Every time it feels like Hollywood has decided to remake a property that couldn’t be more sacred, they one up the ante. Michael Bay has been prepping a remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s suspense/horror classic The Birds, and Variety reports that the project has now found its director: Dutch filmmaker Diederik Van Rooijen. Van Rooijen has …
Just days after the 39th anniversary of the conviction of Patty Hearst back on March 20, 1976, Deadline is reporting that Fox 2000 has acquired the rights to a new, untitled book being written by Jeffrey Toobin about the life and kidnapping of Hearst. The writers behind Big Eyes, Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, will …
Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! is an excellent middle period Almodóvar feature, emblematic of so much of what brought him to international prominence: the dark comedy, the campy melodrama, the sexuality, the quirkiness.
Riffing on Terek Puckett’s terrific list of director/actor collaborations, I wanted to look at some of those equally impressive leading ladies who served as muses for their directors. I strived to look for collaborations that may not have been as obviously canonical, but whose effects on cinema were no less compelling. Categorizing a film’s lead …
It seems as though everything that could be said or written in praise of Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar has already been expressed. He is, without the shadow of a doubt, not only a critical darling, but has also earned himself a very respectable amount of fans in the movie going public, and, lest it be overlooked, built an impressive career with stories that, either directly or otherwise, spoke about subsections of the human population that only so rarely make important or relevant appearances in film, most notably homosexuals and transvestites.
For three decades, Pedro Almodovar has been the most internationally successful purveyor of queer cinema. His first film, 1980’s Pepi, Luci, Bom and Other Girls on the Heap, was released just two years before Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s too-soon swan-song, Querelle. Though the directors possess distinctly different approaches to the medium (Almodovar hasn’t yet gone sci-fi ala World on A Wire, for instance), their films were among the first brashly and unapologetically queer films that were both critically accepted and widely seen.
E. B. White once wrote, “Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested and the frog dies of it.” Analyzing trilogies seems to the same. The entire point is to enjoy them. Still, given the many sins to be found in film, there are worse things than movie trilogies but few have …
In some films, particularly of the twists and turns variety, a significant event, moment or even line of dialogue, can be summarized by the phrase “This changes everything”. This is known as a Game Changer, where the established landscape of the movie’s plot is irrevocably and dramatically altered, with no chance of ever going back. …
This week, we turn our focus to Spanish auteur Pedro Almodóvar, who has reunited with former collaborator Antonio Banderas for The Skin I Live In, which finds the acclaimed director wading further into the depths of genre than perhaps ever before, folding in aspects of the mad-doctor subgenre and even…torture porn? We’ll also rewind to …
The Skin I Live In Written by Pedro Almodóvar Directed by Pedro Almodóvar Spain, 2011 The hallowed caverns of cinema history are littered with the skeletal remains of mad scientists, those power-crazed maniacs whose unholy experiments are frequently an affront to god and to the more tangible realm of medical ethics. These sneering antagonists are …
The Skin I Live In Written by Pedro Almodóvar Directed by Pedro Almodóvar Spain, 2011 The hallowed caverns of cinema history are littered with the skeletal remains of mad scientists, those power-crazed maniacs whose unholy experiments are frequently an affront to god and to the more tangible realm of medical ethics. These sneering antagonists are …
This year’s New York Film Festival is shaping up to be a strong one at that. Recently My Week with Marilyn, directed by Simon Curtis, has announced it’s world premier at the festival on October 9th as the Centerpiece at Alice Tully Hall. Added to the list are the highly anticipated films, A Dangerous Method …
Pedro Almodóvar is heading to the Cannes Film Festival with his latest film The Skin That I Inhabit (La piel que habito) ready to screen. We posted one image before (seen above) but now the studio has released four new promotional photos for the picture which you can see below. The film is a revenge …
In 1990, shortly after The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover was refused an R rating by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), Harvey Weinstein of Miramax Films found himself confronted with the exact same dilemma. The film in question this time was Pedro Almodovar’s Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!. The …
Every year in January or February I put together a predicted list of my favourite films of the year. Not only am I usually completely wrong, but about half of my predicted picks never even see a release. It is, nonetheless, a fun little project and is a good exercise in getting a sense of …
This heartwarming, humanist and gender-blurring pic about life imitating art imitating life could possibly be his most accomplished work. All About My Mother Directed by Pedro Almodovar With All About My Mother, Pedro Almodovar shifts away from his earlier, more kinky and offbeat views of sex and relationships. Here, he is more concerned about conventional …