Finished watching Squid Game. Interesting, but Episode 9 was both anticlimactic and superfluous. It brought the series from being believably real to being believably unreal. The only lasting thing I can recall is that rich foreigners can afford to use Asians as playthings--so, yes, we are horses. But, in the last analysis, who cares about spending billions proving one's philosophy in life when there are better things to do, like living? And Seong Gi-Hun's ten-year-old daughter comes out as the ultimate loser--she never gets to reunite with her father.

I've watched quite a few Korean movies by now and am impressed with the actors' and actresses' truthful performances despite terribly flawed scripts. I believe this is because South Korea has a School for Performing Arts, a real academy, which we don't have in the Philippines. Johnny Delgado and Laurice Guillen's daughter Anna Feleo, however, is trying to change all of that.

It is quite unfortunate that, after all these decades, there are no real arts academies in the Philippines. Most of what we have are short-term workshops. As a result, performers are essentially freelancers, and that is already all that our society expects them to be.