Pixar’s Coco is about a little boy who crosses into the colourful Land of the Dead in order to resolve a family issue. To celebrate this movie’s release, and to learn a little more about the culture behind it, I visited local makeup artist Tammy Fonseca, and had my own transformation into a Catrina.
Dia de los Muertos is a national holiday celebrated in Mexico on the first two days of November. On November 1st, the boundary between the worlds of the living and the dead is believed to be thinnest. It is an occasion to celebrate your dead loved ones – not a time to be sad or scared, but to be joyous, as you would be on a birthday. Families make altars called ofrendas that are decorated with marigolds, photos, and ornate sugar skulls. They might bring gifts to their loved one’s grave, basically all the deceased’s favourite stuff. If you were visiting my grave, you’d have to pay music way too loudly, and toast with extra-dry martinis in my honour. If I was visiting my grandmother’s grave, I’d wear knit slippers and say shitty things about my mom. It’s just a nice way to remember the person you loved by doing the things they loved. You laugh and tell stories and play music.
If you get dressed up, a calaca is a skeleton, a calavera is a skull, and a calavera de azucar is a sugar skull (which is a frosted, skull-shaped treat made from sugar paste and colourfully decorated). The most famous calavera of all is “La Calavera Catrina,” a high-society skeleton lady dressed in a big flower hat, from a 1910 etching by Mexican artist José Guadalupe Posada. It was meant to remind us that money or no, we’re all the same in death. She has become the most iconic symbol of Dia de los Muertos. Since death is viewed not as an end but as the continuation of life, dead relatives are not mourned by celebrated. Painting your face as a calavera or catrina is a way of telling death you aren’t afraid.
This Mexican ritual is a loving tribute to their ancestors but is also an essential part of 
keeping the old ways alive and vibrant in their culture today. So when we watch a movie like Coco, or the similarly-themed The Book of Life, we can think about where this dazzling imagery comes from, and know that each of the bold colours in Coco’s vibrant palette means something:
Yellow – Represents the sun &unity; like in death, under the sun, we’re all the same
White – Represents spirit, hope & purity.
Red – Represents blood and life.
Purple – Represents mourning, grief and suffering.
Pink – Represents happiness.
A face with lots of purples may therefore be a tribute to someone more recently passed, or gone too soon, whereas a face of pink might mean that their loved one’s suffering is alleviated in death and the family is ready to celebrate and honour their life’s accomplishments.
Tammy is an accomplished makeup artist who got her start studying architecture. Now she draws blueprints of faces before she begins painting them. It took her 2.5 hours to paint mine.
Tammy has been making people beautiful for a long time but started painting skulls when she was inspired by an episode of American Horror Story (The Walking Dead has also inspired her – guess what else she paints?). Aside from your typical horror, she’d love to get her hands on a comic book movie to really make her mark, and her dream is to work on a Cirque du Soleil production.
Tammy’s favourite celebrity makeup looks are Kate Winslet and Liz Taylor. A lover of art, she of course finds inspiration all around her, and when I asked about the temporary nature of her work, she was nonplussed: “people and bodies are my canvasses.” True, and yet I felt true sorrow when I watched it rinse down the drain of my shower. Her work has been featured in Imira and Luxe Ottawa Magazine. She looks to beauty bigwigs Lisa Elbridge, Vanessa Davis, and Argeni Pinal for inspiration.
I was really pleased to have met Tammy and to experience what it’s like to sit in the makeup chair and become someone else. Now it looks like I belong in the world of Coco, which is out in theatres this week. Feel like seeing how the sausage is made? You can watch a slideshow here.
the book justice. And even happilier, the movie doesn’t suck, period, which was a major concern of mine. It seemed far too easy to just let it coast on its sentimentality. But while director Stephen Chbosky doesn’t have a lengthy track record to ease my worrisome nature, he does have one credit under his belt that’s all I really needed to hear: he adapted and directed
Belorussian dictator (Gary Oldman). So he cuts a deal: if they let out his wife (Selma Hayek), he’ll give testimony. The only catch is that every other witness has been systematically murdered. Sam Jackson nearly is as well, but one of Ryan Reynolds’ disgruntled CIA exes calls him in at the last minute to try to get Jackson to the Hague in one piece.
Kenneth Branagh directs himself as Agatha Christie’s famed Poirot, and he’s equally right in both roles. He leads an all-star cast including Daisy Ridley, Johnny Depp, Josh Gad, Judi Dench, Michelle Pfeiffer, Penelope Cruz, Willem Dafoe and more. The only thing you can complain about with such an ensemble is that we spend precious little time with any one of them – Dench is particularly underused.
again, this movie misses its mark with me. I think it’s pandering and condescending and incredibly obvious that was written and directed by MEN. But I’m not a Bad Mom, I’m a Good Aunt. And the role of Good Aunt is really easy: you buy lots of presents, you let them get away with everything three notches above murder, and you give them 100% of your time and attention once or twice a month. Being a mom, bad or not, is infinitely harder because parenting is about the details. So if carving out 104 minutes to sneak away to one of those fancy movie theatres that serve wine is all you can muster for yourself this holiday season, have at it.
L.A. but it was a long, long time before the acting bug caught him back. He had a contract where he did a lot of background and bit parts, and most of those are lost to the either; his first known role is of course uncredited but he played a bellhop in Dead Heat on a Merry-Go-Round (1966). His first credited role was a year later in the western A Time For Killing – he appears as Harrison J. Ford. He needed the initial to distinguish himself from a dead silent film star but in fact, Harrison does not have a middle name and so the J. stood for nothing and was soon dropped.
which would make him a star of a franchise that has now spanned 5 decades. Jesus. He was paid somewhere in the neighbourhood of $20M for the last installment, plus a 0.5% share of revenues; he was paid $10k for the first one, and was glad to have it.
Board of the Archaeological Institute of America. He’s also the vice-chair of Conservation International, an American nonprofit environmental organization, which as led to two species being named after him: a newly discovered spider now called Calponia harrisonfordi, and an ant henceforth known as Pheidole harrisonfordi. He also got to name a butterfly, and he named it after his daughter, Georgia.
is not exactly an excellent movie. But Connolly is pretty much everything you could ask for and more, and the kid actors are a goddamn delight. They’re mouthy and disarming – the kind that completely enchant you, unless they’re yours. But they’re not, so you can sit back while your own are in bed and watch their antics, guilt-free. Because oh yes, there will be antics. It’s a silly little film that, in the end, I enjoyed quite thoroughly. It’s a notch above a time-waster; a movie that doesn’t need to be seen with any pressing urgency but if you come across it randomly you might find yourself pleasantly surprised, as I did.
room because she wanted to share something for “just the ladies.” Turns out, it was a GIF she’d seen on Facebook: Name your vagina by using the last movie you watched. Of course, instead of being boring and truthful (and smart and scrolling by without comment), women (and men) are falling over themselves to come up with the best titles they haven’t recently, or ever, seen: No Country For Old Men, Lethal Weapon, Sausage Party. Feel free to take you best shot in the comments section. As for me, well, I couldn’t quite remember the name of the last movie I’d seen – only that it was a documentary on Netflix about Hasidic Jews. I was a little worried.
ASSHOLES WATCHING MOVIES 