Pedro Almodóvar
55 connections found
Filmography
Julieta 2016 
The Skin I Live In 2011 
Pain and Glory 2019 
I'm So Excited! 2013 
Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown 1988 
Talk to Her 2002 
Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! 1990 
Bad Education 2004 
Parallel Mothers 2021 
Live Flesh 1997 
Volver 2006 
All About My Mother 1999 
Broken Embraces 2009 
The Room Next Door 2024 
Matador 1986 
Law of Desire 1987 
Labyrinth of Passion 1982 
The Flower of My Secret 1995 
What Have I Done to Deserve This? 1984 View:
Connections, in both directions
Eyes Without a Face (1960)
Directed by Georges Franju
influenced The Skin I Live In (2011)
Visuals Themes Plot
There's a goodly dose of Georges Franju's 1960 French horror classic "Eyes Without a Face."
There are echoes of Georges Franju’s Eyes Without a Face, Hitchcock’s Vertigo and just about anybody’s Frankenstein.
Cinephiles will recognize dreamy allusions, most obviously to Georges Franju's Eyes Without a Face, but there are also deep-red hints of early Dario Argento films, Robert Wiene's The Hands of Orlac and its remake, Karl Freund's Mad Love, and the films of David Cronenberg, among others.
The Skin I Live In is a gaudy mash-up of George Franju’s memorably queasy Eyes Without a Face, with other plot strands lifted from various other sources, including Verdi’s opera Il Trovatore.
The film has elements of Hitchcock and, most of all, George Franju's far, far superior "Eyes Without a Face," but "The Skin I Live In" is structurally rickety.
"Vertigo," "Eyes Without a Face," "Rebecca," "Frankenstein" and every mad doctor movie ever made, including "The Island of Lost Souls," are mixed into this movie's DNA.
The film pays loving tribute to actresses and that genre of movies familiarly called "women's films" and Almodovar has merged three -- Bette Davis in "All About Eve," Gena Rowlands in "Opening Night" and Romy Schneider in "L'important c'est d'aimer" -- into a buoyant homage to the female sex, "women who act" and "actresses who have played actresses."
Paying homage to cinema legends with a script that overtly references "All About Eve" and "A Streetcar Named Desire," the director has created similarly memorable heroines of his own.
As she gradually regains the will to live through her involvement with the lives of others (including her son's favourite stage diva Paredes), Almodóvar piles on the coincidences, contrivances and twists so that the film succeeds best as a beautifully crafted, semi-ironic melodrama (it cleverly alludes to - and integrates - All About Eve, Streetcar..., Capote, etc).
At the movie’s start, Manuela and Esteban watch All About Eve together on television.
I guess it represents a significant advance in his career, giving us a kinder, gentler, more soulful Almodovar who makes a lot more references than usual to other movies: All About Eve and A Streetcar Named Desire especially, but also (in terms of the story's point of departure) John Cassavetes's Opening Night.
He is watching TV with her and the movie "All About Eve" is on, which encourages him to write in his pad "All About My Mother."
On his 17th birthday, his mother surprises him with tickets to a stage production of "A Streetcar Named Desire" starring the great actress Huma Rojo (Marisa Parides) as Blanche Dubois.
Good fortune smiles upon her when Manuela finds employment as an assistant to actress Huma Rojo (Marisa Paredes), who's playing Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire.
Paying homage to cinema legends with a script that overtly references "All About Eve" and "A Streetcar Named Desire," the director has created similarly memorable heroines of his own.
Later, they attend a local production of A Streetcar Named Desire starring Huma Rojo, the aforementioned actress.
I guess it represents a significant advance in his career, giving us a kinder, gentler, more soulful Almodovar who makes a lot more references than usual to other movies: All About Eve and A Streetcar Named Desire especially, but also (in terms of the story's point of departure) John Cassavetes's Opening Night.
There are echoes of Georges Franju’s Eyes Without a Face, Hitchcock’s Vertigo and just about anybody’s Frankenstein.
In a Hitchockian twist of the Vertigo variety, Almodóvar eventually reveals that characters are not who we think they are and the very idea of victimhood, which seems so clear-cut at the beginning, is actually a sticky, murky morass that leaves the theater with us.
"Vertigo," "Eyes Without a Face," "Rebecca," "Frankenstein" and every mad doctor movie ever made, including "The Island of Lost Souls," are mixed into this movie's DNA.
Part “Vertigo,” part “Beauty and the Beast,” part “Bride of Frankenstein,” Pedro Almodóvar’s “The Skin I Live In” is yet another casually masterful work from a director who has barely put a foot wrong in his 30 (!) years of feature filmmaking.
Like James Stewart's lovesick griever in Vertigo, who alters the couture and coiffure of a sales clerk to make her resemble his dead dream girl, Robert has sculpted Vera into the living effigy of his late wife.
In structuring the picture around the reminiscences of Salvador Mallo (Antonio Banderas), who worries that he may never shoot another movie, Almodóvar invites us to consider Pain and Glory as his own version of Fellini’s 8½ .
Like Marcello Mastroianni in Fellini’s 8½ , Banderas’s Salvador Mallo is an autofictional director in crisis.
In this sense, the movie I thought about most while watching Pain and Glory, even more than 8½ —an obvious reference underlined by the poster of Fellini’s film hanging in the office of Salvador’s personal assistant—was Nanni Moretti’s masterful Mia madre.
The filmmaker in Fellini’s “8½” (1963) was professionally thwarted, too, but his problem was mental blockage and carnal fatigue, whereas poor Salvador has fused vertebrae (surely a better excuse).
It is more than Pedro Almodovar’s 8½ …it’s his Pain and Glory .
Rather than incorporating the melodrama many of his most polarizing films have featured, this comparatively low-brow story, rich with bittersweet humor and heart, seems only interested in honoring its form; similar to Federico Fellini’s own filmmaker chronicle 8½ (1963).
The film pays loving tribute to actresses and that genre of movies familiarly called "women's films" and Almodovar has merged three -- Bette Davis in "All About Eve," Gena Rowlands in "Opening Night" and Romy Schneider in "L'important c'est d'aimer" -- into a buoyant homage to the female sex, "women who act" and "actresses who have played actresses."
Yet despite those antecedents (and others, like Cassavetes' "Opening Night"), this film is pure Almod¢var.
I guess it represents a significant advance in his career, giving us a kinder, gentler, more soulful Almodovar who makes a lot more references than usual to other movies: All About Eve and A Streetcar Named Desire especially, but also (in terms of the story's point of departure) John Cassavetes's Opening Night.
Before long, she's managed to launch a successful restaurant (as Crawford did in "Mildred Pierce") while protecting her daughter's self-esteem (a la Stanwyck in "Stella Dallas").
Also very present is the spirit of Joan Crawford in "Mildred Pierce," which lends the story its central predicament.
An ugly turn of events right out of "Mildred Pierce" involving her tough teenage daughter (Yohana Cobo ) turns fortuitous for her, and she winds up a proprietress of a little restaurant whose principal clientele is a 30-person film crew.
Pedro Almod�var is another auteur whose queer eye feasts on eruptions of womanhood, and in Volver, his new work, he name-checks his own cinematic duo (Mildred Pierce arcanely, Visconti's Bellissima explicitly).
The movie is being compared to Mildred Pierce, and it contains a several parallels, one of which involves Raimunda running a restaurant successfully on her own.
Cruz has said it's the role of her career, and she may be right: drawing heavily on the Sophia Loren of yore in stylizing her sumptuous beauty, both Loren in Two Women and Joan Crawford in Mildred Pierce are Raimunda's indomitable predecessors.
Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008)
Directed by Woody Allen
influenced by Volver (2006), Live Flesh (1997), Talk to Her (2002)
Compare this performance with her roles in "Elegy" and "Volver ," for example, and you see that Cruz has a much wider range than her eye-candy reputation suggests.
Much of what's best here is brought by the actors, especially sloe-eyed Bardem and the excitingly maniacal Cruz, who's as good as she was in "Volver."
After struggling with English-language crap like Sahara, Cruz has quietly given three stunning performances in Volver (which she should have won the Oscar for), a movie that opens next week that I’m still technically embargo-ed on, and this incredible role.
Cruz has displayed her versatility before -- especially in Volver - and here her fiery Spanish insensibility works perfectly as the catalyst.
Writer/director Woody Allen ("Match Point," "Cassandra's Dream") has assembled one of his most unusual casts for his latest, European set film and his combination of recent favorite (Scarlett Johansson, "Scoop," "The Black Dahlia"), new discovery (Rebecca Hall, "Starter for 10," "The Prestige") and local blood (Javier Bardem, "No Country for Old Men" and (Penélope Cruz, "Volver") sizzles and sparks.
Cruz and Bardem, who have a history together - the erotically charged 1992 Spanish import, Jamón, Jamón, and Pedro Almodovar's 1997 gem, Live Flesh - turn what could have been a cartoon rendering of hot-blooded Latin passion into a seriously unpredictable relationship.
If Almodóvar looked to Douglas Sirk in "All About My Mother" (although as a filmmaker, he's far wetter and more approachably rumpled than the crisp, buttoned-down Sirk), this time he's casting an eye toward Italian neorealism: "Volver" includes a clip from Luchino Visconti's "Bellissima," starring perhaps the most vital-looking actress of all time, Anna Magnani.
Yes, she's supposed to evoke the va - va-voom of the great European earth-goddesses (a clip of Anna Magnani on a bed in Visconti's "Bellissima" plays on TV), but the strategy is a little more personal for Cruz, too.
Pedro Almod�var is another auteur whose queer eye feasts on eruptions of womanhood, and in Volver, his new work, he name-checks his own cinematic duo (Mildred Pierce arcanely, Visconti's Bellissima explicitly).
In Volver, Mr. Almodóvar has taken great pains to turn her into a voluptuous firebrand, big as the screen can hold, with a makeover inspired by the extended eyeliner of Claudia Cardinale, the tumble-down hair and plumped-up cleavage of a young Sophia Loren, and Dustin Hoffman’s padded derriere in Tootsie.
Cinephiles will recognize dreamy allusions, most obviously to Georges Franju's Eyes Without a Face, but there are also deep-red hints of early Dario Argento films, Robert Wiene's The Hands of Orlac and its remake, Karl Freund's Mad Love, and the films of David Cronenberg, among others.
Before long, she's managed to launch a successful restaurant (as Crawford did in "Mildred Pierce") while protecting her daughter's self-esteem (a la Stanwyck in "Stella Dallas").
Cruz has said it's the role of her career, and she may be right: drawing heavily on the Sophia Loren of yore in stylizing her sumptuous beauty, both Loren in Two Women and Joan Crawford in Mildred Pierce are Raimunda's indomitable predecessors.
And with All About My Mother, he has made the near equivalent to Sirk's Written on the Wind (1956), a weepie movie with a brainy sensibility, an open heart, and a wicked sense of humor.
Almodóvar has tempered Jonquet's extremely cruel tale, shifted the relationships around and relocated the narrative to Toledo, the beautiful city south of Madrid where his idol, Luis Buñuel, set his 1970 masterpiece Tristana, a psychological drama of controlled savagery about the destructive affair between an elderly, liberal aristocrat (Fernando Rey) and his beautiful ward (Catherine Deneuve).
Cornet and Suárez are young, dumb and callow, while enigmatic Marisa Paredes, the most interesting character in the movie, is like Garbo doing Mrs. Danvers in Rebecca.
"Vertigo," "Eyes Without a Face," "Rebecca," "Frankenstein" and every mad doctor movie ever made, including "The Island of Lost Souls," are mixed into this movie's DNA.
The girlfriend-in-a-coma theme is a familiar one, but unlike Pedro Almodóvar’s rhapsodic dramatic comedy Talk to Her , the medical crisis here is harrowing.
I kept wondering what the more substantial Javier Bardem would have been like in the part, with his mournful aspect of having seen and done all and regretted much of it, and also thought about Colin Clive, who was so ineffably, grippingly crazy in that granddaddy of the genre, Frankenstein.
(Vertigo is a clear antecedent, as are James Whale’s Frankenstein and Georges Franju’s Eyes Without A Face.)
Cinephiles will recognize dreamy allusions, most obviously to Georges Franju's Eyes Without a Face, but there are also deep-red hints of early Dario Argento films, Robert Wiene's The Hands of Orlac and its remake, Karl Freund's Mad Love, and the films of David Cronenberg, among others.
In film, previously, we saw such finesse at work in “The Mosquito Coast” (1986), a Paul Theroux adaptation in which Harrison Ford plays an inventor who moves his family to Belize to start a new life . . .