Word: hollywood
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...tormentor." Yet Gordy has given de Passe the freedom to run the company as she sees fit. Says Gordy: "If somebody had asked me a year ago, I would never have guessed we were going to do a western." Now that de Passe has reached near the top of Hollywood's mostly white, mostly male elite, she maintains that she has no yen to jump to a major studio. Says she: "There really isn't anything out there that I am interested in. I was planted in a garden that allowed me to grow...
Imitation, it has often been said, is the sincerest form of Hollywood. So movie moguls are now hot to remake Women on the Verge, with perhaps Jane Fonda, Sally Field or Goldie Hawn playing the main role -- taken in the original by Almodovar's house superstar Carmen Maura -- of a TV actress whose lover has just moved out. This week Almodovar goes to Los Angeles in hopes of picking up a Golden Globe statuette. Women on the Verge has already won the Felix, Europe's highest movie prize. And on Academy Award night, Felix may find an odd-couple mate...
...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...
...runs into her lover's ex-wife, his new mistress, his son and the lad's fiancee. Plus a couple of doped-up cops and a Jehovah's Witness concierge. The film is devious enough to have speared every foreign-language prize from U.S. critics and obvious enough that Hollywood is genuflecting at Almodovar's door. "Pedro is going to become a major director," says Orion Pictures' Mike Medavoy, "either in Hollywood or wherever he decides to work...