Brandon’s movie memory

Another Almodovar centering on accidents, suicide, bullfights and brain death on hospital beds… no organ donation discussions this time, though. Opens and closes with our protagonist seeing two different plays (there are either plays or films in every Almodovar movie that I can think of). And we get a gorgeous live performance by Caetano Veloso.

Center of the movie has Marco (Dario Grandinetti) watching over his girlfriend Lydia (Rosario Flores), and Benigno (Javier Camara) watching over his wannabe girlfriend Alicia (Leonor Watling) in a hospital. None of the main actors are Almodovar regulars; it’s a whole new cast. Geraldine Chaplin (Charlie’s daughter) plays Alicia’s dance instructor and Augustin Almodovar has another small part but I never recognize him.

So, the twists. Travel-writer Marco doesn’t realize that matador Lydia was about to leave him for another matador the day of the accident, and Alicia’s family doesn’t realize that Benigno is Alicia’s stalker until she becomes pregnant while still in the coma, and Benigno goes to jail and soon commits suicide. Seemingly happy ending as Marco meets Alicia at the play. Hell of a movie.

Leo (Marisa Paredes, Huma in All About My Mother) is a 50-ish woman with major marital problems. Her husband Paco (Imanol Arias) is always off on distant NATO missions and when he does return one time, it’s just for an hour to shower, fight with Leo, and announce that he’s leaving her for good. He’s also having an affair with Leo’s best friend, psychologist Betty (Carmen Elias). Leo’s mother fights constantly with Leo’s sister Rosa (Rossy de Palma, the one with the nose). What’s more, Leo is secretly the hugely popular romance novelist Amanda Gris, and after interviewing for a newspaper column, the editor Angel (Juan Echanove) finds out. Fortunately, he and Leo are perfect for each other, and he even ghost-ghost-writes a couple Amanda Gris novels while Leo’s getting back on her feet by taking care of her mother in their old village. Oh also Leo’s maid Blanca stages a great flamenco show funded by a script that her son Antonio stole from Leo’s trashcan. Very much an adult movie, with the usual motherhood themes and suicide attempts. Not as wild and fun as the others… pretty grounded, for Almodovar.

Opens the same way as All About My Mother, with Betty taping a play-acted discussion at the hospital regarding organ donation after a patient has died. Nobody dies in this one, though.

Manuela (completely excellent Cecilia Roth) takes her son Esteban (Eloy Azarin) to see A Streetcar Named Desire, starring Huma Rojo (Marisa Paredes) as Blanche, and Nina (Candela Pena) as Stella. Esteban wants Huma’s autograph, chases her taxi in the rain, and is fatally struck by another car. Manuela travels from Madrid to Barcelona to tell Esteban’s father Lola (Toni Canto), a transsexual, that his son has died, and that he had a son in the first place.

In Barcelona she hooks up with Lola’s friend Agrado (Antonia San Juan), who got ripped off by Lola a few months prior. Agrado leads her to the nun Sister Maria Rosa Sanz (Penelope Cruz) to find Lola, not knowing that Sister Maria is pregnant with Lola’s son, a fact she tries to hide from her parents. The “Streetcar” theater company has also moved to Barcelona and Manuela tracks them down, sorta accidentally becoming Huma’s personal assitant (a job later handed over to Agrado), which mostly consists of tracking down Nina after she disappears to find/take drugs.

Sister Maria dies in childbirth, naming her son Esteban. Manuela becomes Esteban’s mother, because Maria’s mom has her hands full watching Maria’s alzheimers-suffering dad.

Awesome, with moving performances throughout… sad and happy and wonderful. Technically strong, well edited and written, but the entire focus is on the performances, the actresses. Worth seeing again and again. Beat a buncha movies I’ve never heard of for best foreign oscar in 2000. Apparently it was loosely based on “The Human Voice” by Jean Cocteau.

Both Almodovar movies seen today feature incredible coincidences happening while women search for the fathers of their children. Both take place in large cities (Madrid and Barcelona) but treat the cities like familiar towns, where you can always run into someone you know.

Almodovar’s closing dedication: “To all actresses who have played actresses. To all women who act. To men who act and become women. To all the people who want to be mothers. To my mother.”

Pepa’s (Carmen Maura) lover Ivan (an older Fernando Guillen) is leaving her. She just found out she’s pregnant and tries unsuccessfully to contact him for two days to tell him so. She tries contacting Ivan’s former lover Lucia (Julieta Serrano) to find Ivan, but no luck. Lucia and Pepa are each convinced that Ivan is about to go on a trip with the other, but he’s off to Stockholm with a third woman, a feminist lawyer named Paulina Morales (Kiti Manver) whom Lucia and Pepa have each tried to hire.

Lucia has a son by Ivan named Carlos (Antonio Banderas with poofy hair) who shows up coincidentally to rent Pepa’s apartment with his fiancee Marisa (big-nosed Rossy de Palma). But not before Pepa’s suicidally upset friend Candela (cute, short-haired Maria Barranco) comes along to hide out after she was forced to harbor Shiite terrorists who planned to blow up tonight’s flight to Stockholm (but are now safely in police custody). Also involved are a mambo cabbie (dyed-blonde Guillermo Montesinos), a couple policemen, neighbor Ana (Ana Leza) with a motorcyclist boyfriend, and an uncredited speaking part for Javier Bardem as the messenger at the lawyer’s office who convinces her receptionist to let Pepa in for a few minutes.

In between, the bed is set on fire, the phone and answering machine both get tossed through a window, drugged gazpacho knocks everyone out, Banderas gets frisky with Candela, and Lucia gets crazy and hijacks a motorcycle.

That should be sufficient to remember plot. Movie is colorful and fun and moving and hilarious… completely awesome. Worth seeing again. A Danish movie called Pelle the Conqueror beat this and Salaam Bombay out for best foreign oscar in 1989.

IMDB says: “A fifty-year-old prostitute, no longer able to attract men, looks back on her sad life. Once a lady-in-waiting at the imperial court at Kyoto, Oharu fell in love with, and became the lover of, a man below her station. They were discovered, and Oharu and her family were exiled. For Oharu there followed a life filled with one sorrow and humiliation after another.”

That’s about right. Her dad is pretty crappy to her, and the whole “marry for love whatever the cost” message is lost pretty quickly when everyone’s social position ends up determining the rest of their shameful lives as usual. Didn’t see the big deal of this being one of the greatest movies ever made, actually got shamefully restless in my seat and hoped it would end soon. I guess Japanese period dramas were just not made for me. It’s a big deal that Toshiro Mifune is in this, but I’m ashamed to say that I didn’t recognize him and don’t know who he played (”Katsunosuke”).

Sissy Spacek is tormented daily (most memorably in a shower-room scene full of naked high-school girls), then just when she’s made to feel special (via rigged prom queen vote), down comes the pig’s blood and out pours the psychic rage (school fire), which later also takes out her tormentors (car crash) and her mother and herself (collapsing their house). A classic for obvious reasons. Spacek was memorably nude in Prime Cut also, and probably in Badlands but I don’t remember. She was 26 in this so it’s okay to get naked.

Hooray! Angie Dickinson decides to have an affair after walking around a museum forever, gets killed in an elevator 30 minutes into the movie in an obvious and great shower-scene homage. The killer is psychiatrist Michael Caine’s transsexual alter-ego, and it’s up to witness Nancy Allen and Angie’s son Keith Gordon (the director!) to bring Caine to justice (using KG’s high-tech toys like a bicycle-mounted time-lapse camera), since crappy detective Dennis Franz won’t help. Must’ve made transsexuals angry. Neat movie.

Yay, a public screening, but boo, a DVD projection. The roller skating scene and the singing scene and the opening factory scenes will never cease to be funny and amazing. Charlie gets fired from his factory job after going completely mental from being treated like a machine, ends up in jail. Foils jailbreak high on coke that fellow inmate slips into salt shaker. Gets letter of commendation from the mayor, which gets him night watchman gig at department store. Meanwhile, orphan girl (dad died in workers’ protest) is stealing to eat and dreaming of a nice home and a nice husband, meets Charlie and they play at the store after hours. The store is robbed and Charlie and the girl are caught up in the plot. Then I forget a few things, but she ends up dancing at a restaurant and Charlie gets to be a singing waiter, then The Song…

edit 7/31/07: Katy finally watched last night. Liked it!

Same old gorgeous La Jetee. No longer makes me think of 12 Monkeys while watching it (a good thing). I spotted cats and a bird (below), but no owls. Watched out on the porch - Katy enjoyed it, but never mentioned the motion part. Thanks again for my poster.

One of my favorite movie stills ever:

Luke Wilson and Maya Rudolph are supposed to be frozen for a year, but it turns into 500. Dax Shepard is Frito, the dummy they meet who tries to help them get home. Luke goes from being a criminal to being president (taking over from a pro wrestler). Also there’s a monster truck gladiator match, a big clock in the middle of town that blinks 12:00, and some other stuff that’s too tiring to try to remember right now. A pretty okay movie with scattered funny + clever parts, not the cult classic the AV Club seems to think it has/will become.

Was this a great movie, or just pretty good? Were Scarlett Johansson and Hilary Swank good in this or not? Was the movie full of style or very straightforwardly told? My answers keep changing, so I guess I’d better see it again sometime.

Josh “Bucky” Hartnett and Aaron “Lee” Eckhart are boxers (”Ice” and “Fire” respectively) turned detective-partners. Lee becomes obsessed with the Black Dahlia murder after the body is found while he’s on a stakeout shooting someone involved with the money he stole from somewhere else I forget, and abandons his wife who I think is a former prostitute who has a crush on Bucky and was disfigured by a guy who’s about to get out of jail and when he does Lee wants to kill him but ends up killed himself by shadowy rich Hilary Swank I forget why exactly while Bucky watches helpless like he so often does. At the end Bucky ends up with Scarlett of course, but still haunted by this Black Dahlia who actually doesn’t play a big part in this (and doesn’t look one bit like her lookalike Swank). There’s more to it I’m sure. Oh, and it’s all told through Bucky’s eyes so performances are actually colored by his memory of them - a cool touch.

Was fun to watch anyway, never dull, and was neat to look around the opening-night theater as the lights came up at the big WTF expression on everyone’s faces.

Showed to Jimmy. Hope he liked it. Tight 80-minute twisty little noir about pickpocket who accidentally steals secrets about to be traded to the russians. Cops were monitoring the switchoff to pounce on the head commie, so now cops, commies and the girl stuck in the middle are all after the pickpocket, who remains supercool in the face of danger. Richard Widmark and Jean Peters star, and Thelma Ritter plays Moe, the tie salesman / informant. Everyone in this is perfect. The girl gets shot, but she lives, and Widmark gets her in the end.

Jerry Lewis is an orderly who would be a brilliant doctor if he didn’t suffer from a syndrome that causes him to empathize with his patients, literally feeling their pain. Unlikely, I know, but it’s a comedy. Mean suicidal woman comes in who can’t afford to pay for treatment, but Jerry falls for her and works overtime so she can stay. Meanwhile another nurse likes Jerry, and after he’s cures of his empathy trouble, he chases her down instead of sticking with the mean girl.

Pretty funny, a good enough diversion, even if some of the gags were lame and the ambulance-and-stretcher-chase finale went on too long.

fixing a “snowy” TV set:

getting the wrong girl:

madcap finale (note helpful numbers 1 & 2 on ambulances):

Weird little tour of a plastics factory. Starts with colorful flowers.

Moves backwards through the manufacturing process…

Ending with the explosive chemical processes that produce plastic in the first place.

I guess it’s “quirky”. Guy who wrote the commentary was a novelist… wrote “Zazie in the Underground”, made into a movie by Louis Malle.

Two scenes from “Other Side of the Wind” that played on Spanish television or someplace. Don’t know anything about context. First has a movie director being interviewed by the press from all sides, then a hot couple getting it on in the passenger seat while another guy drives in the rain. Not the kind of thing I’d expect from Welles. All quick cuts and artistic shots a la F For Fake.