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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
