Category: Spanish Film
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All About My Mother (Pedro Almodóvar, 1999)
Highly intertextual, referencing All About Eve, A Streetcar Named Desire, and Almodóvar’s own work, not to mention the form of the soap opera. Early shot in the kitchen highly reminiscent of Jeanne Dielman. The grainy photos on the facade of the theater anticipates the photographs in Almodóvar’s later Broken Embraces. When Esteban gets hit by the car, slow-motion…
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Viewing Log, Week of 7/8/2012
Sometimes you just need, like, a year-long break, you know? Drive (dir. Nicolas Winding Refn, 2011) – It has the kind of pacing that rewards patience, and even assumes it from its viewer, which is nice. Someone called it 2011’s The American, and one can see why. It’s one of those “art-house” films that prioritizes…
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That Obscure Object of Desire
Viewed in three sittings, a screening as fractured as the identity of the titular object. She only serves as a distraction for the viewer in her dual performance. She is the trap successfully sprung by herself onto the obsessive, unsuspecting “subject,” a gracious title that can only be bestowed upon the male character out of…
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Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown
Almodóvar loves genres: combining them, mostly. This one is a clashing of melodrama (of the telenovela sort), noir, thriller, tragedy, and probably others. He loves his women as perhaps gay men like him and Ozon do best; he’s no Tarantino, re-imaging and re-imagining women from an earlier vein to suit a very contemporary mashup more…
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Quickies, Vol. XII
Unfaithfully Yours (dir. Preston Sturges, 1948) – Another Stanford Theatre gem. Sturges tops the So-Embarrassed-I-Don’t-Know-Their-Stuff List. This was a fortuitous screening, since after viewing The Hudsucker Proxy, with all its Capra influences, I was reminded that Capra is dwarfed in the Coens’ oeuvre by the influence of Sturges, who is far more grotesque, straight-up morbid.…
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Brother-In-Law Review: Volver
This begins one of (hopefully) many serial posts with little else other than a photo of my beloved brother-in-law’s face giving a synopsis of my thoughts and feelings about a film. While one might prefer to “review” films oneself rather than interpret the conclusions of another about them, it’s the interpretation aspect that we presently…
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Volver
It turns out that any consideration of Volver is somewhat lacking without having seen Pedro Almodóvar’s earlier film The Flower of My Secret. Marsha Kinder’s review in Film Quarterly (Spring 2007, Vol. 60, Issue 3) takes this approach and then some, purporting that Volver is best understood in relation not only to that previous film…
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Spirit of the Beehive
At least two very respectable persons (one the aforementioned Beardsley and the other to be called “Ayle-sa”) recommended to me Spirit of the Beehive (El espíritu de la colmena), and they each did so more than once. This spells out almost certain doom for a film – not because they’re wrong about the film, but…
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L’Âge d’Or
The second and last collaboration between Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, L’Âge d’Or is quite a bit more than Un Chien Andalou. Though the latter was shorter and perhaps more shocking originally (though that is arguable), this film is more complex and slightly more withheld. The outburst and subsequent ban it received for many decades…
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Un Chien Andalou
Watching Luis Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou is truly like watching one’s subconscious; it’s more than a dream but less than a nightmare, the sort of disturbing thing that causes you simply to shake your head upon waking up and wonder where that could have come from. The influence of Salvador Dali is difficult to miss;…
Precious Bodily Fluids 