A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews
A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews
"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
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Showing posts with label Alberto Iglesias. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Alberto Iglesias. Show all posts
Cast: Antonio Banderas, Asier Etxeandia, Leonardo Sbaraglia, Nora Navas, Julieta Serrano, César Vicente, Asier Flores, Penélope Cruz, Cecilia Roth, Susi Sánchez, Raúl Arévalo, Pedro Casablanc. Screenplay: Pedro Almodóvar. Cinematography: José Luis Alcaine. Production design: Antxón Gómez. Film editing: Teresa Font. Music: Alberto Iglesias.
Film puts us in an eternal now, letting us see people and places out of time. One moment we may be watching the handsome young Antonio Banderas in Matador (Pedro Almodóvar, 1986) and the next the grizzled Banderas, on the cusp of 60, in Almodóvar's Pain and Glory. Which is one reason filmmakers are so obsessed with traveling through time, whether in the sci-fi mode or in the autobiographical one. Banderas has so often been identified with Almodóvar that it would be unthinkable for the director to make a movie about an aging director, struggling with the weight of time and guilt that has taken a toll on his body and his career, without casting Banderas in the role. Both director and star work through the pain to achieve a measure of glory in this film, one of the best in the oeuvre of either artist. The great achievement of Almodóvar in this film is to take a well-worn theme, the intersection of art and life, and make it fresh and revelatory. It's unmistakably an Almodóvar film, containing the vivid use of color we identify with his work -- and that of his production designer, Antxón Gómez -- as well as his frankness about his own sins and misdemeanors. But it's also a Banderas film, with that actor's sly undercutting of his personal beauty and charisma, seldom before so brilliantly employed, except in Almodóvar's The Skin I Live In (2011). It earned him an overdue Oscar nomination. The film ends with a witty surprise, which is not only a sly trick but also underscores its thematic content.
Cast: Benicio Del Toro, Demián Bichir, Franka Potente, Norman Santiago, Joaquim de Almeida, Lou Diamond Phillips, Jorge Perugorría, Rubén Ochandiano, Cristian Mercado, Carlos Acosta-Milian, Armando Riesco, Marisé Álvarez, Marc-André Grondin, Carlos Bardem, Yul Vazquez. Screenplay: Peter Buchman, Benjamin A. van der Veen. Cinematography: Steven Soderbergh. Production design: Antxón Gómez, Philip Messina. Film editing: Pablo Zumárraga. Music: Alberto Iglesias.
The continuation of Steven Soderbergh's epic portrait of Ernesto "Che" Guevara almost stands on its own as a film, focused as it is on Che's ill-fated attempt to stir revolution in Bolivia after the success in Cuba. Che: Part Two is subtitled "Guerrilla," and it deals largely with Che's illness -- he suffers from asthma -- and inability to control his troops before his final capture and execution. Soderbergh avoids an elegiac tone, concentrating instead on the details of guerrilla warfare.
Benicio Del Toro and Demián Bichir in Che: Part One
Cast: Benicio Del Toro, Demián Bichir, Catalina Sandino Moreno, Rodrigo Santoro, Julia Ormond, Oscar Isaac, Ramon Fernandez, Yul Vazquez, Santiago Cabrera, Édgar Ramírez. Screenplay: Peter Buchman. Cinematography: Steven Soderbergh. Production design: Antxón Gómez. Film editing: Pablo Zumárraga. Music: Alberto Iglesias.
Subtitled "The Argentine," the first part of Steven Soderbergh's epic portrait of Ernesto "Che" Guevara (Benicio Del Toro) covers the revolutionary's life from his first meeting with Fidel Castro (Demián Bichir) in 1955 through the success of the campaign in Cuba to Che's address to the United Nations in 1964, proclaiming a "battle to the death" against American imperialism. With a less coherent narrative line than the one in Che: Part Two, the first film feels more scattered and just a little superficial, but it has a strong feeling of actuality in any given sequence.
Toni Cantó and Cecilia Roth in All About My Mother
Cast: Cecilia Roth, Marisa Paredes, Candela Peña, Antonia San Juan, Penélope Cruz, Rosa Maria Sardà, Fernando Fernán Gómez, Toni Cantó, Eloy Azorín. Screenplay: Pedro Almodóvar. Cinematography: Affonso Beato. Production design: Antxón Gómez. Film editing: José Salcedo. Music: Alberto Iglesias.
Fascinatingly complex melodrama that's part hommage to movies like Douglas Sirk's and part exploration of contemporary views on gender and sexuality, but mostly one of Pedro Almodóvar's most searching and honest films. It won the Oscar for best foreign language film.
Julieta Arcos: Emma Suárez Younger Julieta: Adriana Ugarte Xoan: Daniel Grao Ava: Inma Cuesta Lorenzo: Darío Grandinetti Beatriz: Michelle Jenner Marian: Rossy de Palma Julieta's Mother: Susi Sánchez Beatriz's Mother: Pilar Castro Antía: Blanca Parés Young Antía: Priscilla Delgado Young Beatriz: Sara Jiménez
Director: Pedro Almodóvar Screenplay: Pedro Almodóvar Based on stories by Alice Munro Cinematography: Jean-Claude Larrieu Production design: Antxón Gómez Music: Alberto Iglesias
Julieta is low-key for a film by Pedro Almodóvar. It has the familiar bright pops of color and the characteristic involvement in the lives of women, but it rarely surprises or startles you with either its events or outbursts from its characters. Its use of two actresses to play the same title character has been likened to Luis Buñuel's casting two actresses in the same role in That Obscure Object of Desire (1977), but Buñuel's film features two very different-looking actresses in scenes that are occurring in the same time period, a disorienting effect when Buñuel switches from one to the other. In Julieta, Emma Suárez and Adriana Ugarte play the title character at different periods in her life, and although the two actresses don't look very much alike, there's little disorientation when one takes on the role from the other. Almodóvar has said that he didn't want to mess around with old-age makeup, and he's right. As the film begins, the older Julieta is packing to move to Lisbon with Lorenzo when a chance encounter on the street with Beatriz, an old friend of her daughter, Antía, causes her to abruptly chance her mind and stay in Madrid. We learn that Julieta and Antía have been estranged for many years -- the daughter even has children that Julieta has never met. In hopes that Antía will make a move to reconciliation, Julieta even moves to an apartment in the same building in which they lived when Antía was growing up. And she begins to write the story of how she met Antía's father, Xoan, initiating a flashback in which Ugarte takes over the role of Julieta from Suárez. Like Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Almodóvar has always had strong ties to the films of Douglas Sirk, with their tortured love affairs and strong, beleaguered female protagonists, and like Sirk, both filmmakers use melodrama as a vehicle for social comment, particularly on the roles of women. Julieta touches on the still-pervasive and often repressive role of religion in Spanish life, but the film isn't out to make a point about it other than incidentally. The real focus of the film is on the unraveling of the story of Julieta herself as she comes to terms with female friendships and rivalries. The men in the film, from the passionate Xoan to the almost sexless Lorenzo, are decidedly secondary, there only to stir the plot and to spur Julieta's involvement with the other women in their lives. It's a splendidly crafted movie, but it feels at the end like one that was begun without a clear destination.
Javier C'amara, Leonor Watling, Rosario Flores, and Dario Grandinetti in Talk to Her
Pedro Almodóvar won a well-deserved Oscar for his screenplay -- an award that's rarely given to someone writing in a language other than English -- and was nominated for best director for Talk to Her. It's an extraordinarily challenging film -- even for Almodóvar, who loves to challenge filmgoers -- that works on several levels. First, it's an absorbing narrative about the boundaries between life and death: The protagonists, Benigno Martín (Javier Cámara) and Marco Zuluaga (Darío Grandinetti), are both in love with women who are in comas, unresponsive but undeniably still present, trapped between life and death. Second, it's a film about the boundaries between the sexes. At least two of the characters have jobs that are traditionally held by members of the opposite sex: Benigno is a nurse, and Lydia González (Rosario Flores) is a bullfighter, and each has encountered the stereotyping that labels them as anomalous. Benigno is easily stereotyped as gay: He studied nursing, cosmetology, and hairdressing so he could take care of his mother, with whom he lived until her death. And he is trusted with the intimate care of the beautiful, comatose Alicia (Leonor Watling) because he is thought to have no sexual interest in her. But even Marco has "feminine" characteristics: He cries easily, for one thing. In the first scene of the film, he is seen sitting next to Benigno at a performance of Pina Bausch's Tanztheater piece, Café Müller, with tears rolling down his face. Benigno, who doesn't yet know Marco, is moved but dry-eyed, and he recalls Marco's tears later when he tells his fellow employees about the performance. Benigno and Marco finally meet after Lydia is gored by a bull and left in a coma. She is hospitalized just down the hall from Alicia, and Benigno advises Marco to talk to Lydia -- advice he scorns because he's been told that she's brain-dead. Benigno, on the other hand, believes that Alicia listens to him and even mysteriously consoles him: He knows from an encounter with her before the accident that left her comatose that she was a dancer who loved traveling and silent movies, so he tells her about dance performances he attends, reads to her from travel guides, and describes the movies he sees. One of the movies is called The Shrinking Lover, and Almodóvar creates it for us: A female scientist (another gender-role switch) creates a potion that causes her lover to shrink, and in a final, Buñuelesque scene, we see the tiny lover's body disappear into her enormous vagina. Shortly thereafter, Alicia is found to be pregnant, and although it's never confirmed that Benigno raped her, he is sent to prison. The extraordinary thing about Talk to Her is that Almodóvar manages to keep all of the elements of his film in a delicate balance, so that even the absurd and surreal moments maintain plausibility, and the bittersweet ending feels integral to what has gone before. The tone of the film is lightly melancholy where it might have been crude and sensational, and it's maintained by a lovely score by Alberto Iglesias and a beautiful sequence in which Caetano Veloso sings "Cucurrucucú Paloma," about a man weeping for his lost lover, as a tearful Marco recalls his love for Lydia. The excellent performers also include Geraldine Chaplin as Alicia's dance teacher.
In the middle of Pedro Almodóvar's Bad Education, two men go into a theater that's holding a film noir festival. When they come out later, one says, "I kept having the feeling those films were about us." Indeed, if Almodóvar's movie is inspired by anything, it's film noir, but filtered through the Technicolor movies made by Alfred Hitchcock in the 1950s. The score by Alberto Iglesias often echoes the melancholy longing of Bernard Herrmann's music for Vertigo (Hitchcock, 1958). The intricate plot for Bad Education begins when a young man (Gael García Bernal) comes to the offices of film director Enrique Goded (Fele Martínez) and identifies himself as Goded's old school friend Ignacio Rodriguez. He doesn't call himself Ignacio anymore, he says. Instead, he goes by his stage name, Ángel Andrade, and he's hoping that Goded will cast him in his next film. Goded is more than surprised to see his old schoolmate -- in fact, he tells his assistant and current lover, Martín (Juan Fernández), Ignacio was his first love -- but he's currently experiencing a creative block and isn't hiring anyone now. So the actor leaves Goded a manuscript of a story he has written. Part of it, he says, is about their school days, and the rest is fiction based on what he thinks might have happened when they grew up. Goded reads the manuscript and is so impressed by the story it tells that he is determined to film it. And so begins an intricate film about memory, imagination, deception, betrayal, obsession, and revenge that centers on a pedophile priest's molestation of his young students. Bad Education was originally given an NC-17 rating by the Motion Picture Association of America for "explicit sexual content," but I suspect it was mostly because the sexual content involves two men. The rating was eventually reduced to R. The performance by García Bernal is spectacular: He manages several identities while retaining the core essential to all of them. Like most Almodóvar films, Bad Education is alive with bright primary colors -- the cinematography is by José Luis Alcaine, the art direction by Antxón Gómez, and the set decoration by Pilar Revuelta, with costumes designed by Paco Delgado and Jean-Paul Gaultier -- but the brightness only serves to heighten the shadows.
