#FINALLY people are seeing the old Hollywood glamour she embodies

[butmakeitgayblog]

She is ✨Art✨

[your-lips-are-very-red]

St. Vincent x Emma Madden Interview

This is the text from the St. Vincent interview that Emma Madden was asked to not use. Since Miss Madden has decided to take it down, I wanted it to be available somewhere online - in case she manages to get all the cached versions taken down, too. 

SOURCE: https://archive.is/wFkLN

About a fortnight ago I was commissioned to interview St. Vincent, an artist I have been inspired by, impressed by, turned on by, compelled by, curious of, in awe of, occasionally suspicious of—for the better half of a decade. I try not to think about other journalists too much, but St. Vincent has developed a reputation for intimidating us. For her last press cycle, she made her interviewers crawl into a pink box; she would play a pre-recorded message on a tape recorder if a question bored or irked her. I found that quite funny—irresistibly imperious—but I considered it an act of degradation rather than an interesting switch of power. I love famous people but I also find them quite silly, like a Schnauzer wearing a bowtie.

  I didn’t know why, but for around two hours after our call ended, I was reeling with nervous energy. I was vocalising it and trying to get to the other side of it, the way I sing songs when I’m walking through a haunted house. I woke up the next morning with a voice message from the editor who assigned this piece. I am fond of this person and I will not name them. MBC, the team in charge of St. Vincent’s publicity (which is helmed by Barbara Charone, who also works for Madonna, and is considered one of the more powerful and intimidating publicists in the industry) had been on the phone to this editor, demanding the piece be pulled. My editor’s words: “They said she’s terrified of this interview coming out.” The publication didn’t have a leg to stand on.

"Terrified"? That word didn't seem to square. I thought I had done a not-so-good job the night before. I ended the call thinking I hadn’t asked the right questions. St. Vincent and I didn’t feel like a good match in conversation (or at least not in this conversational setup set-up, for which I was given thirty minutes, and continual reminders from the person on St. Vincent’s team, who remained on the call with us, that we’d need to wrap up well in time for St. Vincent’s Instagram Live session with Paul McCartney, which directly followed our interview.) St. Vincent tended to interpret my questions in bad faith. I assumed she believed me to be a Bad Reader; presumptuous, judgemental, simple, anti-curious—all qualities that her latest album ‘Daddy’s Home’, which I’ve interpreted as a counter to the folly, inadequacy and meretriciousness of moral purity—counters. Anyway, she read me wrong. I love Lana Del Rey.

  I got a call from MBC later that morning by a man who sounded quite nervous. I told him I was confused, I asked him what the matter seemed to be. He wasn't totally sure, he said, "she found the interview aggressive." Aggressive? I complimented her and cowed to her and laughed at her jokes. "Well, the message has been passed down a line of many messengers, she might not have actually said that." The man on the phone said that this—one of his artists demanding an interview to be pulled—had never happened to him before. It hadn't happened to me either. I felt annoyed by how easy it was for St. Vincent to kill something I had researched and expected money for. But the interview started to seem valuable to me after I was told that she didn't want it out in the world. "Can we draw a line under this and just kill the piece here?" said the man on the phone.

Below is the full transcript of my interview with St. Vincent (save for a short and-forth about Tool which didn’t make sense when turned into text). My questions are in bold, her responses are in italics.

**for the sake of this post, Madden’s questions are bold and Annie’s answers are not** Hi, how are you? Good how’s it going?

Not too bad. What’s your mood for today? My mood for today, well it’s good, I’m getting on an Instagram Live chat with Paul McCartney in a couple minutes so my mood is a little bit nervous but good.

I’m excited to talk about this album, I think it has a sick sense of humor that I appreciate a lot. I’ve had a really fun time listening to it.

Oh I’m glad, thank you.

I’m sensing there’s kind of a 70s trend at the moment in terms of fashion and the ways some other bands are presenting themselves. Is that something you were anticipating, is that something you feel you belong to, or was it just kind of accidental?

Accidental.

Do you feel bummed about that? No I don’t, I always just kind of do my own thing.

Do you think there’s a reason why people might be inspired by the 70s today? Do you see an analog with our world today and with the 70s? I guess this album is based in 1973, right?

Between ‘71 and ‘76, so post flower children idealism, post the Summer of Love hangover, but pre escapism of gay disco and pre nihilism of punk. Life was bad but music was good, kind of vibe.

Kind of when the trash aesthetic was taking hold, especially by Andy Warhol. Does trash inspire you? Um like literal rubbish?

No like the trash aesthetic, I guess in the PR you call it sleazy, grimy. Yeah but the difference with sleazy is that sleazy tries to present as glamorous but there’s something off, trash is just trash. I don’t know if trash pretends to be anything other.

  Can you have glamour without sleaze? Sure, absolutely. I mean, like the 20s Greta Garbo way, I would say Golden Era Hollywood, I mean behind the scenes it was probably a nightmare but you look at it and it is very genuinely shiny and beautiful.

I love the sitar on this album especially on ‘Down’, the riff is so sick. How did you get to the sitar? Well it’s not a sitar per se, it’s a choral electric sitar guitar and so it was I think George Harrison made them kind of popular in the ‘60s, I think the one I have is from ’67 and it plays like a guitar but it has a resonating body on it so it sounds sitar-esque. It was made very famous in the Steely Dan Do it Again solo.

  I guess the main PR bulletin point of this album is about your dad coming out of jail. Why did you want that to be the main way that people might read this album? More like an entry point, the title Daddy’s Home to me I mean one, it is literal but also it’s funny and cringy and pervy and also I think more than anything kind of refers to my own transformation into Daddy as it were. Yeah it’s probably not anything I would’ve really thrown out there except that it was made public without my consent but I didn’t really get to tell that side of the story and I don’t bring it up for sympathy. It simply is my story, it’s not intended to be indicative of necessarily anything, it’s just my story and I was gonna tell it with humor and compassion, all of that.

Did you anticipate a lack of sympathy for your dad’s crimes and the subject matter of this album and did that factor into how you shaped this record? That’s the tail wagging the dog my dear. No, no. A lack of sympathy, well, which crime would be the most sympathetic? I didn’t do anything, I’m simply writing about something that I think on some level everyone who’s ever had a parent can understand in the sense of you’re often going “How much of you am I?” and we kind of do identity projection through all these things so no, it’s again, it’s not really there for anything other than my own anecdotal story.

At what point did you transform into this daddy character? For how much of your adult life have you been the daddy? Oh I would just say over the past few years, I’ve just been quite a bit more leaned back and shoulder shrug and say let’s just sit down in the old beat up leather armchair and have a tequila and chat it out you know. Life is complicated, human beings are complicated and I wanted to just write stories about flawed people. There’s a whole lot of judgement going around and not a whole lot of understanding. And judgement is anti-curious. There are some people, perhaps the more sanctimonious and morally pure, who might not be interested in an artist’s reflection on their father’s white collar crimes. Do you have much sympathy for those kinds of people? I mean I think I can get sympathy for all people. If that is the reason why they decide not to spend 46 minutes with my work then I’m sure there’s plenty of other work out there for them that they can enjoy that is morally pure. They should find pure work from pure people and enjoy it.

I guess last year’s riots brought abolition towards the mainstream, during the time you were making this record, which is partially about your father’s time in prison. How did that square with your thoughts on prison and the US carceral system? Well I have plenty of thoughts on it, I’m not totally sure how it’s relevant to this.

Well I was wondering if you have a standpoint on it or if you’d rather just be ambiguous? I have so many thoughts and opinions, I don’t presume that my thoughts and opinions are relevant on every subject though. I don’t have that much hubris.

I understand. I was wondering about the Candy Darling inspiration, how does she come into the fold? Oh I just, Candy Darling to me is such a beautiful heroine in that she came from Queens and went not geographically far but worlds away to Manhattan and became her true self and in that particular kind of combination of glamour and toughness, where you feel like her name should be on the marquee and yet she could stick you with a shiv if you said the wrong thing. And I just find her inspiring and really beautiful, and I didn’t know but I found out a friend of mine was close with her and was at her bedside when she died so I was just picturing Candy Darling’s ascent to heaven as taking the final uptown train.

Wow. Did you feel like you were embodying her on this album or presenting as her? No not as such, but definitely taking inspiration from some of her energy for sure. I do hear a bit of her voice on the title track, I was wondering if you were kind of modeling your voice after her? On Daddy’s Home? Oh, no.

I love the sultriness of that song, even though it’s just about signing autographs in prison. I found it really funny. Yeah it’s definitely again, I’m writing about my own story with humor and compassion and self-effacement, all that.

Do you see this album as a movement, does it have a narrative? Yeah. It’s a full story, it’s a full collection of short stories. It has a shape and everything.

That’s just how I listened to this album, as a series of short stories. I was wondering how they interlink in your mind? I guess you have the person on Broadway, you have your dad, you have the person who’s maybe thinking of having a baby or not having a baby. I just could write stories of flawed people doing their best to get by because I’ve been most of the people on this album at one point of my life or another. And again I could write about them without condemnation and judgement just, here we are.

Are you a nostalgic person? No not generally.

Not even during the creation of this album? I’m thinking of the humming tracks, your mum cooking in the kitchen. Not exactly, I think that this particular kind of music with its sophistication and some of the jazz language in the harmony and its sense of time, it was a kind of music that I’d loved for so long but never really dipped into myself, and I think we kind of learn things a lot of times when we’re ready to, and I think I was kind of ready to learn some of the lessons that this kind of music had to teach me.

Do you think about shame a lot? Um, I think that shame is the reason why most people do the violence that they do. I think violence is an expression of impotence.

What was it about the post-idealist era in particular that you were drawn to, why not go through the flower power utopia sort of 60s route? I think that there’s an intellectual orthodoxy that is involved in utopian thinking and a lot of times it doesn’t allow for either a complex set of incentives or it doesn’t allow for the totality of human nature in its equation, and then it fails and because the structure of any kind of power is really complicated so I think in general the desire… and I understand that we’re living in, in some ways, I think just with the internet part of it, in some ways unprecedented times. And I understand people’s desire for certainty in times economic strife, cultural upheaval, all this stuff. I completely understand the desire for certainty. But I don’t think it’s as simple as demanding moral purity and punishing anyone who doesn’t fix the orthodox criteria. I understand the desire but I’m not sure it’s gonna get to where I think we want to be, which is just general more equality, whether it’s wealth equality, wealth disparity, all that kind of stuff I just think the matrices of power are really complicated.

You were saying earlier about Daddy and how you were thinking about your dad and the overlap between you two and how we all possibly become our parents. I was wondering how you consolidate the influences of your parents? I don’t know anything about them obviously but I know that your mum was a social worker, your dad was an entrepreneur, and those seem like two totally opposing worlds. Yes, my mother is a social worker and she instilled in all of us I think the idea that the work we do should be meaningful and she’s definitely really humanistic and that kind of thinking I think, that had an impression on me. My dad wasn’t an entrepreneur, my dad was a stock broker I think? But I grew up with my mom and my stepdad and my stepdad was a very different kind of guy, just was an army brat and grew up really poor, and was just coming from a different mindset and they’re just very different kinds of people. Not a judgement thing, just very different. Yeah my mom definitely errs on the very humble side. And yeah, my dad is a complicated, charismatic person who’s also very intelligent, and who went down a path that was full of consequence. Yeah they’re really, really different people so it’s funny to kind of square who was who.

What does your dad think of this album? Oh he loves it!

Yay, that’s good to know. Did you ever rebel against your dad’s lifestyle growing up as a teenager? I didn’t grow up with him, and he was in Tulsa Oklahoma. I don’t know what lifestyle you’re necessarily presuming but..

No I’m not presuming, just wanted a little background on your relationship with him I guess. So he wasn’t in your life that much where you were younger? I would go and we would spend summers there and Christmas, but I grew up in Dallas for the most part with my mom and my stepdad.

Was this album in any way an opportunity to get closer to your dad? Not in any way consciously, no.

  But are you finding with age and with time you’re getting closer to him? Well him being out of prison helps in terms of just proximity. Yeah, here’s what I’m finding. I’m finding that we live by the stories that we tell ourselves and that sometimes we realize that the story we’ve been telling ourselves for a long time was either wrong or lacked a certain amount of information, and then we have the choice of whether to reject the new information because it’s too painful to rethink the story that we’ve been telling ourselves, or assimilate the new information and go, wow life is complicated, this is an interesting wrinkle. I choose to do the latter.

  Yeah, it’s very easy to bullshit yourself, right? Yeah, it's true in all kind of ways you know?

This story, the story of your dad, it almost seems redemptive. I mean I would say so, and that’s not in any way what I intended and you know, a lot of times when you’re making something, I mean you’re a writer you know, you have the compulsion to make it but you’re not necessarily sure where it’s coming from or why or any of those kind of questions, but I think there is the possibility of redemption, I do, I think there is the possibility of people to change and I think there is a possibility of things like forgiveness and growth. And if I didn’t think that there was a possibility for human beings to change, to grow, to take in new information and then continue to write their story, then I don’t know what we’d really be doing, you know? And that’s not really the world I want to live in, we’re a moving picture we’re not a still photograph.

Do you want to try and change the world, do you feel like you have that power, do you feel hopeful that there can be a better future? Sorry for the cheesy language. No, I mean I don’t think that many people would accuse me of being an optimist in a lot of ways, and I don’t think in terms of my “power to change the world” I mean I think all I can do is try to study the human condition and write about the human condition in some way that resonates and then maybe people will hear that and that will resonate with them and I think that ultimately the best case scenario for music is empathy because it’s like psychologically this is why we like to listen to stories or this is why we like to watch movies is so we can go down the empathy exercise and you can see yourself as that person in the film, see someone who isn’t like you in any way, shape or form from a just box ticking kind of way, but then realize oh, we’re very similar in some ways or what would I do if I was in that situation, we do all these things and we live by these stories and I think those stories well-told can encourage empathy and empathy can go out into the world and have a kind of transformative experience. I don’t really think about, I mean I think once I make a thing and then it’s out in the world and it’s for other people to assimilate or enjoy or not, whatever, however they take it, is absolutely fine by me. But it’s for them, it’s not my place in any way to say how people should or should not enjoy it or assimilate it.

Yeah the reason I brought up prison abolition earlier is because that might be how some people contextualize this album. I would say that that’s one lens. That to me would not be the main lens.

[I’m told to wrap it up]

Yeah let’s wrap up. So Tool cover album next? No, I wish.

Someday I’m hoping. I love Tool.

I feel your Paul McCartney nerves Yeah, I’m gonna go shower.

That’s always a good idea. Okay take care, thank you again for you time Thanks, bye.

[amostexcellentblog]

IYO, which Golden Age stars had the most interesting "will make degrading cameo for food" phases?

Sorry this is so late, but whoa boy that’s a loaded question. Honestly, a lot of silent and classic Hollywood stars had money troubles in their later years because residuals weren’t really a thing until the 50s. Before the television market nobody thought there was a way to consistently make money on old movies so everyone was content to be paid upfront. Then add on a lot of stars grew accustomed to lavish lifestyles and never learned responsible spending and most of them had some degree of financial difficulties after their careers declined. Some of them had a sense of humor about it, for others it was humiliating and there can be a vague sense of exploitation about the whole thing that makes some fans reluctant to talk about these periods.

We should probably begin with Orson Welles, who made what was/is considered the greatest movie of all time, and yet had to take some pretty demeaning work to pay the bills. Like, he really did do a frozen peas commercial. That’s not something the writers of The Critic made up. It exists, it’s on youtube!

Bette Davis famously placed an ad in Variety asking for work when parts dried up. She spent most of the 60s starring in horror movies of declining quality, primarily because she needed money to support he family, but also because she was desperate to work. By the 70s though the Hag Horror fad had passed and she became even more desperate. A 1971 film Bunny O'Hare had her playing an elderly woman who dresses up as a hippie to rob banks on a motorcyle, it was so bad she sued the studio claiming it had damaged her future employment prospects. During this time she also filmed 4 sitcom pilots, and not good ones either. they were for Aaron Spelling, the man behind “Jiggle-TV” (although Davis herself did not jiggle, she still had some pride). The tv show Feud treated this as a sort of tragic time where the woman who once sued Jack Warner for better scripts was so desperate for work she stopped caring about quality. I look at it more as Davis realized that no matter how much dreck she did the public would always consider her a Hollywood Legend, so she was free to stop worrying about her image and just take whatever paid work she could get while playing the movie queen in interviews. 

Another low point was the Disney-sequel Return From Witch Mountain in 1978 where she and Christopher Lee (who took the part just to work with her) played the villains intent on using mind control devices on two super-powered alien kids. To say Davis’s character was as flat as cardboard is an insult to cardboard. She finally got a decent script in the 1980s with The Whales of August opposite Lillian Gish, so she was able to remind everyone how good she could be a few years before her death. Not every star would be so lucky.

Joan Crawford, who must be discussed alongside Davis by Hollywood law, has become, along with Welles, the poster-child for late career humiliation. Like Davis, Crawford spent the 60s doing low budget horror shlock, but somehow her movies always seemed shlockier. She teamed up with William Castle twice, for his Strait-Jacket he let her act like the movie queen she’d once been and she took full advantage. She demanded a limo to drive her to set each day, a role be given to a vice-president of Pepsi (she was on the board) and refused to let him be fired even when it became obvious he couldn’t remember his lines. She insisted on portraying her character as in her 40s despite turning 60 the year it came out, and also played the character as a 20-something in flashbacks. The air conditioning on set was cranked obscenely high because she believed cold air kept her skin from wrinkling.

In 1968 Crawford guest starred on The Lucy Show as a version of herself who liked being out of the public eye (Ha!). Lucille Ball by this point was a terror to work with and she bullied Crawford relentlessly over everything from her dancing to her drinking (which of course just made Crawford drink more). Later that year her daughter Christina was hospitalized, meaning she wouldn’t be able to film her scenes for the daytime soap opera she was in. Crawford, 64 years old, convinced the producers to let her fill in. And they said yes, so for four whole episodes Crawford appeared as a 24 year old girl. And on top of that, she was so drunk she could barely remember her lines. A year later Crawford had what I think is her most interesting TV role. For Rod Serling’s Night Gallery she played a ruthless, blind heiress who will stop at nothing to be able to see. It’s a standard Serling morality play right down to the ironic twist. What so fascinates me is that it marked the professional debut of one Steven Spielberg, although by his own admission he shot the thing like a European art film and had it taken away in editing so it could be re-worked into something presentable on network TV. So you have Crawford, who started her career in the silent era, came to embody the studio system, and remained a movie star into the 1960s, being directed by Spielberg, one of the key directors of the New Hollywood era who went on to create the era of the blockbuster tentpole we live in today. It’s such a fascinating meeting in the middle moment of the woman who ebodied the first half of Hollywood’s history, and the man who embodied its second half.

From there she went on to her final film, 1970′s Trog. She played a scientist investigating a ape-cave man hybrid believed to be the missing link. She was so drunk she had to use cue-cards to read her lines. The movie was so low-budget she had to wear her own clothes and change in an old van. Roger Ebert once said that the difference between Crawford and Davis was that Crawford would agree to make Trog. He wasn’t wrong. She made a handful of TV appearances after that, but then the tabloids published some unflattering pap photos. In the 1930s when she’d been the most beautiful woman in Hollywood she famously told an interviewer “I never go out of my house unless I look like Joan Crawford the movie star, if people want the girl next door they can go next door.” Decades later she lived up to her words, convinced she could no longer look like the glamorous movie queen she cancelled her public appearances and spent the last years of her life in Norma Desmond-like isolation. She died in her New York apartment in 1977 with only her maid and a loyal fan by her side.

This is getting long, but I have to mention Aldo Ray, a big macho man action hero of the 1950s who made a porno in 1979 and spent the 1980s working mostly with cult exploitation filmmaker Fred Olen Ray (no relation). Ray Milland was a hunky leading man in the 40s, spent the 1970s alternating between genuine A-list hits like Love Story and shlock like Frogs and The Thing With Two Heads where he played a racist whose head is grafted onto a black man. Yeah:

Bela Lugosi’s fall from grace has been much covered. He had a huge hit with Dracula but feuded with the studio and soon found himself confined to B-level shlock, eventually finding himself a member of Ed Wood’s stock company. Fan still debate if Wood was exploiting him or helping him. Boris Karloff fared better. He made plenty of low budget dreck for Roger Corman, but he also endeared himself to younger audiences, most notably in How the Grinch Stole Christmas and went out on a high note with Peter Bogdanovich’s directorial debut Targets.

Lastly, we must speak of Veronica Lake. She was a glamour queen of the 40s, famous for her hair style where her long blonde locks were styled to cover one eye, studio publicists dubber her “The Peek-a-Boo Girl.” She made one genuine 4-star must-see classic, Preston Sturges’s Sullivan’s Travels, and some well regarded noirs and comedies, but she was washed up by the 1950s. She was discovered working a a waitress in the 1960s and subsequently told her story on the talk show circuit and later in an autobiography. She decided to use the money she’d earned from various public appearances to produce a comeback vehicle. For some reason, perhaps known only to her, she decided the best movie to relaunch her career was Flesh Feast. A no budget Grade-Z catastrophe where she played a mad scientist developing a breed of flesh eating maggots while moonlighting for an underground organization of escaped Nazis in possession of Hitler’s body. She is charged with reanimating their Führer so they can take over the world. Turns out though, Lake is only doing this to avenge her mother who was subjected to Nazi experiments in the concentration camps. Once old Adolf is alive and kicking again, she throws her flesh eating maggots in his face and laughs maniacally as he dies a second, painful death. Honestly, Lakes delivery of the line “Don’t you like my little maggots?” deserves to go down as one of the all-time camptastic line readings in the history of cinema. But seriously, this movie raises so many questions I can’t even start. Like, if she just agreed to star I could understand, but she was a producer on this, she went all-in on this project, why? Why this of all things?

[mermaidsirennikita]

Favorite Reads 2017

2017 was, all in all, not the greatest year for books (for me personally).  A few follow-ups to series-starters I loved disappointed me; there was a lack of new historical fiction that was truly compelling; YA was very hit or miss.  But there are always exceptions to the years unspoken “rules”, and I found myself reading more thrillers than I had before.  Maybe the bright side of my usual categories (I don’t know that they’re all genres) failing me is that I had to get a bit more adventurous.

In no particular order, my top ten favorite books of the year were as follows...

Crazy Rich Asians by Kevin Kwan.  Rachel is an ABC--American Born Chinese.  Smart, practical, and successful, she’s dating Nicholas Young, quite possibly the man of her dreams--but there’s a bit of mystery about him.  So when Nick brings her to his family home in Singapore to attend his friend’s wedding, she’s shocked to discover that he’s the heir to a fabulous fortune, hailing from one of the most high-profile and wealthy families in Asia, or perhaps even the world.  Everyone is out to break up Rachel and Nick, it seems; but especially his mother, the conniving and clever matriarch Eleanor.  This is one of the most addictive books I’ve ever read, and the rest of the trilogy thankfully measures up.  God, I was hooked; and it’s nothing like what I expected.  There are vapid characters, sure, but this isn’t Gossip Girl--the book is wickedly smart, and Kwan seems to make great insights about “crazy rich Asian culture” without ever seeming sanctimonious.  The characters are great--you root for Nick and Rachel’s romance while falling in love with his Machiavellian mother, and for that matter his tragic It Girl cousin Astrid.  Unfortunately, this book has been categorized by some as trashy... and sure, at times it is.  But it’s also one of the best books I’ve read in a long time.

Wintersong by S. Jae-Jones.  In nineteenth century Europe, Liesl is a gifted composer.  But she’s overshadowed by her brother Josef, a musician, and their beautiful sister Kathe.  As a child, Liesl knew the Goblin King; and she meets him again as a young woman, stealing her sister away from the mortal world.  Liesl makes a bargain with the Goblin King: if he returns Kathe, Liesl will become his bride.  The Goblin King--enchanted with her music--whisks her away to his realm, creating a world of delights that’s hard for Liesl to resist.  This book is basically everything a grown woman could want Labyrinth to be.  Liesl and the Goblin King do have a captivating romance, but it’s not so much insta-love as I would say it’s a sexual awakening.  I don’t think she’s starry-eyed; she’s more attracted to him physically, and experiencing the thrill of having someone return that attraction for the first time.  So much of the book is about passion--the Goblin King’s passion for Liesl, their shared passion for her music, the Fair Folk’s passion in general for things that they can’t have.  It’s a melancholy, haunting book with just the right side of indulgence to make it impossible for me to resist.

Final Girls by Riley Sager.  After surviving a massacre that took all of her friends during a college cabin trip, Quincy is a part of what the press calls “the Final Girls”.  Lisa survived a sorority girl slaying, while Sam was nearly murdered at the motel she worked at.  But the three don’t really interact, as Quincy is determined to live a normal life.  She doesn’t even remember what happened to her on the night of the Pine Cottage murders.  That all changes when Lisa is found dead of a supposed suicide, and Sam shows up on Quincy’s doorstep.  Quincy needs to remember what happened all those years ago--before it’s too late.  This book is far from your run of the mill thriller, with unexpected twists and a feminist slant.  It’s almost a satire of slasher tropes--except the plot is a bit too coherent for a satire, and everything is a little too real.  I blazed through it, and wasn’t exactly sure of what happened until the very end.

Warcross by Marie Lu.  Teenager Emika Chen makes her living as a bounty hunter--specifically, tracking down people who illegally bet on Warcross, the virtual reality game that’s taken the world by storm.  Of course, Emika’s hacks in the game aren’t exactly legal either, so when she’s summoned to Tokyo by the game’s creator, billionaire Hideo Tanaka, she assumes the worst.  But Hideo has a proposition for her: if she can find out who’s at the heart of a dangerous security glitch in the game, the payout will be huge.  But as Emika competes undercover, she realizes that the stakes--personal and professional--are much higher than she thought.  This is one of those books that really surprised me. You don’t have to be a gamer to follow “Warcross”--which also, surprise, has a great romance to go along with it--but the parts of the story that pertain to the game are just as compelling as the bounty hunting plot.  What pleased me most, however, was the ending; nothing is as it seems in this book, and the characters are much grayer than you might imagine.

Girls Made of Snow and Glass by Melissa Bashardoust.  This retelling of Snow White focuses on the relationship between Lynet, our princess, and Mina, her wicked stepmother.  Lynet is the living embodiment of her dead mother, and recently made the queen of the southern territories by her father--which displaces Mina, of the southern territories and devoted to her homeland.  What Lynet doesn’t know, as we’re told the story of Mina’s past, is that she was made from snow by Mina’s alchemist father--who, using the same magic, saved Mina’s life by making her a heart of glass. Mina believes herself incapable of love, and despite her closeness to Lynet, she grows increasingly threatened by the girl.  This fairy tale is decidedly dark--but it’s clear that this isn’t darkness of the sake of darkness.  Rather, we see the good and bad in both Mina and Lynet, two women driven apart by the machinations of men--but perhaps not permanently.  

An Enchantment of Ravens by Margaret Rogerson.  The painter Isobel caters to a specific clientele: the fair folk.  Incapable of “craft”, they treasure Isobel’s paintings, but are feared for their predatory and capricious ways.  Isobel’s always been careful around the fair folk, but slips up when she paints the autumn prince, Rook, accidentally depicting sorrow in his eyes.  This creates a great weakness for Rook, who takes her on a journey to the autumnlands, so that she can stand trial and dispel the notions of any mortality in Rook.  Of course, there is the issue of their attraction to each other--because if a mortal and a fairy fall in love, their lives will be forfeit.  This is a lovely fairy tale, with a romance that is much more hard-won and realistic than what I expected from the summary.  While Rook is just as fanciful as you’d expect a fairy to be, Isobel has her feet planted in reality, and I love a story in which the main character really, really doesn’t want to fall in love.  This book depicts the fair folk with just the right balance of fear and whimsy, and I dare you to read it without falling for the world.

Flame in the Mist by Renee Ahdieh.  The daughter of a samurai, cunning Mariko is on her way to meet her betrothed, a prince.  Along the way, her party is attacked by a group of bandits paid to assassinate Mariko--killing her servants along the way.  Disguising herself as a boy, she infiltrates the bandits’ group--known as the Black Clan--determined to find who was sent to kill her, and get revenge.  This retelling of “Mulan” takes on gender roles in a fantasy realm influenced by Japanese history, with Mariko standing as a strong female character, but also a girl.  Renee Ahdieh is great at building these history-based fantasy worlds--and she’s not too shabby when it comes to the romance department, either.

Caraval by Stephanie Garber.  Scarlett and Tella live a sheltered existence, dominated by their abusive father.  Scarlett--the responsible one--has always dreamed of going to Caraval, the magical circus-like show that sucks the audience into the game.  In an effort to make her sister relax, Tella takes Scarlett to Caraval, only to get swept up in its magic.  The object of this year’s game?  To find Tella.  So Scarlett joins a host of people looking for her sister--but the line between reality and fantasy on the island is blurred, and Caraval may turn out to be just as dangerous as it looks.  This is the sort of dreamy fantasy that is just delicious to read, especially during cold weather.  

The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid.  Unknown journalist Monique is stunned when she’s selected to interview the notoriously private movie star Evelyn Hugo, famous for her beauty, talent, and seven husbands.  As Monique is drawn into Evelyn’s story, she becomes more and more curious about why Evelyn chose her, and who the real love of Evelyn’s life was.  Evelyn is clearly based on Elizabeth Taylor in some ways, but the story is really all her own.  While Evelyn’s tale is obviously more compelling than Monique’s, they satisfyingly come together in a way I didn’t quite expect.  Really, at its heart this is a love story; but it’s also quite the piece of Old Hollywood glamour, with all the gossip and controversy that you’d expect.

The Language of Thorns by Leigh Bardugo.  This anthology of fairy tales is set in Leigh Bardugo’s grishaverse, but all take a little bit from those that you might be familiar with.  They’re dark and sensual, some of them a little gory.  But what really got me is that these are stories I can really see the characters from Bardugo’s other books telling.  The world feels fully realized, the morals complex but solid and a little dated, but with reason.  Read this if you want to be transported and a little spellbound.

[vintage1981]

#FlashbackFriday to Jess Franco’s Faceless/Gorezone Issue 6

Toward the end of the decade of decadence (aka the 80s) exploitation auteur Jess Franco attempted to break into the commercial horror market. Faceless is the most notable production, with a cast that brings together ex-porn actress (and Jean Rollin regular) Brigitte Lahaie, British genre icon Caroline Munro, German character actor Anton Diffring, Luchino Visconti muse Helmut Berger, and seventies US TV and film superstar, Telly Savalas! Although still a low budget affair, this Rene Chateau production does offer a slick and glamourous look, unlike anything typically seen in a Jess Franco production.

Dr Frank Flamand (Helmut Berger) runs a posh clinic that specialises in expensive beauty treatments and quack "youth-enhancing" therapies for the excessively rich and vain. What his pampered clients do not know though is that many of their treatments are developed at the expense of kidnapped experimental subjects who are kept prisoner in the soundproof padded cells behind a locked door deep within the labyrinthine corridors of the clinic!

When a dissatisfied patient (who was horribly scarred during bungled plastic surgery) attempts to gain revenge by throwing acid in Flamand's face, she instead hits his beautiful sister, Ingrid (Christiane Jean) and badly disfigures her. Flamand vows to restore the beauty of his beloved sister and, together with his ice-cold assistant (and lover) Nathalie (Brigitte Lahaie), organises the kidnapping of coke-addicted model Barbara Hallen (Caroline Munro) with the intention of using her in a new face-transplant operation he intends to develop for his sisters benefit. Barbara is the daughter of wealthy industrialist Terry Hallen (Telly Savalas) and after his daughter's disappearance, Hallen hires American private detective Sam Morgan (Chris Mitchum) to find her. Meanwhile, Flamand and Nathalie consult Dr. Karl Heinz Mozer (Anton Diffring), an ex-Nazi associate of Flamand's mentor Dr Orloff (Howard Vernon), and employ him to help them experiment on more kidnapped victims in their attempts to perfect the complicated operation.

Gorezone Issue 6: Caroline Does Splatter by Steve Swires

Fantasy films’ first lady has been systematically subjected to an onslaught of cinematic indignities — stalked by slashers, menaced by madmen and terrorized by tormentors. Rarely, however, has she been asked to exercise her acting ability; usually, she is merely required to look helpless, scream her lungs out and defer to the heroics of her male co-stars.

Finally, after two decades of dramatic dues-paying in such creatively constrained circumstances, Caroline Munro feels confident enough to test her talent. A veteran of 13 consecutive genre excursions— including Dracula A.D. 1972, Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter, Maniac and The Last Horror Film — she recently ended her involuntary screen hiatus by starring in two new English-language European horror movies, Paul Naschy’s Spanish-lensed The Howl of the Devil and Jess Franco’s French Faceless. Reaching beyond the limitations of her cult status, she also made her first non-genre appearance in 20 years, in the British TV movie Maigret.

Selected by her Slaughter High collaborators Peter Litten and George Dugdale to play the female lead in their proposed big-budget production of Dr. Who: The Movie as well as the title role in their unorthodox multimedia creation Roxscene, Munro grew increasingly restless as both major projects were delayed by a lengthy development process. Anxious to resume her acting career after four years as hostess of the popular British TV game/variety series 3-2-1, she gratefully accepted the unexpected offers of overseas employment.

“The more I’m on camera, the better it is for me,” the British actress reasons, relaxing one morning in her London flat. “As with an athlete or a dancer, an actor must keep training. Since Doctor Who and Roxscene have yet to reach fruition. The Howl of the Devil, Faceless and Maigret gave me an opportunity to get out and do a bit of work. Frankly, I become very bored when I’m not working.”

There were few occasions for boredom on the rugged Spanish locations of The Howl of the Devil (a.k.a. El Aullido del Diablo). Shot in Madrid and the quaint mountain village of Loyzoya— complete with cobbled streets and an 11th-century monastery — during July and August of 1987, the film was written, directed by and stars Paul Naschy. A short, toupeed, barrel-chested John Belushi look-alike whose real name is Jacinto Molina, Naschy has appeared in more than 75 Spanish movies bearing such luridly Anglicized titles as Frankenstein’s Bloody Terror, The Werewolf vs. the Vampire Woman, Count Dracula’s Great Love and Night of the Howling Beast, earning him the crown of Spain’s King of Horror.

Designed as an ambitious showcase for his performing abilities, Howl presents Naschy in 10 different roles, reflecting his affection for the classic Hollywood movie monsters of his youth. A demented retired actor named Hector lives with his young nephew Adrian in an ominous chalet, where he dresses up as Fu Manchu, Rasputin and Bluebeard to torture nubile female victims procured by his loyal manservant Erik, portrayed by Howard Vernon. A horror fan himself, Adrian (played by Naschy’s 12-year-old son, Sergio Molina) fantasizes visits from his favorite celluloid creatures, recreated in elaborate prosthetic makeup by Fernando Florido and embodied by the ubiquitous Naschy: the Frankenstein Monster, the Phantom of the Opera, Quasimodo, Mr. Hyde and — inevitably— Naschy’s best-known character, the melancholy werewolf Waldemar Daninsky. This Happy home life is eventually interrupted by the reappearance of Adrian’s dead father, Hector’s twin brother Alex, a rotting corpse also essayed by the resilient Naschy.

Cast by novice producer Juan Gomez after he spotted her photo in David Quinlan’s book The Illustrated Directory of Film Stars, Munro plays a poor Spanish maid named Carmen, relentlessly pursued by the homicidally horny Hector. Unfamiliar with Naschy or his work, Munro asked her solicitor father to read the clumsily translated screenplay, which was filled with guilt and retribution, sexual repression and religious obsession. “Obviously, he didn’t think it was brilliant,” she admits. “But he said, ‘It’s certainly no worse than some others you’ve done, and it might be an interesting part for you.’ I thought it could be a mistake for me to do it, but because I liked my part, I decided to take a chance. Besides, if my dad thought it was all right, then it must be OK.”

Burdened by an unwanted glamor image as a perennial sex symbol, Munro enthusiastically donned plain-looking clothes, flat shoes and an apron, and pinned back her long dark hair to* convincingly portray her earthy character. Likewise, Munro actually scrubbed floors and even chopped the head off a real dead chicken on camera. “I wasn’t very keen on that,” she concedes. “Paul gave me a whacking great knife — twice the size of Crocodile’ Dundee’s, knife— and said, ‘Cut the head off the chicken.’ I told him, I can’t do that.’ I just cut it gently down the middle. He said, ‘That’s no good. You must look like you’ve done it all your life.’ So I finally did cut the head off. It was a touch of the Tom Savini there.” A popular genre figure in Europe and Japan, Naschy has yet to conquer the more demanding American market, his voice will subsequently be dubbed by an American actor. This unusual production problem created an awkward acting situation for Munro, who performed her part with her normal British accent, at Naschy’s instruction. “It was a bit more difficult than I was used to, but that made it more of a challenge,” she notes. "Most of the master shots were done over Paul’s shoulder, showing me speaking. Some of the time, he was actually speaking Spanish. Because I understand Spanish fairly well and I knew the intention of the scenes, I could tell what he was saying and when it was time for me to speak. “I was nervous at first, because Paul is a foreboding-looking fellow with a great deal of energy. He is very intense in his work, very European in his approach, with extraordinarily piercing eyes. But he was exactly right for his character. Once we began working together, I found him quite easy to get on with.” Naschy even allowed Munro to rewrite her own dialogue. “I’m hopeless at writing,” she maintains. “But the script left something to be desired, because it was translated too literally from Spanish to though three of his films were released here theatrically in the mid- 1970s by Sam Sherman’s Independent-International Pictures and several of his other movies are currently available on home video. To facilitate American distribution, Naschy shot The Howl of the Devil since he doesn’t speak the language, he delivered his dialogue phonetically, and English. Many of the lines were archaic and ungrammatical. So I rewrote my dialogue to make it more conversational. I offered to help rewrite the rest of the dialogue as well, but Paul didn’t want to confuse the other actors.” Adding her creative input in such a manner is a new occurrence for Munro, who previously would passively accept her scenes as written, regardless of any misgivings. “That comes with experience,” she observes. “You learn what you will or won’t do in a scene. There are certain things I won’t do. Generally, there isn’t much substance to the characters in most genre movies, unless you create some for yourself. Now, I feel I’m in a position — at my age — to be thinking more about characterization.” Munro, satisfied with her Spanish sojourn, believes The Howl of the Devil will spotlight a more self-confident side of her acting personality. “I won’t say I enjoyed every minute,” she acknowledges, “but I was certainly kept on my toes. I hope people will see more range from me as an actress than they’ve seen before. I had to extend myself more in the role. I had some initial reservations, but everything felt right while we were making it. There was nothing about my scenes that offended me. Of course, I don’t know how the finished film will turn out, but for my part, I’m really pleased I did it.” Completing her Howl of the Devil role in 12 shooting days over a three-week period, Munro next flew to Geneva, Switzerland to star in the unusual industrial show The New Travels of Marco Polo. While in Geneva, she was contacted by director Jess Franco, offering her a leading role in his latest thriller Faceless. Filmed in and around Paris during November and December of 1987, Faceless (a.k.a. Les Predators de la Nuit) revives the moribund subgenre of surgical atrocity movies initiated in 1959 by Georges Franju’s classic Eyes Without A Face (a.k.a. The Horror Chamber of Dr. Faustus) and imitated by Franco’s own The Awful Dr. Orloff in 1961. The first feature produced by Rene Chateau, France’s leading video distributor, Faceless boasts an impressive international cast including Helmut Berger, Telly Savalas, Anton Diffring, Chris Mitchum and 79-year-old Howard Vernon , reprising his tireless Dr. Orloff persona. Jacques (Lifeforce) Gastineau provides graphic makeup FX. Doubling as screenwriter under the pseudonym “Fred Castle,” Chateau personally chose Munro, having seen her work in Starcrash and Maniac, which he released on video in France. In a resonant bit of casting, she plays jet-set American model Barbara Hallen, whose mysterious disappearance motivates the entire storyline. Kidnapped from a modeling session by actress Brigitte Lahaie (France’s most notorious porno queen in a rare mainstream role), Barbara is brought to a fashionable health farm run by sinister plastic surgeon Doctor Flamand (Berger), who constantly requires fresh blood and organs with which to rejuvenate his chic clientele. 

Aided by ex-Nazi scientist Juan Moser (Diffring), Flamand plans to graft Barbara’s exquisite face onto his horribly disfigured sister, until a savage assault renders her skin unusable. Meanwhile, alarmed by his daughter’s inexplicable absence, New York millionaire Terry Hallen (Savalas) sends Vietnam-veteran-turned-private-detective Morgan (Mitchum) to Paris to discover her whereabouts. As Morgan’s investigation draws him closer to the truth, Flamand and his sadistic henchman Gordon sharpen their chainsaws and drills for the inevitably gruesome final confrontation.

Chiefly confined to a padded cell in an actual clinic undergoing renovation, Munro spends most of her screen time in a short white hospital smock. As her character recovers from her brutal attack, she is repeatedly injected with debilitating drugs, hastening her mental and physical deterioration. Abdicating her reluctant glamor image with a vengeance, Munro had no qualms about appearing progressively more disheveled. “I wanted to look as extreme as I could get,” she insists. “In fact, I encouraged them to make me look worse. It actually helped me as an actress. The worse I looked and felt, the better my performance.

When I was crying, my tears were real. I didn’t need glycerine, because I felt truly degraded. It had to be that way, it was so important to see the change in Barbara— to show the glamorous, confident, attractive woman at the beginning, and the poor, sad, pathetic creature at the end. Otherwise, the film wouldn’t work.”

Responsive to the actress’ concerns. Franco thoughtfully decided to shoot Munro’s unpleasant scenes in reverse order. “That way, I could look forward to feeling clean,” she points out. “It was a good method, because I hated being so dirty. I had grease in my hair. I really looked a mess. But it felt absolutely right for the part. “In fact, I looked almost too convincing,” Munro smiles. “At one point, I was walking down the back stairs at the clinic, wearing only a little white smock. I was made up with a bloody cut on my face. One of the real nurses saw me and exclaimed, ‘Oh, mon Dieu! What happened?’ She thought I had really been injured. Many of the actual patients gave me very funny looks. I should think it put them off going back to that clinic.”

Jess Franco, according to Munro, proved to be a surprisingly careful and considerate filmmaker. “I had never heard of Jess before, but I enjoyed working with him very much,” Munro remarks. “I trusted him and felt confident with him. He speaks very good English. I could ask him questions, and he would help me. He has a great sensitivity with actors. He understood how we felt and gave us encouragement.”

A former model herself, Munro easily mastered the American accent she delivers in Faceless. “It’s better than the American accent I did in Slaughter High,” she comments, “because I’ve had more experience at it. But it’s still quite a soft American accent, since the character has been living and working in Europe, and that has affected the way she speaks. I suppose it’s more of a mid-Atlantic accent. I just hope people won’t assume I’ve been dubbed by an American actress again.”

Finishing her Faceless fright fest after three hectic weeks in France, Munro next appeared in her first TV movie, Maigret. Directed by Paul (Prom Night) Lynch, the film is based on a popular series of mystery novels by Georges Simenon. Munro portrays Carolyn Pace, power hungry secretary to scheming American millionaire Patrick O’Neal.

“I just want to be a working actress,” she says, then pauses to reflect on her future plans. “Frankly, I never thought of myself any other way. I’ve never wanted the huge success that other people have wanted for me. I’m very happy doing smaller films. “Without shouting to the whole world, I can push myself quite far within these roles and not be looked at too critically,” Munro decides. “The success or failure of these movies is not on my shoulders. Each one’s just another acting experience for me. And I find I get better with each new experience; I’m still learning my craft all the time.”

[its-thatching]

Six Degrees of Separation: Kilala mo ba si Lilia Cuntapay?

Antoinette Jadaone’s first feature film that focused on the legendary extra Lilia Cuntapay, hailed as the “dakilang extra” of the local horror scene. The mockumentary played with the line between truth and fiction that the distinction between them didn’t matter. Lilia Cuntaplay played herself as she spent the last three decades as an extra in horror films, first discovered by the great Peque Gallaga in Shake, Rattle, and Roll II. He, among all the others, said that Lilia is the perfect woman to play an aswang and from then on, she mostly took on ghoulish roles. Now, for her role as “mamasang” in an indie film, she got nominated for best supporting actress. The film followed her journey as she prepared for the awards night. We saw her write her thank you speech, get a dress from a local tailor, and solicit the advice of her loved ones. We saw her as a mother just wanting her doctor daughter to go home to her so they could be with each other again, a giving neighbor who donated trophies to the kids in the barangay, a hardworking actress who is willing to get up at 6 am in the morning despite her old age just to practice her lines which she didn’t get at the end. As the film progressed, we saw her speech get longer and longer, as she encountered many people who had helped her one way or another, only to be (spoiler alert!) disappointed and let down by the people from the local entertainment industry by not giving her the credits she deserved.The title “six degrees of separation” comes from the theory that everyone knows each other through a chain of people with six or less intermediaries. This was portrayed in the film when they explained how Nanay Lilia was connected to Kevin Bacon, who was said to have worked with every rising star in Hollywood. Nanay Lilia, who has existed mostly on the fringes of celebrities and the whole showbiz glamour, is connected to everyone in showbiz because of her 3-decades long work experience. 

Explicitly, the film embodies the journey of a prominent horror extra, Lilia Cuntapay, who often played roles of aswangs and other monsters or ghouls in Filipino films and TV shows, when she receive a best supporting actress nomination for a role where she played as a “mother” pimp. As the film progressed, we see Nanay Lilia become less and less hopeful, beaten down by the instances and failed promises by people from the film industry: the director who initially promised to give her a speaking role but backed out because she’s been type-casted already and her presence would ruin the feel of the shot, the TV patrol crew who interviewed her but failed to put her interview in the final edit, and many more.

Implicitly, it shows how this capitalist culture has poured over into the entertainment industry, where people like Ms. Lilia are rarely given a chance to grow and develop, and are often just taken for granted because they have nowhere else to go. Even though these people work tirelessly to give their best shot for just 10 seconds of screen time, they get rewarded with so little in return because they are not the stars of the show. From the celebrity cameos like Kris Aquino, we can assume that even as an extra, she has left a big impact in the industry. One thing that the audience has to constantly remind themselves of is that the film is a mockumentary--- and Jadoaone did such a good job of making the audience forget this. The heart that this film offers is beyond the narrative it portrays. It is a universal truth: that even with all the effort you put into your passion, to create something with your heart and mind fully into it,  it does not guarantee that it will be rewarded or recognized. The line between self-fulfillment and the desire for recognition is not as defined as we all think it is. After all, as Aristotle proposed, we are all social beings, and it is a natural tendency to want to be affirmed by others for the work that you’ve done. In the film industry, these two things often go hand-in-hand. The existence of award-giving bodies and the whole fiasco during awards season is a proof of how much recognition helps with one’s self-fulfillment. The most prolific and famous actors are often those who are hailed and awarded in Hollywood ceremonies like the Academy Awards and Emmy Awards. Once you have been recognized as an intelligent and adept actor, screenwriter, director, etc., the opportunities will most probably come flooding in. The spectrum of self-fulfillment and desire of recognition are overlapping. For someone like Nanay Lilia, who has been type-casted as an “aswang” and has not had the opportunity for growth because she wasn’t classically trained or her looks are not as versatile as the others, recognition means a lot. As audience members, we were programmed by the film to root for her every step of the way because we got to see how earnest and dedicated she was with her art. Having said those, we feel some sort of attachment with Nanay Lilia because we all experienced a similar struggle like hers. 

Symptomatically,  I believe that the film showed the universal fear of dying and not being remembered. It also shows how a lot of Filipinos exist in the margins of society, no matter how hard we work, there is a bigger chance for us to just be taken for granted by those above us. The glamor behind the life of the stars would not exist without people like Lilia, people who don’t get mentioned in awards but who nonetheless work and wait tirelessly. I think that we all feel like underdogs sometimes, one way or another, and this feeds into the fear of just disappearing from this world completely, making life feel so minuscule and insignificant. For Filipinos, especially, we have this tendency to crave for fame and recognition. It is evident from the way we treat Filipinos or Fil-ams who make it big overseas. We tend to glorify showbiz culture and the whirlwind of gossip or chikas it brings for celebrities. Of course, this doesn’t mean that when one is famous, one is already a stellar and legitimate actress, and vice versa. We have actors like Mercedes Cabral and Arnold Reyes, who normally work with independent film companies, but are not commercially well-known in showbiz, but who are nonetheless amazing. Nanay Lilia herself is a living testament of this. For 3 decades she always played small roles in different films, that even when she was filling out an information sheet for a medical exam makes her think deeply about who she is: should she call herself an “actress” on the occupation line, or just an “extra”. 

I believe that the movie is realistic but way too nihilistic in its approach to show the harshness of reality. Even in the ending the reward isn’t even technically hers but was given to her by the actual winner. But it does play with our greatest human fear of being invisible towards everyone.

I don’t think the film followed any moralistic principles. If anything, it mostly portrayed nihilism showing how futile lilia’s determination is when working. She did everything right just to earn a reward that isn’t hers.

In terms of coherence, I personally think the film was consistent with showing Nanay Lilia’s struggle to get lead roles. The film has two realities: one that follows Lilia as she goes through the whims of her everyday life, and one where she is in her own fantasy where she already won the award with the whole set-up that makes her look a  tad bit crazy and senile. The latter’s quality is dependent on the scene that is shown in the former. For example, when she got disappointed by TV Patrol’s failure to include her interview in the news after she invited everyone in the neighborhood and even her daughter who is living far away from her, her speech in the fantasy sequence was short and she looked so forlorn. 

I found it somewhat really complex with its storytelling. The movie would send you through a spiral of emotions through and through as the audience follows along the journey of lilia to earn just a sliver of recognition among his colleagues and friends. The way it brought awareness to the predicament of lila using a mockumentary is smart. It shows us the vast acting skills and talents of lila and shows us her experiences through a more digestible cut in the movie. The movie pulled on the heart stings of the audience in such a great way that it left a deep mark that the audience will bring through their lifetime. So they’ll become more appreciative with the work of people like lilia with each scene that shows how no one even recognises lilia with each scene and only a select few do. 

The film is brilliant and original on all levels. I don’t think this has been done in the Filipino cinema before. Even though Mockumentary is a genre that has been thoroughly explored internationally (i.e., borat, what we do in the shadows, the office) and often in the context of comedy, I believe this film is unique for its Filipino context. It is full of paradox: it is both charming but angering at the same time, out-of-touch but also so grounded in its narrative. The way Jadaone treated fact and fiction by creating a storyline that is so realistic and universal but is essentially scripted from start to finish is just disconcerting. The pop culture references and cameos are just a sprinkle on the tragicomedy-esque script about the life of the “dakilang extra”.  Lilia Cuntapay was such an amazing actress in this film. The tears she shed, her outer contemplations about her life, her random pondering made her so human in the eyes of the audience that we end up feeling like she’s just our friendly next door neighbor lola. 

I believe that the whole movie is an insult to Lilia as a hardworking person. Even though i said the film being a mockumentary is smart i still think she deserved better. The mockumentary shows she has the talent and skill to bring the audience emotion just as any good actor can. But for her to  just be a joke the whole movie is just sad and mean to her. They made her look like a senile old woman even though shes way better than that.  One of the things she said that struck me the most was “Ang mga extra, simpleng characters lang. Walang past, wala ring future.” I think this encapsulates the underlying conflict portrayed by the film--- that some people are employed just to fill up the space, to bring others up, but ultimately, they are simply forgotten. Underdogs like Nanay Lilia will wait forever just to have the glimpse of success that privileged people have. 

 It can be said that with every fictional narrative, there is a seed of truth that the whole narrative grew from. This is what made Six Degrees of Separation so great: it allowed the audience to attach and, dare I say, see themselves in Nanay Lilia and her struggles as she clung to little triumphs in a career that gave her very little recognition. Opportunities are very limited for people who never started with privilege. Like most of us, she had to work twice as hard just to get so little in return. All in all, Nanay Lilia Cuntapay, bless her departed soul, brought such warmth and heart to the film as she delivered a reality that has no veneer or narcissism.