Precious Bodily Fluids

Tag: Pedro Almodóvar

  • All About My Mother (Pedro Almodóvar, 1999)

    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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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.…

  • 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…

  • 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…