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Reader Imma made these earrings for me out of earring parts. I thought they were interesting but lacked something so I rummaged among my old earrings for that something. That’s when I found a favorite pair of earrings I hadn’t worn in years.

Now they’re strange enough. Thanks for the earrings.

Technically the servants in the Sharon/Gabby households might be described as poor people, but they’re not so much characters as signifiers of wealth, part of the production design.

Philippine cinema has always been obsessed with class. This is to be expected since Philippine society is extremely class-obsessed: everyone wants to look rich (hence the demand for skin-whitening products and luxury goods) because everyone looks down on the poor—especially the poor. In Tagalog movies the rich boy/girl is always falling in love with the poor girl/boy and defying his/her snooty family in order to be with the beloved. These movies always end happily—the audience must be assured that true love is the solution to the class struggle (very Christian, if you think about it).

I suppose rich people marry poor people in real life, but with less frequency than they do in the movies (and by rich we mean people whose net worth is not substantially affected by fluctuations in the exchange rate). Also, these poor are more properly termed ex-poor—many of them have become movie/TV stars, basketball players, and beauty queens.

In the early Sharon-Gabby movies people meet at polo matches, take private planes to visit their haciendas, and hang out on their yachts. Sharon Cuneta was very effective in these early roles because she was essentially playing herself: a rich girl who spoke fluent English and had the colegiala mannerisms. There was almost no acting required. It was later, when she became a Serious Actress, that the performances began to strain credulity. Consider the Lino Brocka komiks melodrama Pasan Ko Ang Daigdig (I Carry the World, or as we referred to it, Atlas), in which Sharon literally carried her “mother” on her back as she poked among the stinking garbage heaps on Smoky Mountain.

Clearly she was more comfortable on a yacht. Unfortunately the local definition of “serious actress” requires the performer to endure the most horrific torments. Only then will she gain critical “respect”.

Going back to P.S. I Love You, which I recently saw in an execrable Viva DVD release that makes us yearn for the clarity and quality of pirate downloads, Boots Anson Roa finds out that her daughter is dating Eddie Garcia’s son. She forbids Sharon from seeing Gabby.

Gabby is reduced to staking out Sharon’s house, which has a huge Arturo Luz sculpture (I think) out front, enrolling in her summer cooking class, and stalking the beloved as she accompanies her mom to play golf.

Admittedly the obstacle to true love is flimsy. No one believes for a second that Sharon and Gabby will not end up together. And just before the movie hits the two-hour mark, all barriers are toppled. “I’ll be at the hacienda as soon as I can,” Gabby tells Sharon on the phone.

“Take the plane,” Eddie Garcia, says, “it’s faster.” This is my favorite line in the movie. I have taken to using it in ordinary conversation. “The traffic on Edsa is awful.” “Take the plane. It’s faster.”

As Gabby’s plane lands, Sharon gallops towards him on her horse. Bursting with emotion, they leap from their respective modes of transportation, and run

run run into each other’s arms. Love me, love my pilot/horse. It beats taking the MRT.

Photo: Maggie Renzi and John Sayles

John Sayles is one of America’s most illustrious independent film directors. His movies include Passion Fish, The Secret of Roan Inish, Lone Star, and the forthcoming Amigo, a film set in the Philippine-American War and shot entirely in Bohol with a Filipino cast and crew. Sayles is an Academy Award-nominated screenwriter, a National Book Award-nominated novelist, and recipient of a MacArthur Foundation genius grant. His work has been described as politically astute, dramatically gripping, and profoundly humanist.

Recently we talked to John and his producer and partner Maggie Renzi about working in the Philippines and about his status as the ultimate Hollywood outsider.

What have you got against Hollywood?

John Sayles: It’s almost a waste of time having anything against Hollywood because there’s kind of no “there” there. Occasionally there are moments, the Academy Awards being one of them, where there is an entity you can resent, but since the big studios disappeared it’s really a bunch of corporations. They do things besides movies, and they have a few people they hire to play with this movie thing because sometimes there’s some money in it. For me, what they do well is not what we do.

To make a living I make movies for them, when I can get a job, so I don’t have anything against them in that way. Most of the people I work with out there, I actually like quite a bit. It’s just that what the corporate world is trying to do more and more is to find the least common denominator and spend the least amount of money they possibly can. So the quality of movies has gone down, and like a lot of industries the concern is, “Can we cut costs and still have people buy it?”

If they can, they’re gonna do that. There’s acceptance of that, and basically people get to work if they make a lot of money. So there are some people making really good movies, and they’ll get to do that as long as their movies make enough money.

When the writers’ strike was on two years ago, I talked to the guys on the central committee. They went to the first meeting with the producers, and on the other side of the table there was not a single person from the movie industry. They were all lawyers from the big corporations. It wasn’t even up to the studio moguls, such as they are, to make decisions anymore.

So it’s kind of useless to be resentful of them—it’s their business and they’ve painted themselves into a corner.

The full text in Emotional Weather Report, today in the Philippine Star.

Vintage frames should always come from thrift stores, flea markets, junk shops and rummage sales. The archaeological element is a large part of their charm.

Today in anthropology we tackle a film from the early oeuvre of Sharon Cuneta: P.S. I Love You, her second team-up with Gabby Concepcion, directed by Eddie Garcia, yes, the actor.

Look, up in the sky, it’s a bird! It’s a plane! A private plane bearing businessman Eddie Garcia in a white suit. He has come to Boots Anson Roa’s hacienda to personally remind her that her P50 million loan is due. Boots Anson Roa suspects that he is tormenting her out of revenge: they used to be a couple, but she dumped him for the richer man that her parents approved of. Since then he has gotten fabulously wealthy. This is a common theme in Filipino movies: the person you reject goes on to become hysterically rich. I call it the Beh, Buti Nga. The ex-lovers are both widowed, a state that the movie wisely declines to exploit.

Boots Anson Roa discusses her financial troubles with her friend Barbara Perez, who reminds her that she and her husband are good friends of Eddie Garcia’s, especially before his wife died in a plane crass. In fact they are hoping that Eddie Garcia’s son and their daughter will end up together. Barbara Perez offers to negotiate terms with Eddie Garcia on Boots Anson Roa’s behalf.

Meanwhile Boots Anson Roa’s daughter Sharon Cuneta meets Gabby Concepcion after his polo match, and she immediately falls in hate at first sight. In Tagalog movies this means she is really mad about him. Also, if someone throw up in a Tagalog movie it means she is pregnant. No one ever has food poisoning or nausea. Fortunately no one onscreen throws up. Of course Gabby Concepcion turns out to be the son of Eddie Garcia. What a coincidence! If you think about it, 96.4 percent of movie plots rely on stunning coincidence.

But Sharon’s friend Lampel Luis, the daughter of Barbara Perez, is kind of interested in Gabby. She invites him to the den to watch Deep Throat, the Betamax copy of which she has mislabeled as The Deep. Attention young readers: Betamax is a video format that only caught on in the Philippines and Cuba, Deep Throat is a famous porn flick, and The Deep is a movie with sharks and wet T-shirts.

Gabby does not get it: he thinks they are viewing the porno out of a shared interest in the cinema. He’s like my gay friend who was working out at a gym when a trainer approached him and said, “Sir, paano ba makipag-relasyon sa bakla?” (How do you have a relationship with a gay man?) “Was he coming on to me?” my friend asked.

“No,” we assured him, “He was doing research for his sociology dissertation.”

“Then he started telling me about his five children.”

“Then he was not looking for a relationship, he was looking for an ATM.”

Lampel, Gabby, and Sharon go to Matabungkay Beach, where everyone’s running around in a swimsuit but Sharon is always completely covered up in a T-shirt and jeans. This may seem unnatural and risible, but I contend that this is one of the reasons that Sharon became a megastar. She knew she was not the hottest girl on the screen, she was insecure about her weight, it showed, and the audience responded to that because face it, We are all insecure about our looks and weight. Everyone, especially the gorgeous, because they know that their beauty could vanish in an instant.

(I just saw the weirdest poster: Irresistible Injectables! It was for a sale on botox, glutathione and other cosmetic treatments, and there was an accompanying photo of a needle approaching someone’s face. Clearly targeting the masochist market.)

So Gabby proceeds to fall for Sharon, which seems unlikely until you consider that she’s the only female in the place who isn’t drooling all over him. (This is an excellent stratagem, write it down.) Lampel snatches away the flower that Gabby has presented to Sharon, raising our hopes that she will be the Bella Flores/Zeny Zabala contravida in the equation. However, Lampel’s character disappoints us by turning out to be a decent human being. When Joel Alano appears she goes off with him, completely forgetting Gabby.

(Joel Alano was my classmate in UP. He suddenly died in second or third year. Continuing the Sharon connection, Francis Pangilinan was my classmate in UP. I would answer the teacher’s question, then he would reframe my answer, and the teacher would like his answer better.)

Back in Manila, Sharon and Gabby start going out. They go to the Aviary in Greenbelt Park where she sketches birds. For young readers: the Aviary in Greenbelt Park housed a collection of exotic birds. After walking around the Aviary we would go to the nearby Shakey’s which had the piano and banjo players and put on those silly cork hats.

Next: There are no poor people in the early Sharon movies.

Rhythm and Blues pioneer Sugar Pie de Santo was born in Brooklyn in 1935 to a Filipino father and an African-American mother and christened Umpeleya Marsema Balinton. (Umpeleya from ‘ampalaya’?) As a kid ‘Peliya’ hung out with a neighbor named Jamesetta Hawkins, who became the R&B legend Etta James. Peliya took to entering singing contests in San Franciso, and she won so often that she was asked to stop joining. The full story is here.

Thanks to Ige for the alert.