic and hard-working youth will learn is that hardwork, without doing a little PR with the bosses, won't translate to moving to a higher rung in the ladder. He will only learn these lessons after he has been burned twice, thrice. He will learn to hold his tongue, laugh at the corny jokes of his Boss, retaliate with blacker lies when he has been besmirched and pretend to be dumber than his dumb Boss (aides of politicians are peerless in this field!).
Welcome to the Real World!!

Revisiting a Cinematic Classic

Last Holy Week, I noticed that local television channels have stopped airing biblical movies like The Ten Commandments, Ben Hur, Jesus of Nazareth, Jesus Christ Superstar, The Passion of the Christ, etc. Years ago, viewers were inundated with such Holy Week treat and local TV went went off the air on Good Friday, the only time of the year that networks shut down. When I opened the TV on Friday, most of the stations were on air! Gezz! How times change!
The only religious film that we watched on TV was The Ten Commandments, which I last watched years ago. My father brought betamax tapes (Stop laughing okay! It was the ancient '80s.) of The Ten Commandments plus Jesus of Nazareth from, gasp, Saudi Arabia. So we have watched it probably a thousand times that I could tell the scenes that they have cut from the version that they aired to cut playing time and to milk some moolah from advertisers.
I must admit that I found the acting of Charlton Heston and Yul Bryner too theatrical. Maybe, I have been used to the modern method of acting. But what I found most amazing with The Ten Commandments was how they pulled it off in the absence of computer generated images. The parting of the Red Sea was impressive, even by today's standards, but marshalling thousands of extras for a single shot was an incredible feat by itself, to think that computers were not available then to clone ten extras into a humongous multitude or to build nonexistent colossal structures. And the musical score? One of the best ever!
One curiosity that I spotted was in the opening credits that acknowledged the participation of Egyptian soldiers in the movie. They were probably utilized as, well, warriors, much in the same way that Peter Jackson enlisted New Zealand troops for The Lord of the Rings trilogy. And the female cast? Heck, they could make today's screen goddesses a run for their money, especially Deborah Paget!