Popcorn Kernels: La Movida

As our Almodóvar marathon draws ever nearer to its conclusion, let’s review three consecutive films from his early period, roughshod works born from La Movida: the progressive Spanish punk scene that formed in Madrid following the death of the dictatorial, conservative King Franco.

Labyrinth of Passion

Year: 1982

Director: Pedro Almodóvar

Cast: Cecilia Roth, Imanol Arias, Helga Liné 

Run Time: 1 hour 40 minutes

MPAA Rating: N/A

A gay Tehrani prince and a nymphomaniac rock starlet fall in love within the hustle and bustle of Madrid, surrounded by interlocking stories of passion, sex, and rock ‘n roll.

Just two years after his messy but promising debut with Pepi, Luci, Bom, Pedro Almodóvar proved with Labyrinth of Passion that his early period of trial and error would be like no other. Although he wouldn’t achieve true greatness until 1987’s Law of Desire, all the ingredients that he would use throughout his career can be found in Labyrinth.

The absurd kinkiness delivered with a casual shrug that defines most of the director’s best works is at full bore here, with the farcical plot twisting around pharmaceutically-induced incest, a hilariously hard-up psychoanalyst, and a beachside flashback that in one fell swoop delivers upon two characters their nymphomania, daddy issues, and homosexuality, with the implication that a bunch of kids are about to have an orgy. It’s ribald. It’s excessive. It’s La Movida.

Although the plot is certainly more lucid and coherent than Pepi, Luci, Bom, Labyrinth takes frequent breaks from juggling its sixteen or so characters to indulge in a prolonged exploration of the fashion and music of Almodóvar’s Madrid (including two extended cameos of the director himself, alongside musical collaborator Fanny McNamara) Frankly, it’s not compelling filmmaking, but it’s a fascinating cultural document that helps you understand exactly where the man and his unique approach to cinema came from.

But even if it’s not on a whole one of his masterworks, Labyrinth of Passion shows an astonishing vertical leap in Almodóvar’s sense of style. Although his increased budget was still relatively small, he found much more freedom in creating a universe filled with bold colors and retro pop art designs. It’s a beautiful-looking movie, bursting fully formed from the visual imagination of an aesthetic genus.

And it’s damn funny. Almodóvar’s fast-talking, effortlessly cool characters deliver incredibly clever dialogue as if it were the easiest thing in the world. It’s a loving, hilarious portrait of a world burgeoning with life, and even though it’s still a bit slapdash and all-over-the-place, it’s a wonderful showcase of exactly what the young director was capable of.

Rating: 7/10

Dark Habits

Year: 1983

Director: Pedro Almodóvar

Cast: Cristina Sánchez Pascual, Will More, Laura Cepeda 

Run Time: 1 hour 54 minutes

MPAA Rating: N/A

A heroin-addicted nightclub singer takes refuge in a convent, which is run by nuns who turn out to be just as sinful as she is.

Dark Habits contains the seeds of just about everything that would come to define Almodóvar’s alter work. Absurdly casual kink and blasphemy, loosely scripted melodrama with a pinch of ironic comedy and an enclosed world dominated by a group of diverse women.

It even features many key players who would come to define his key ensemble: Consummate cranky mother Chus Lampreave (as Sister Rat, who secretly writes porn in her spare time), 80’s muse Carmen Maura (as the bongo-playing Sister Damned, who cares for the convent’s pet tiger), The Flower of My Secret star Marisa Paredes (as the pious Sister Manure, who physically punishes herself every chance she gets and takes LSD to get hallucinations of the divine), the matronly Julieta Serrano (as the heroin-addicted lesbian Mother Superior), and All About My Mother heavy-hitter Cecilia Roth (as Mercedes, a drug-dealing former nun).

Unfortunately Dark Habits is mostly defined by those iconic Almodóvar qualities that it lacks. Aside from Serrano and Lampreave, the other ensemble actresses play very minor pars, and the crux of the plot lays on the shoulder of Cristina Sanchez, the wife of the producer. Although she played minor roles in Almodóvar’s two previous films (as “Bearded Lady” and “Eusebio’s girlfriend”), it’s obvious he didn’t find an inspiring figure in her as a lead, and the film’s emotional center is lopsided because of it.

Also, the technical quality here is extremely poor. Almodóvar was still building up his mastery of film aesthetic (which begins to rear its head a the party setpiece in the third act), but the kinks he had to work out include such major factors as sound and cinematography. There are entire scenes that are incomprehensibly muffled, and though he has fun with lighting during his chapel scenes, not even the most forgiving viewer would find the camerawork comparable to Bad Education, or even Law of Desire, which came a mere four years later.

It’s fine to spend time with these charming nuns, but the melodrama never coheres into a legible whole (entirely new plot developments are still unspooling five minutes from the end) and it’s a little too long for such a meandering hang-out movie. I love me some nuns gone wild, but an Almodóvar half a decade later could have made something much more moving and satisfying out of this very same premise.

Rating: 6/10

What Have I Done to Deserve This?

Year: 1984

Director: Pedro Almodóvar

Cast: Carmen Maura, Gonzalo Suárez, Luis Hostalot 

Run Time: 1 hour 41 minutes

MPAA Rating: N/A

The lives of a downtrodden housewife, a dominatrix, an alcoholic writer, an impotent policeman, a lizard, and a  telekinetic little girl intertwine in a Madrid apartment complex.

What Have I Done to Deserve This? (aka ¿Qué he hecho yo para merecer esto?, which is not any easier to type) is the worst Almodóvar film I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen all but four at the time I’m writing this. It’s the only one I’ve considered giving a score that isn’t even marginally positive, but as I was flipping through my notes I realized something. This movie is freaking hilarious.

The big standout is Chus Lampreave (playing essentially the same role as her peak performance in The Flower of My Secret, in which she’s lucky enough to get to play off the incredible Rossy de Palma, who the Almodóvar ensemble acquired in 1987). Her batty old mother schtick never gets old, but she has some especially sharp moments here, and her relationship with a lizard she finds in a park might just be the emotional lynchpin of the entire film.

And although Carmen Maura is limited by her character being the center of the “tragi-“ half of this tragicomic film, she still brings a blustery detachment to some of the director’s kinkiest scenes yet that makes them even funnier. You can’t not giggle as she makes a quick buck by sitting next to an exhibitionist going at it with her prostitute neighbor, still clutching the groceries she walked in with, bored out of her mind. And out of all the casual kink of Almodóvar’s early work, nothing can beat the brutally businesslike transaction where she lets her son be adopted by a pedophile dentist because she can’t afford to get him a new crown. It’s dark as hell, but not a single character sees it that way, and that’s the perverse magic of this director, especially during his boundary-pushing Movida period.

So yes, it’s funny. It’s just not much of anything else. The final scenes are incredibly moving, but for the most part the story keeps you at arm’s length, all the while being incredibly confusing. The interlocking story combines autobiographical elements (Almodóvar’s time as a letter writer in his home village is reflected here), vintage kink, a family drama instinct that will eventually pupate into Volver, and a bunch of scattered odds and ends of characters who pretty much amount to nothing (including a telekinetic little girl who should’ve had more than three minutes of screen time), which all jostle for attention in a harried mush.

There are feints toward the cinematic artistry that Almodóvar would truly manifest in Law of Desire, like the lizard named Money who arrives in a time of chaos, metaphorically representing every character’s tangled motivation. But the limitations of the set make this a very static, almost neorealist movie, and that approach is too inherently lifeless to benefit from the director’s particular talents. It’s a noble mess, but a mess nonetheless, and not one that I would feel particularly keen to revisit.

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 1075

Popcorn Kernels: Pain And Life

Here is another trio of reviews on Pedro Almodóvar films, as we enter our final summer marathon of his collected filmography.

Matador

Year: 1986
Director: Pedro Almodóvar
Cast: Assumpta Serna, Antonio Banderas, Nacho Martínez
Run Time: 1 hour 50 minutes
MPAA Rating: NC-17

A matador obsessed with death meet a defense attorney with a similar fetish when one of his students confesses to a string of murders

Matador is one of Almodóvar’s weirder movies, and that’s really saying something. It’s kinky, edgy, and dark in ways only his early 80’s output could be. He was still exploring his craft, and there was certainly still room for improvement, but his inimitable voice still rings loud and clear.

For one thing, this tale of rape, murder, suicide, and necrophilia is hilarious. The A-plot is as straight as a drama can be, but it bounces between a litany of buoyant performances on the sidelines: Julieta Serrano as the pious, bullying mother of Antonio Banderas, Chus Lampreave as the doting, oversharing mother of the model he assaults in an early scene, and even Pedro Almodóvar himself, in an uncredited cameo as a fashion show director. Their antics and complete lack of self-awareness allow Matador a levity that prevents the subject matter from becoming too unbearably dark.

And despite its lack of the bold color patterns that would come to define the director’s work, Matador is beautiful on top of everything. The opening scene in which bullfighting is compared to seduction numbers among the director’s most sublime visual sequences. Unfortunately, this level of cinematic perfection fails to sustain itself, and in turn is incapable of keeping the messy plot on life support. It’s still a delightful slice of filmmaking, but it overstays its welcome, something that almost no Almodóvar movie is capable of doing.

Rating: 6/10

The Flower of My Secret

Year: 1995
Director: Pedro Almodóvar
Cast: Marisa Paredes, Juan Echanove, Carme Elias
Run Time: 1 hour 43 minutes
MPAA Rating: R

A romance author can’t find inspiration now that her marriage is on the rocks, and takes a newspaper job where she has to review her own novel.

The Flower of My Secret is definitely a middling Almodóvar work, from his period in the early 90’s that people don’t like to talk about quite so much. Nevertheless, if any other director had made it, it would be considered the peak of their career. That’s the kind of sliding scale we’re working with when we discuss Almodóvar, and that’s a glorious thing.

As far as I can figure it, there are only two things “wrong” with The Flower of My Secret. First, while Almodóvar’s plots do tend to meander, this one really gets away from him, especially in the third act. The movie is short enough that the messy plotting isn’t exhausting, but it can be a bit difficult to really sink your teeth into it. The second thing is that the film is just plain. The director’s retro, eye-searing colors and bold set design choices are rather toned down here, so there are no images immutably burned into your brain.

Those are the reasons it’s not a classic Almodóvar film. The reasons it’s a great Almodóvar film are numerous. For one thing, it’s downright hilarious. The plot beats are reserved for some heartstring-plucking melodrama, but some of the film’s many detours find their way into character-based joviality, with dialogue slipping over itself in a beautiful farcical frenzy. This reaches a particular height whenever our protagonist visits her mother and sitter, played by Almodóvar stalwarts Rossy de Palma and Chus Lampreave. Lampreave especially takes what she was working with in Matador and turns it up 11 as a batty, headstrong aging mother stock character given warmth and depth around the edges of her irresistible performance.

The melodrama is also well-crafted, anchored by the terrific Marisa Paredes, who joined the Almodóvar troupe in the early 80’s, but really rose to the top of the heap with his 90’s material. The scene of Paredes seeking comfort from the women in a knitting circle in her hometown is worth the price of admission alone. Paredes suffers a lot, but Almodóvar uses her trials and tribulation to celebrate life, love, art, beauty, and especially women of every shape and size.

Rating: 8/10

Broken Embraces

Year: 2009
Director: Pedro Almodóvar
Cast: Penélope Cruz, Lluís Homar, Blanca Portillo
Run Time: 2 hours 7 minutes
MPAA Rating: R

A blind filmmaker revisits a tragedy that struck 14 years ago while he was directing his final film.

Broken Embraces is definitely a Pedro Almodóvar movie. If ever you see a lush melodrama filled with gorgeous women and mop-headed twinks boasting an ending that makes you go “oh, that’s all?,” he is surely behind it. A lot of his favorite themes are present: a death setting a chain of events in motion, an artist finding catharsis through their craft, Penelope Cruz looking gorgeous as all hell… It’s definitely in his drama vein.

Frankly, Almodóvar’s dramas don’t appeal to me nearly as readily as his comedies, but broken Embraces struck me more than most of the others. There’s a quiet beauty in this reflection on a long, full career. And the autobiographical elements are hardly veiled, considering that this character is in the middle of making a fictionalized version of Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. The only difference is that this version (titled Chicas y Maletas) is kind of a disaster whereas Breakdown is a stone-cold masterpiece.

Like most of his dramas, Broken Embraces is a technical triumph. From the detailed production design to Cruz’s platinum blonde wig so fierce they had to call in animal control, every item in the frame is perfectly composed. All the better to let the emotions of the story spill out around it. Frankly, I can’t find that much unique to point out, because it’s exactly as sublime as his other efforts. I should really step back and appreciate how lucky I am to be able to take this film’s craft for granted, but the sad fact is if it’s not Volver, then I’m just not as invested.

Rating: 7/10
Word Count: 1024

Popcorn Kernels: All Modovar

In our continuing quest to watch every Pedro Almodóvar movie ever made, we have spanned his filmography from his very first movie to his most personal, autobiographical work, to his most recent attempt to return to his roots, all of which are getting mini-reviews right here.

Pepi, Luci, Bom and Other Girls on the Heap (Pepi, Luci, Bom y otras chicas del montón)

Year: 1980

Director: Pedro Almodóvar

Cast:  Carmen Maura, Eva Siva, Alaska

Run Time: 1 hour 22 minutes

MPAA Rating: N/A

A fast-talking heiress, a submissive housewife, and a 16-year-old punk rocker come together to explore their desires, their individuality, and the anarchist lifestyle of Spain’s Movida movement.

So, it has come to this. When I found the disc for Pepi, Luci, Bom and Other Girls on the Heap hidden in my school library’s treasure vault, I knew I had to leap on the opportunity to rent it. It’s hard to find (in fact, I had to crack through a Region 2, subtitle-less DVD to get to this screening like I was in a National Treasure movie). But I knew there was a reason it’s hard to find. As Pedro Almodóvar’s first movie, it has certain… challenges. By his own admission, the continuity is a complex puzzle with pieces missing. And he never had a lick of film school, so he was flying by the seat of his pants. However, this was also going to be a treat. I was going t see what an Almodóvar movie looked like when stripped of its directorial polish. What raw core components does he possess?

Well, the first thing I’ll say is that Pepi, Luci, Bom is unmistakably an Almodóvar movie. It has the circuitous storytelling, the twisted 50’s pop art style, and the unbreakable bedrock of humor. Hell, it has Carmen Maura, his preferred lead actress for almost a decade. But this Almodóvar isn’t the quietly kinky artiste we’ve come to know and love. This is a young Almodóvar bristling with contempt for post-Franco Spanish culture, and he has made a messy loud, delirious, radically queer anarchist text. It’s unprofessional, but it makes up for that in volume, like all the best punk rock idols.

I’m used to queer, S&M, antiestablishment subtext in the director’s work, but here it’s just plain text. Hell, it’s supertext, leaping out of the frame and splattering all over your face, much like the scene where a submissive housewife receives a golden shower from a teen punk while giving a knitting lesson. It’s sublimely kinky (the Golden Shower scene is treated like Marilyn Monroe’s famous skirt updraft in Seven Year Itch), frequently funny, disconcertingly erotic work that – if it doesn’t quite function as a narrative – at least makes a distinct impression.

The key here is Almodóvar’s casual presentation. He’s not trying to shock you, he’s just showing how these people’s lives are different from ours in shocking ways. It’s a wonderfully out-there sexual and political statement.

Now, I’ll be frank. This movie’s narrative is a shattered disaster. There is such irreparable damage to its hull that Almodóvar must resort to title cards to make any semblance of sense. Continuity is an idea this movie has heard of, but long ago or maybe in a dream. The movie slams the brakes for several full musical performances from a punk band. But it also numbers among his funniest works, building big, blaring laughs out of incredulous, frequently perverse situations. This is a sex farce that doesn’t care if you’re gay, straight, masochistic, or whatever. It will throw you full force into the midst of this incredible, memorable, irreverent, wonderfully amusing heap.

Rating: 6/10

Bad Education (La Mala Educación)

Year: 2006

Director: Pedro Almodóvar

Cast: Gael García Bernal, Fele Martínez, Javier Cámara 

Run Time: 1 hour 46 minutes

MPAA Rating: NC-17

A movie director meets an old flame from boys’ school who wants to star in a movie he wrote, fictionalizing his own life. He discovers not all is exactly as it seems, and he must untangle the web of fiction and reality to discover the truth.

So, it’s time to skip forward from 1980 to 2006. With a couple odd decades to ruminate on what it means to be a film director, Almodóvar releases Bad Education, a film so clearly autobiographical that this title card fades directly to the title card of one of his protagonist’s films. Obfuscating this true to life material, which is also a scathing attack on the Catholic school system, are several layers of fictionalization that are perhaps the most frustrating of his career, and this is a man who does not shy away from circuitous narratives.

Although the narrative is difficult, I’s also supremely rewarding, providing a piano wire tension for the thriller elements that dress up this quasi-memoir. It’s telling that his film that most blends fiction and reality on the thematic level is also the one that literally folds in stark, horrifying truths from his own life. Almodóvar has always been obsessed with depicting the act of filmmaking and film viewing, but Bad Education combines them here, both within the narrative and the very structure of the film, which he uses to give him some distance from his past so he can really examine it properly.

It’s a fascinatingly complex journey, bolstered at every turn by the extraordinarily vivacious Gael García Bernal, who utterly transforms at every narrative juncture, playing a variety of different characters in various layers of the movie. His performance is a tour de force, layering broad comedy over a deeply tragic figure, then combining an object of lust with an unsettling threat, and always maintaining exactly what tone the script demands. He is key to understanding how the disparate portions of the film function, as well as how they all fit together.

With all this going on, Almodóvar isn’t up to as many visual tricks as usual, though one stunning, bloody transition is both shocking and profoundly thematic. It’s possibly the best cut of his entire career, so he’s not exactly coasting. Although my least favorite Almodóvar movies have all been his attempts at thrillers, which he is too warm and gooey to really pull off properly, Bad Education is a terrific, valuable piece of cinema packed with raw emotion and sensuality. This is certainly the director’s most personal work, and it shows by cutting straight to the bone.

Rating: 7/10

I'm So Excited! (Los amantes pasajeros)

Year: 2013

Director: Pedro Almodóvar

Cast: Javier Cámara, Pepa Charro, Cecilia Roth 

Run Time: 1 hour 30 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Three harried flight attendants attempt to distract the business class passengers from the fact that the plane is about to make a highly dangerous emergency landing.

At the time of this writing, I’m So Excited! is the most recent Almodóvar movie available in America (Julieta has already been released in Spain, but is taking its sweet time to make its way across the pond), which competes this slate of mini reviews’ span from the beginning of his career to the present. Some 36 years down the road from Pepi Luci, Bom (33 at the time of I’m So Excited!’s release), things have certainly changed. Two Academy Awards grace his shelf (Best Foreign Language Film for All About My Mother, Best Original Screenplay for Talk to Her) and a whole host of actors and actresses have returned time and time again, had fights and vanished for decades, then resurfaced with newfound vitality.

One of the strengths of Almodóvar’s work is his massive pool of performers, which he draws from pretty much constantly. Every movie he makes is graced with familiar faces and future celebrities, because he knows who’s good to work with and has an eye for recognizing raw talent. I’m So Excited! has a lousy reputation among fans of his work, but one thing nobody can argue against is his casting: Almodóvar stalwarts Penélope Cruz and Antonio Banderas cameoing as hapless airline employees, Volver standout Lola Dueñas as a psychic virgin, Cecilia Roth (who’s worked with Almodóvar since Pepi, Luci, Bom) as an aging dominatrix, and future Sense8 hottie Miguel Ángel Silvestre as a drug mule on his honeymoon. And that’s just some choice cuts from the jam-packed cast.

As you can see from those character descriptions, I’m So Excited! is very much a  return to the wacky ensemble comedy format that  defined the first decade of Almodóvar’s career. It’s a fast-moving, casually filthy romp with queer overtones, undertones, and everywheretones. The reason it has such a foul reputation is that it’s a stark departure form his recent works, which have been more prestigious dramatic fare like your Volvers and your Bad Educations. There is no such desire for cinematic respect in I’m So Excited!, which is leagues more shallows than his masterpiece Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, but as uproariously funny as anything he’s put out. This is the first film in a long time where he’s not putting on airs, and it’s mighty refreshing to see him let his freak comedy flag fly.

That said, there are some major, perhaps film-breaking flaws in I’m So Excited! A less-than brief interlude where we abruptly leave the perspective of the plane completely disembowels the film. Although this sequence is just as funny as everything else, the hysterical midair farce slowly building its momentum comes to a screeching halt that it never fully recovers from. And the rigorously classical comedic structure loses its timelessness with a funny, but extremely forced joke about Twitter. It’s odd that a reference to social media should feel anachronistic in 2013, but Almodóvar has built such a 50’s-esque pastiche universe in his filmography that it just feels like a violation.

But so it goes. I’m So Excited! is a spectacularly lopsided, shallow film that limps across the finish line, but it never stops being a hilarious, raunchy good time. Pitch perfect comic performances bounce around the confined, pressurized tube like pinballs, creating a raucous, glittering chaos that’s part Airplane!-esque mania, part Women on the Verge battle of the sexes, and part gay pride parade, with a dash of Beavis and Butthead scatological humor. It’s a blast, so it doesn’t need to be a masterpiece. Almodóvar has made enough of those to last a lifetime, so let’s just let him have fun.

Rating: 7/10

Word Count: 1724

Popcorn Culture: Banderas de Manos

Man, Sergio and I are just plowing through the filmography of Pedro Almodóvar Here are two mini-reviews of flicks starring a psychotic Antonio Banderas. Check it out.

The Law of Desire (La Ley del Deseo)

Year: 1987

Director: Pedro Almodóvar

Cast: Eusebio Poncela, Carmen Maura, Antonio Banderas 

Run Time: 1 hour 42 minutes

MPAA Rating: NC-17

A promiscuous gay film director brings home the wrong fan: A jealous, psycho who will stop at nothing to make sure he’s his ONLY lover.

Pedro Almodóvar is a genius. A colorful, frenetic, dazzling presence behind the camera. An overwhelming personality that radiates love and fun even if you’re not enjoying a particular movie all that much. The way Almodóvar crosses and transcends genre boundaries, it was inevitable that I would stumble across one that doesn’t hit my sweet spot, though that doesn’t mean it’s not a work of art. The film in question is Law of Desire, which grafts the director’s loopy, nebulous storytelling style onto a thriller framework. It can’t be argued that the result isn’t visually spectacular, but the presence of such a tautly defined genre casts the director’s storytelling idiosyncrasies under a harsh spotlight.

To be fair, everything I love about Almodóvar is here in spades: His surreal interstitials (like a gorgeous shot of cocaine falling over a movie script like snow), his effortlessly kinky sexual deviancy, and most of all his intricately woven thread of unshakeable humor. The comedy is not so prevalent as Volver or Mujeres (the latter of which is an out-and-out farce), but it’s no less electric. Humor is mostly relegated to supporting players Carmen Maura (an Almodóvar stalwart from Day 1) and Manuela Velasco (star of my beloved [REC], who is very young in this film but no less talented) leaving Banderas and top-biller Eusebio Poncela to make do with a heap of straight drama (and by that I certainly don’t mean “heterosexual”) that doesn’t mesh as well with the cozy, silly aesthetic as it could have.

There are still some tremendously solid components to this part of the film, notably the subtext about a filmmaker who wants to direct his own life but finds out that life has different plans. But this is largely derailed by a goody third act amnesia plot point that’s perhaps even more frivolous than the similar moment in The Muppets Take Manhattan (yeah, that movie got dark).

It’s an undeniable achievement in filmmaking (remembering the driving scene that matches a car with the lead’s flaring emotions still sends a chill down my spine,), but the story is just to weak to hold up the weight of Almodóvar’s visual prowess. The film crumples in upon itself in the third act, but let’s remember that a disappointment within the context of this director’s filmography would be the magnum opus of most anybody else.

Rating: 6/10

Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! (Átame)

Year: 1989

Director: Pedro Almodóvar

Cast: Victoria Abril, Antonio Banderas, Loles León

Run Time: 1 hour 41 minutes

MPAA Rating: NC-17

A newly released mental patient kidnaps his favorite movie star and ties her up in her apartment to make a case for why she should marry him.

Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! is essentially a bold-faced challenge to anybody who thought that Law of Desire was too kinky. It might boast the shallowest, most straightforward narrative I’ve seen in one of his films, but that doesn’t stop it from being a sexually dynamic, uproariously silly, sublimely weird erotic thriller. It suffers from the los of Carmen Maura (the up-for-anything actress who stopped working with Almodóvar for 18 years after a tough experience on the set of his previous film, Mujeres al Borde de un Ataque de Nervios), but what female lead Victoria Abril lacks in personality, she makes up for in wounded vulnerability.

Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! is an intriguing evolution from Law of Desire, upgrading the sympathy for its villain along with the depth and complexity of Antonio Banderas’ performance. While the story may not have as many twists and turns, it shows a heretofore unseen focus on developing one particular character, showcasing Banderas as the true movie star he is. The really interesting thing about the cut-and-dry plot keeping the villain in the spotlight is that the film is unmistakably an entry in the horror genre. You don’t just hire The Thing composer Ennio Morricone by accident.

Of course, Almodóvar can’t keep his finger on any one genre for more than about 20 seconds, but the horror influence is certainly felt. So far, every single movie of his that I’ve seen has either been explicitly about cinema or features a character who works in the film industry, but this is his first to center almost entirely over the production of a B-horror film. Again, this is certainly no coincidence. His passion for the subject bleeds around the edges of the frame, and these scenes on the movie set number among his most effortlessly funny material.

I can’t stress enough that the story itself is a touch weaker than it could have been, but I’ll be damned if h doesn’t pull out the stops everywhere else. The foreshadowing in the script is dense and satisfying, and a recurring shot from the film-within-the-film is a woefully perfect cinematic image (a body swinging on a rope that resembles the pendulum of a grandfather clock). Plus, his characters, even the ones that only appear in a single scene, are given startling emotional depth. They’re like stepping into a puddle only to realize that your foot has plunged into a pothole.

Almodóvar just loves people, even the crazy ones. Especially the crazy ones. As wacky, kinky, and violent as Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! gets, it remains a warm-hearted tribute to the best in humanity, it’s also a fearless depiction of sexual deviancy with an extended, iconic (for those who know about this kind of thing) lovemaking sequence that’s erotic because it’s not erotic. It’s perhaps the most real, human sexual act hat’s ever been committed to celluloid. It reflects his European sensibilities in a perfect, divisive (NC-17, anyone?) manifesto. Sex is messed up, gross, fumbling, and beautiful. And it certainly doesn’t have to be a big deal.

This scene(and in fact this entire movie) basically defines the entirety of Almodóvar’s sexy, lighthearted, fearless filmography. So, yeah. Don’t write it off just because the A-plot is a wee bit thin.

Rating: 7/10

Word Count: 1075

Popcorn Kernels: Sick Women

This set of mini reviews will cover a multitude of films I’ve seen recently about women who are under the weather, whether it’s a contagious bug, a nervous breakdown, or a psychological corkscrew.

Contagion

Year: 2011
Director: Steven Soderbergh
Cast: Matt Damon, Kate Winslet, Jude Law
Run Time: 1 hour 46 minutes
MPAA Rating: PG-13

A lethal viral pathogen is quickly spreading across the world and authorities scramble to find its source, discover a cure, and decide who to save first.

There’s no single more effective moment in Contagion than its opening shot: A pale Gwyneth Paltrow coughs and sniffles in an airport lounge. The title card “Day 2” appears in ominous, blood red font. This is not the beginning of our story. We don’t know how or why, but it has already begun and there is no escape until it reaches its inevitable conclusion. Now that's how you open a movie!

I’m an easy lay for viral outbreak movies. As a card-carrying germophobe, I had a knot in my stomach for nearly the entire duration of the movie. It freaked me out more than every horror movie I’ve watched this movie, combined. And while I appreciate any film that can generate a physical reaction in its audience, I am NOT an easy lay for positive reviews. And as tense as Contagion may be, it’s an astoundingly messy movie.

It’s telling that the film’s best moment is its opening shot, because once Contagion’s innumerable characters and subplots kick in, they weigh the film down like so many anchors. The broad, multi-perspective view of an epidemic is certainly an intriguing and tense approach, but the film’s overall structure suffers, narrative logistics cracking under the weight of a metric ton of stars. Contagion’s desperate attempts to weld together storylines involving Matt Damon, Kate Winslet, Laurence Fishburne, Marion Cotillard, Jude law, John Hawkes, Brian Cranston, and Elliott Gould lead to a waterlogged conclusion that haphazardly drops subplots to bail out a slowly sinking narrative. It’s the Garry Marshall’s Valentine’s Day of viral outbreak movies.

Contagion is a roller coaster; a rip-roaring thrill ride that leaves you entirely unchanged upon its completion, if a little nauseous. Its shallowness isn’t necessarily a fault, even if its relentlessly purple dialogue is (“should I call someone?” “Call everyone!”). It does have some shaky thematic throughlines about the indignities of the class system and how fear and rumor spreads just as quickly as disease, but for the most part it’s just a slick, by-the-numbers thriller. When it finally ends with a pointless explanation of the virus’s origin, it’s hard to feel like the movie has accomplished anything, but it was definitely a wild ride.

Pro-Tip: Contagion is patently NOT a date movie. Potential suitors, avoid at all costs.

Rating: 7/10

Mujeres al Borde de un Ataque de Nervios

Year: 1988
Director: Pedro Almodóvar
Cast: Carmen Maura, Antonio Banderas, Julieta Serrano
Run Time: 1 hour 30 minutes
MPAA Rating: R

An actress jilted by her co-star boyfriend tempts to deal with her break-up while a friend on the run from the law, her lover’s ex-wife, his son, and his son’s fiancée unexpectedly arrive at her apartment.

Sergio and I were so taken with Pedro Almodóvar’s Volver that we more or less instantly followed it up with Mujeres al Borde de un Ataque de Nervios/Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, a much earlier entry in his filmography that also stars the inimitable Carmen Maura (it was also the one that capsized their creative partnership, and in fact they wouldn’t work together at all until the 18-years-later Volver, but that’s neither here nor there, I suppose). Although it’s another female-led comedy with dark themes that allows its protagonist license to be venal and selfish, Mujeres could hardly be more different from Volver.

Where his 2006 effort is a confident, fantastical treatise on the beauty and wonder of life, Mujeres is an out-and-out farce of gran proportions, a wacky, door-slamming effort in the vein of classic stage works like Noises Off. There’s the obvious contributing factor that it mostly takes place in a single location once the second act kicks in, but it’s also a loony jaunt jam-packed with delightfully cartoonish characters. Once again, Almodóvar delivers an effervescent comedy that transcends language barriers with a solid undercurrent of emotion and artistry.

You see, the women in this film aren’t just on the verge of a nervous breakdown due to their over-the-top situations. They are real life women trying to get by in the face of life’s incalculable unfairness. Their struggles are palpable and their exaggerated reactions blameless. Essentially every problem they face is the result of men carelessly using them like playthings, and the entire arc of the film reflects main character Pepa’s growth into independent womanhood. Not only is it a passionate and exuberant feminist tract, it’s a god damn work of art.

There is perhaps no film scene of the entire year that matches the dreamy magnum opus of this film’s opening, played out through a retro film scene followed by Ivan – the man who caused all this trouble – providing dubbed Spanish dialogue for another movie. The eclectic collection of shots in the film within the film depict him declaring his undying love for a multitude of international women (including an American stereotype I can’t say I’ve ever come across – a baton-twirling cheerleader), followed by an outpouring of dubbed emotion over a muted film track, in which the woman silently flaps her lips in response to his declarations. It’s a genius setup that clearly implies how Ivan (and, by extent, the world) views and ignores women, as well as how trapped they find themselves by his words. It’s a powerful, beautiful piece, and it’s followed by 80 minutes of vivacious, neon farce.

It’s a stylized, wacky, sexy romp that turns a comic relief cabdriver (he’s a relief from the comedy because he’s marginally less funny than the other characters) into an exquisitely precise longform punchline. This film is women against the world, and they grab it by the horns, toss it through a plate glass window, and keep it laughing so hard it passes out. I’ve only seen two of his films so far, but Pedro Almodóvar is swiftly becoming one of my favorite directors.

Rating: 10/10

Heathers

Year: 1989
Director: Michael Lemann
Cast: Winona Ryder, Christian Slater, Shannen Doherty
Run Time: 1 hour 43 minutes
MPAA Rating: R

A teen girl is seduced by a new boy in town, who convinces her to murder the popular kids at her high school.

I’ve always viewed Heathers as an alternative teen classic, a late period bit of counterprogramming to the overly earnest John Hughes cycle, but I personally hadn’t seen the film since the first time I watched it, at a very young age. Given distance and a new perspective, Heathers is much better and a hell of a lot worse than I thought. Its themes have only gotten more potent and many moments are unequivocally brilliant, bleeding-edge satire, but to get to them you have to sift through a heap of late 80’s detritus.

The first act is a gauntlet to prove that you’re worthy of the film’s brilliance; a cheap, stagey spectacle of overbaked dialogue that almost certainly made a young Diablo Cody swoon. It’s a vexing half hour of hip, snappy teens spouting avant garbage about spokes in their menstrual cycle, reigned over by a truly dreadful, soul-curdling non-performance from Kim Walker as the Queen Bee Heather Chandler. But once you’ve broken through that vexing permafrost, you hit pay dirt.

Heathers is a delicious dark comedy that could only have been made in 1989 – that sweet spot in the wake of the slasher boom but pre-Columbine – and its true core of pitch-black humor activates with Heather Chandler’s death, which also conveniently rids the cast of its weakest link. After this, the film snaps like a slingshot, launching into a wry satire detailing what happens when a vapid, venal student body that is used to violently lashing out more out of a sense of stir-craziness than righting actual wrongs comes into contact with a genuine, dyed-in-the-wool psychopath. This is a society where suicide (faked or otherwise) is the great equalizer, an alternapunk wasteland of superficial nihilists who will fake true emotion if it gets them on TV, where life only gains meaning once it’s extinguished.

It’s unspeakably grim, but also uproariously funny. Watching these teen movie archetypes marching through their stages of non-grief is a hilariously biting indictment of apathetic teen culture, balanced out by the earnest Winona Ryder resisting her seduction over to the Dark Side (represented by Christian Slater, copping Urkel’s nasal whine). She is the one point of light in this world of careless parents, thin-skinned teens, and inept cops, and her dance with the Devil has surprising emotional weight. Her turning point into genuine heroine for hope comes in the film’s most brilliantly twisted moment: a guilt-stricken Ryder burns her palm with the car’s cigarette lighter and Slater grabs her hand, not to comfort her, but to use it to light his cigarette.

This detachment fuels the entire film, giving it an edgy boost that overcomes its feeble first act and shoddy production design(although I do love the blue neon light used to denote nighttime and one shot of a chase scene through the misty woods is a warped, expressionistic marvel). Eventually this delves into a patently silly climax that I recognized as goofily inferior even when I was a kid, but for the bulk of its run time, Heathers is a sharp, dynamic, demented flick that’s totally worth ritual rewatching, a proto-Fight Club for the angsty teen set.

Rating: 7/10
Word Count: 1623