High Notes

New national Selena podcast offers personal look at the Texas superstar

Anything for Selena is out now.

Selena Quintanilla, known to millions of fans as the queen of Tejano music, is one of the most celebrated Mexican-American entertainers of the late 20th century. Her immense talent and tragic death captivated millions, and now with a Netflix series and a new podcast, Selena is inspiring a new generation of fans.

On January 13, WBUR and Futuro Media launched Anything for Selena, a nine-episode podcast about the music icon’s life story, her enduring legacy, and what she means to the Latinx community. Ultimately, as host Maria Garcia describes it, “it’s a podcast about belonging.”

Using a deeply personal lens, Garcia weaves her own story as a queer, first-generation Mexican immigrant, while using cultural analysis, social justice history, and real-time politics to explore the impact of Selena. Each episode, available in both English and Spanish, unwraps another layer on Garcia's journey "to understand what it means to love, mourn and remember Selena."

That journey begins at the border where Garcia was born in Juarez, Mexico, and later grew up in El Paso. “[It was] a place where for a long time, I felt divided in two,” she says in her podcast promo.

When she started attending school in El Paso, her schoolteachers anglicized her name to Mary. “This was the early '90s when assimilation was incredibly rewarded,” she says during a phone interview. Around the age of 7, Garcia discovered the rising star on television.

“Red lips, brown skin, big hoops, [Selena] was magnetic no matter what side of the border she was on,” Garcia explains.

Selena debuted on the music scene in 1981 as the lead singer of the band Selena y Los Dinos, which included members of her family. Later, after breaking out as a solo artist, she achieved stardom with songs like "Como la Flor" and "Amor Prohibido."

In 1995, Selena's life came to an end when she was shot and killed by Yolanda Saldivar, her friend and former boutique-store manager.

Pop music fans who may be unfamiliar with Selena's Spanish-language work may remember her posthumously released 1995 hit song "Dreaming of You." Two years later, the film Selena was released starring Jennifer Lopez in the title role, catapulting Lopez into international stardom.

Only nine when Selena died and 11 when the biopic was released, both had a formative impact on the young Garcia. “This [podcast] is like my dream,” she said in a phone interview. “I’ve been thinking of her all of my life.”

And so, when creating Anything for Selena, Garcia says she needed to tell the story from her own perspective, a goal she feels she has accomplished.

“I wanted to situate it in today,” the host says. “I didn’t want to make a podcast that was just looking back. I wanted to make a podcast that was helping us make meaning of our culture today, of the moment today, of our lives today with the insight of the last quarter-century since her death.”

The podcast will likely find a very public audience, but for Garcia, it's a personal homage to the superstar who helped inspire a little girl growing up in El Paso. Even today, Garcia still listens to Selena's greatest hits whenever she feels she needs a little motivation.

“I love 'La Carcacha',” she says. “It always makes me want to party.”

How about if you’re in a pensive mood?

“'No Me Queda Más',” she replies without skipping a beat.

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The firs two episodes of Anything for Selena are now available for download at WBUR, NPR, Apple podcasts, Spotify, and more.

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Movie Review

Faces of Death returns with modern twist on cult horror film

Photo courtesy of of IFC Films

Dacre Montgomery in Faces of Death.

True horror fans will likely be familiar with the 1978 cult film Faces of Death, which purported to be a documentary showing real-life killings in gory detail. It didn’t, of course, but that didn’t stop rumors from continuing to spread for decades. Now, almost 50 years and multiple sequels later, comes a new version of Faces of Death, an actual movie that pays homage to the original in interesting ways.

Margot (Barbie Ferreira) works at a YouTube-like company called Kino as a content moderator, flagging videos that violate the company’s policies. This means her job often involves seeing some truly despicable things from all manner of depraved people. One day, though, she comes across a video that seems a little too real, and after seeing more similar videos, she starts to believe they’re genuine murders.

Going against her company NDA, she starts to investigate the videos on her own, which puts her on the radar of Arthur (Dacre Montgomery), who is actually kidnapping people and killing them on camera through methods seen in the original Faces of Death film. It’s not long before Arthur tracks her down, with a plan to make her one of his next victims.

Written and directed by Daniel Goldhaber (How to Blow Up a Pipeline) and co-written by Isa Mazzei, the film is not so much scary as it is creepy, with the occasional gross-out sequence. The idea of having someone emulate the killings in the cult film is a good idea, and pairing it with the modern-day attention economy - in which content creators go to increasing lengths for clicks - is a clever twist on a concept that other films have done.

The film as a whole is a commentary on how social media and video sharing sites have often decided to prioritize profits over the well-being of their users. Margot is shown allowing videos involving violence and sexual assault to stay on the site while nixing ones depicting how to use Narcan or demonstrating putting on a condom on a banana. Josh (Jermaine Fowler), Margot’s boss, is even explicit in the company mandate that outrageous videos drive views.

While Arthur has the makings of a good villain, there are few attempts to make him seem truly diabolical. His kidnappings often seem more spur-of-the-moment than calculated, and even though he has a well thought-out dungeon at home, the house’s location in the suburbs seems to make him vulnerable to easy discovery. Goldhaber and Mazzei leave more than a few unanswered questions along the way that take away from the intensity of the story.

Ferreira is yet another actor from Euphoria who’s capitalizing on her exposure from that show. She plays Margot’s increasing anxiety well, and when the action ratchets up in the final act, she meets the moment in a satisfying way. Montgomery returns to the vibe he had while playing the evil Billy on Stranger Things, and even though his character doesn’t fully live up to his potential, Montgomery sells his evil for all it’s worth.

The new Faces of Death may not be what some are expecting given the reputation of the previous films, but it’s a solid horror/thriller that uses the brand as a launching pad into something different. It doesn’t make much of a dent in the scare department, but it does give its violence and gore a degree of relevance in today’s often desensitized world.

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Faces of Death is now playing in theaters.

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