Word: almodovar
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Almodovar says his movies are about the "five essential themes: death, liberty, equality, beauty and, of course, love." Scanning Dark Habits (1983), one finds not love but revenge. It is your basic anticlerical Latin comedy: Reform School Girls set in a convent. The film can be seen as Almodovar's payback for a Catholic education "full of hypocrisy -- you can't learn by being terrorized." But the convent's mother superior isn't kidding when she tells the chanteuse, "My only sin is to love you too much," for that is the only sin and salvation of any Almodovar heroine...
...movies are autobiographical," says Almodovar, "but only in the essentials, not in individual anecdotes." In the subversive sitcom What Have I Done to Deserve This? (1985), "I wanted to talk about my family, and about the horrendous family life of the barrios." Mom (Maura) sniffs glue, pops pills and burns the chicken. Dad sings German songs -- reason enough for her to kill the dull brute with a ham bone. By this time the viewer may feel like put-upon Mom or bashed-in Dad, so assiduously has Almodovar cataloged his atrocities. But the filmmaker had more cunning indiscretions in store...
With Matador (1986) and Law of Desire (1987), Almodovar displayed his brazen assurance of style and vaulted from comic realism to soap-operatic mannerism. Matador is a contemporary vampire story: an ex-bullfighter and a woman lawyer, believing that death is the ultimate climax, impale each victim on the cold steel of their lust. Law of Desire draws a bent triangle: a gay movie director, his transsexual sister (Maura) and her adopted child's rightful mother (played by a Spanish drag queen). Revelations of murder, incest, suicide and lotsa hot sex follow, but the tone remains knowing, tender. As Matador...
...Desire and other Almodovar films take many cues from homoerotic cinema, from the fascination with lust and death that animated certain films of Jean Cocteau, Kenneth Anger, John Waters and R.W. Fassbinder. But Almodovar also looks back in glamour to '50s Hollywood, when Rock Hudson could comfort a dying Jane Wyman in one film, then woo perky Doris Day in another. Thus his pictures are both bleakly comic and defiantly romantic, hipper than tomorrow and nostalgic for a pre-AIDS era when love's most toxic complication was a broken heart. "To classify movies is to impoverish them," he says...
...Women on the Verge, Almodovar tried to make a mainstream farce and succeeded beyond the dreams of, say, Billy Wilder -- a Hollywood filmmaker he admires for "revealing a sordid society through the most delicious light comedies." Women doesn't meet that standard; it's more like The Big Chill with a bitter taste. But it does have a plot right out of some beloved old screwball comedy. When the disconsolate Pepa (Maura) tosses a couple dozen downers into her gazpacho cocktail, she triggers a plot device that ricochets happily through the film...