Here are The Collected Cameos of Alfred Hitchcock.
My favorite Hitchcock movie is The Lady Vanishes, starring Margaret Lockwood and Michael Redgrave. I put it on when I’m in a blue funk, and it cheers me up. Every time I take a train, I write my name in the dust on the window. Because of that movie I was fascinated by dining cars, and when I finally saw one it was a disappointment. Maybe when I finally take the Orient Express.
I’ve seen Pan’s Labyrinth at the cinema three times, it’s so frigging beautiful. When you watch it, remember to bring your glasses. Many moviegoers are not aware that it’s in Spanish—an understandable mistake since the director also did Blade 2 and Hellboy in English.
The second time I watched it was with Ricky, who will not stand for talking or texting at the movies. Naturally he is always surrounded by people who won’t shut up at the cinema. Years ago, at a screening of Ocean’s Eleven, he found himself sitting in front of a bunch of women who would giggle every time Brad Pitt appeared on the screen. Brad didn’t even have to say anything to get them all excited. When Ricky could stand it no longer, he turned around to yell at the women, only to find that they were nuns. Nuns with a crush on Brad Pitt—what can you do?
Anyway, we were watching Pan’s Labyrinth when the couple to the left of us started yakking. We could hear every word. Apparently the woman could not bear to see violence onscreen, so the man had to describe what was happening. I tried shushing them but they wouldn’t stop. Finally Ricky got up and went over to them. “Please keep your voices down, we’re trying to watch the movie.” The woman said, “We’re just whispering.” “We can hear every word!” Ricky cried. “You ridiculous people!”
Ten minutes later, the people to the right of us started up. Their topic was linguistics, viz. “Oy, ayuda daw, parang Bisaya!” This time we couldn’t do anything because they were senior citizens and were probably hard of hearing or something. “There’s no escape!” I laughed. “We get it in Sensurround!”
Here’s the shocking part. When the movie ended and the lights went on, the guy to the left, the one who was describing the movie to his girlfriend, came over to apologize. “Sorry about the talking earlier,” he said. “Sorry.” I was so shocked that someone would actually admit his fault, I said, “Alright. Thank you.” I’ve gotten so used to uncouth jerky behavior that when I hear people say “You’re welcome”, I almost do a double-take.
Late-breaking news: We won Best Achievement in Hair Design at Cecile Zamora van Straten’s 80s-themed “debut”. (It’s called a debut because dammit, when you get to be the age when the styles of your youth are in fashion again, you can call your birthday party anything you want. Happy Birthday, Cecile! Conventional wisdom says we shouldn’t even be friends. Screw conventional wisdom.)
The winning hairstyle was a tsunami that added six to eight inches to my height. (Think Thompson Twins, Dead Or Alive, and other new wave acts of the Eighties.) It was created by Jay Lozada of Propaganda, and the actual work took about an hour. In the 80s when big hair was de rigueur, my classmates would achieve coiffure height using Dippity-Do gel, hairsprays that were eventually banned because they were causing holes in the ozone layer, beer, toothpaste, egg whites, school glue, and industrial-strength blow dryers. Unfortunately, once the desired height had been achieved, the structure would tend to collapse in half an hour. My tsunami was erected at 5pm and remains standing as of this writing, at 1.15am (I wanted to go out for coffee and taunt the normal people, but we could not find parking space).
The process of building the tsunami hairdo consisted of the following steps.
1. Shampoo
2. Blowdry
3. Setting lotion
4. Sectioning the hair and winding the sections around “agojillo”, those wavy hairpins about a centimeter wide.
5. Hairspray
6. 20 minutes under the dryer
7. Styling for tsunami effect
8. More hairspray
9. An hour later, touch-up “teasing”
10. Still more hairpray
11. Blowdry
The result: Big hair reminiscent of Leni Santos in the seminal 80s film Da Punks, although Marlon Rivera (winner, Best Achievement in Fashion Editing for his 80s tribute incorporating all the major trends of the decade while channelling Sideshow Bob) thinks it was more Manilyn Reynes. (Marlon also advises those who channel Leni in Da Punks not to forget the lisp. “Di mo kami maintindihan, Ma, mga punkth kami.”)
Ironically I never did the tsunami hair in the 80s, although I did have a perm in 1988 that required an elevator car all to itself. The party was fantastic and everything went smoothly, although the security guard had to look thrice before he let me into my building.
Where there’s a Weng, there’s a Weng Weng.
“In the 80s, in one of the most astonishing series of films I have even darted my eyes near, a Filipino called Weng Weng fought crime in a way only an 80s cop knew how. Now a group called The Chuds have written a tribute. . .”
Tulad Ng Dati, Best Film at Cinemalaya 2006, opens today at SM digital theatres in Megamall, Mall of Asia, Southmall, Manila, Sta. Mesa, Fairview, Pampanga, Clark, Cebu, Davao, San Lazaro. Megamall will be screening a 35mm print.
Directed by Mike Sandejas, Tulad Ng Dati stars the Filipino rock band The Dawn. In the late 80s, at the height of their fame, the band’s leader Teddy Diaz was murdered. The remaining members decided to carry on, but disbanded in 1995. They reunited in 2000.
The movie opens in 2006. Vocalist Jett Pangan has lost his passion for music and considers retiring from the band. One night he is assaulted by burglars and falls into a coma. When he wakes up, he has no memory of his life after 1988. All he knows is that he’s 20, Teddy is alive, and he’s at the peak of his career.
Also opening today: Guillermo del Toro’s tough, unsparing, and altogether wonderful tale, Pan’s Labyrinth. In a Spain torn apart by civil war, a little girl takes refuge in a fantasy world. Fascism has no weapons against the imagination.
We’re supposed to be in the digital age where information travels at the speed of thought and all the hassles of bill-paying and banking transactions have been done away with etc etc, I’m sure it’s all written down in a brochure somewhere. I’ve always had my doubts about these claims, but today I decided to put them to the test. Join the information age. Ditch my outdated analog habits. Whatever.
For years I’ve paid my utilities bills through an ATM account. But what if it could get even easier? What if I could pay my bills without leaving the house? So I enrolled in the online banking service. Everything was fine until I tried to register my utilities accounts. Every time I hit ’send’, I would get an error message. So I called the bank’s call center to find out what was wrong.
Ever called a call center? Suddenly you understand Waiting For Godot. After several minutes of listening to promos, muzak, and assurances that someone would attend to me shortly, I decided to spare myself the headache. Instead, I would pass on the headache to someone who was actually paid to endure it. I popped over to the bank (it’s close by) and explained the problem in detail to the very nice staff. She said only the call center could deal with the problem, but she would contact them herself.
Amazingly she not only called me back, but she had an answer: my browser was Mozilla Firefox, and I had to use Internet Explorer to access the site. Then she said I had to call the call center. Yaargh. So I went to the nearest internet cafe to see if using Explorer would solve everything, but the cafe’s connection was excruciatingly slow and I have a short fuse. (Turns out the browser was not the problem, but I won’t bore you with the stupid details.)
After an ice-cold drink, I figured I’d try sending money using my cellphone. Texting money, what a great idea. You register by text, you hand over your money to the agent, they text the recipient, the recipient gets the money from the agent nearest to them. Telecommunications rules. Turns out that there is paperwork. You register by text, but then you still have to fill out a form and present ID. The recipient also has to register, and when they get the text they have to fill out another form to get the cash. I thought the digital economy was supposed to cut down on paper usage, and now I find trees still have to die even if you are sending money by text.
So much for the information age. Maybe it’s happening elsewhere, but not here. Because we don’t exist. We’re not real. We’re in the Matrix, where you could enroll in a credit card company’s bill payment facility and then discover that you’ve been paying the electricity and water bills of some person you’ve never met. (Maybe she took all the money she’d saved and used it to buy the entire line of Secosana bags. Long story.)
There’s quite a bit of sex in the writings of Ian McEwan, some of it fairly nasty, so it comes as a surprise that his new book On Chesil Beach is about a couple petrified with fear on their honeymoon night. Making it the anti-McEwan McEwan: the trademark viciousness has turned into compassion. At 166 pages, it’s a thin premise made profound and moving. I’ll review it at length in my column next week, with sufficiently nasty examples.
So the media turns another killer into a celebrity. Young, dead, and famous. Once again, every psycho who thinks he has a score to settle can rest assured that if he goes out and shoots people, he will get all the attention he feels he’s been deprived of. The higher the body count, the more the airtime. He won’t be around to enjoy his celebrity, but his multimedia presentation (shades of the violent Korean film Oldboy) will be viewed by millions, and for weeks every pundit and TV psychologist will be offering an opinion as to why he did it. An object of fear is transformed into an object of pity, and then an object of envy.
Sure we have to know why he did it, but no matter what we find out, this kind of horror will likely happen again. (After Columbine we were speculating on why those children did it, and our publisher had this explanation. America, he said, is the new Rome.) When it does, people will slap their foreheads and say they saw it coming. Which doesn’t stop it from happening. There are many angry, troubled people in the world. You have problems, and you deal with them as best as you can, but since you do so without a gun and without involving others, you are not newsworthy. When did killing bystanders become a glamorous occupation?
The Virginia Tech shooting marked a watershed moment for old and new media. Read America’s first user-generated confession.
J.R.R. Tolkien, who died in 1973, has a new book out. The Children of Hurin was first written in 1919, but Tolkien kept rewriting it, and variations have appeared in his other works. This is the first stand-alone version, edited by Christopher Tolkien (He who jealously guards father’s estate. Well there’s this bar staffed with little people…).
According to the Washington Post book review by Elizabeth Hand (you have to register to read it), the events in The Children of Hurin take place 6,000 years before the Council of Elrond. Men and Elves are at war with the forces of Morgoth (Sauron’s boss). The hero Turin grows up among the Elves after his father is imprisoned by Morgoth.
“The House of Húrin matches that of Atreus in curses coming home to roost upon doomed and sometimes innocent family members. Readers looking for happy endings will find none in this book. Instead, there is grand, epic storytelling and a reminder, if one was needed, of Tolkien’s genius in creating an imaginary world that both reflects and deepens a sense of our own mythic past, the now-forgotten battles and legends that gave birth to the Aeneid, the Old Testament, the Oresteia, the Elder Eddas and the Mabinogion, Beowulf and Paradise Lost.”
It’s official: Foster, a film by Brillante Mendoza (Masahista/The Masseur), will be screened at the Directors’ Fortnight during the Cannes Film Festival. Foster was written by Ralston Jover (Kubrador/The Bet Collector) and produced by Robbie Tan for Seiko Films (Bridal Shower. Seiko also produced those wonderful movies from the ’80s and ’90s including Huwag Mong Buhayin Ang Bangkay/Don’t Reanimate the Corpse and Patikim Ng Pinya/Taste the Pineapple, and I mention these in an admiring rather than snarky manner.) Foster follows a professional foster mother played by Cherry Pie Picache on the day that she has to hand over her ward, Tisoy, to his American adoptive parents. Mendoza, whose film Masahista won at Locarno a couple of years ago, takes an almost documentary approach to the emotionally-charged subject matter, and gets fine performances out of Picache, Jiro Manio as her natural child, and the rest of the cast. There’s some impressive camera work in a congested neighborhood; my compliments to the crowd wranglers (This is the Feelypeens: Everyone wants to be in the shot).
1. Sunset Boulevard, written and directed by Billy Wilder, with Gloria Swanson, William Holden, and Erich von Stroheim as the butler.
2. 8 1/2, written and directed by Federico Fellini, with Marcello Mastroianni as his stand-in.
3. Stardoom, directed by Lino Brocka, starring Lolita Rodriguez and Walter Navarro.
4. Day for Night by Francois Truffaut, starring Jean-Pierre Leaud, Jean-Paul Aumont, and Jacqueline Bisset.
5. Pagdating Sa Dulo by Ishmael Bernal, starring Rita Gomez and Vic Vargas.
6. The Bad and the Beautiful, directed by Vincente Minnelli, starring Kirk Douglas, Walter Pidgeon, Lana Turner.
7. Singin’ In The Rain, directed by Stanley Donen, starring Gene Kelly, Donald O’Connor, Debbie Reynolds.
8. Pinoy Blonde, directed by Peque Gallaga, starring Epy and Boy2 Quizon.
9. The Dreamers, directed by Bernardo Bertolucci, starring Eva Green.
10. Cinema Paradiso by Giuseppe Tornatore, starring Philippe Noiret as Alfredo the old projectionist.
Winners will be notified by email. Prizes can be claimed at Anvil Publishing during office hours next week. (I’ll be at the World Book Day fair at Instituto Cervantes this afternoon in case you want books signed. I mean my books, not other authors’.)
You want to know how they did those long takes in Alfonso Cuaron’s amazing movie Children of Men (Emmanuel Lubezki was DP)? Here.
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