Word: almodovar
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...ABOUT MY MOTHER A Madrid nurse (Cecilia Roth), luxuriating in grief, goes to Barcelona, where she learns to live again by tending to creatures even more wounded than she. Pedro Almodovar's screwball melodrama has all the kooky verve of his early comedies, but with a depth and life-enhancing warmth that proves Spain's bad boy has reached a vibrant maturity. If this movie doesn't touch your heart, consult a cardiologist. You may be missing something...
...Manuela is the mom every gay, or simply sensitive, son would adore. She watches All About Eve with him, gives him a Truman Capote book for his birthday, takes him to a production of A Streetcar Named Desire. He is a sweet, giving lad with a lot of promise. Almodovar is careful and caring in setting up this lovely couple--one could build a fine movie around them--and then he is ruthless in tearing them apart. With Esteban gone, Manuela has a mission: to grieve heroically and heal the wounds of other desperate souls. She is the ultimate organ...
Hollywood likes his moves too. In a U.S. market where foreign-language films are hard to find even in art houses, Almodovar, 48, is a reliable moneymaker. He also makes the kind of bright, saucy films Hollywood wishes it could. So the studios have courted him ever since his 1988 hit Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. They bought remake rights for Jane Fonda, then for Whoopi Goldberg (though the film wasn't made), then they asked him to direct Sister Act, First Wives Club, Runaway Bride and, he says, "anything with drag queens." But though he hopes...
There is another family in this briskly cathartic film: the brilliant acting ensemble. Almodovar cherishes the notion of a family of actors--the gypsies who, for a few months, become as close as siblings under the maternal eye of their director. So with each new project he plans reunions, forming the tightest stock company in movies. Nearly a dozen actors have appeared in three or more of his films. One, Antonio Banderas, segued into American stardom. The others are all actresses, including Paredes, Carmen Maura and Victoria Abril. Almodovar is the man who loves women, who understands them, who writes...
...nakedness. Much later she is onstage, filling in for Nina as Stella in Streetcar, and she emits precisely the same cry; she has remembered and transformed her mourning into art, and the audience applauds fervently. It is a lovely clue to one of the movie's themes, as Almodovar describes it: "the capacity of women to act without being professional actresses: to lie, to fake, to perform. Men and women both have loneliness, pain, the same kind of suffering. But the way women react to these things is much more spectacular, much more cinematic. It does seem that...