Salon.com > Pedro Almodovar

Oscars Academy honors Pedro Almodovar in London

Thu, 13 Dec 2012 16:57:00 +0000

LONDON (AP) -- Director Pedro Almodovar is being hailed by Hollywood at an Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences retrospective in London.

The iconoclastic Spaniard is due to receive tributes at Thursday's event from colleagues and admirers, including fashion designer Jean-Paul Gaultier, screenwriter Peter Morgan and fellow directors Stephen Frears and Sally Potter.

Almodovar is part of a creative generation that emerged after Spain ended decades of dictatorship in the late 1970s. His quirky and sometimes outrageous films helped launch the careers of Penelope Cruz and Javier Bardem.

He found international success with "Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown" in 1988.

His 1999 movie "All About My Mother" won the Academy Award for best foreign-language film, and Almodovar took the best original screenplay Oscar in 2002 for "Talk to Her."

Almodóvar builds a new Frankenstein

Thu, 13 Oct 2011 00:15:00 +0000

During his career-long passage from 1980s queer-cinema radical to venerated European master, the legendary Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar has made comedies, thrillers, love stories and melodramas, often all at the same time. Indeed, given Almodóvar's passion for classic Hollywood movies, the only thing surprising about the fact that he's finally made a horror movie is that it's taken him so long -- and that he seems curiously uncomfortable with the label. "The Skin I Live In," Almodóvar's 19th feature film, reunites him with '80s muse and star Antonio Banderas, playing a new-school mad scientist who is building the perfect wife in his secret laboratory.

Cannes: Malick’s “Tree of Life” wins Palme d’Or

Sun, 22 May 2011 21:45:00 +0000

CANNES, France -- In a strong and wide-ranging year for world cinema at its biggest annual trade show, the Cannes Film Festival concluded with a major American triumph. Terrence Malick's "The Tree of Life," a long-gestating epic starring Brad Pitt as a 1950s Texas dad, which sought to summarize its auteur's view of not just movies but human life and the universe, won the Palme d'Or. It's the first American movie to capture the film world's biggest non-Oscar prize since Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11" in 2004.

At least Moore's film was a hit; the last American narrative feature to win the Palme was Gus Van Sant's "Elephant" a year earlier, a minimal and dark Columbine-inspired drama that found very little audience in the United States. Fox Searchlight will release Malick's film in American theaters this week, and couldn't have asked for a bigger or better publicity push. "Tree of Life" will presumably now be discussed as a factor in the Academy Awards race, but no film has won both the Palme d'Or and the best-picture Oscar since Delbert Mann's "Marty" in 1955.

Cannes: Antonio Banderas as a suave neo-Frankenstein

Thu, 19 May 2011 19:01:00 +0000

CANNES, France -- Women drive men crazy, and women are of course already crazy. And then there are the men driven crazy by their love of other men. Doesn't that more or less sum up the worldview of Pedro Almodóvar, the great Spanish cinematic showman and stylist, who seems to combine Luis Buñuel, Alfred Hitchcock and the spirit of 1940s Hollywood in one person, like a triune god of the movies? As almost the only film in the main Cannes competition that was absolutely guaranteed to be entertaining, as well as the last likely contender for the Palme d'Or, Almodóvar's twisty horror-thriller "The Skin I Live In" premiered on Thursday at an overstuffed press screening that filled the 2,300-seat Grand Théâtre Lumière right to the rafters. I found a seat in the far right upper reaches of the balcony and clung to it eagerly, while 30 or 40 people wandered through the area with increasingly hopeless expressions.

Cannes 2011: From Brangelina to Lars von Trier

Wed, 11 May 2011 16:23:00 +0000

CANNES, France -- Sunlight is glistening off the distant blue-and-white breakers, and vaguely famous-looking young women with impossibly high heels pause in their stroll down the Boulevard de la Croisette to watch workmen tacking down the red carpet outside the Palais des Festivals. It is time once again for the beautiful, the pseudo-beautiful, the brooding and the parasitical to reconvene on the Côte d'Azur for global cinema's greatest carnival. The Cannes Film Festival, whose 64th edition launches on Wednesday evening with the premiere of Woody Allen's "Midnight in Paris," does not command the same level of worldwide attention as the Oscars and probably never did. But as an annual celebration of the movies' marriage of art and commerce -- and as a trashy, glamorous, nosebleed-snobbish and ultra-populist spectacle -- Cannes remains unlike any other event on the planet.

Pick of the week: Your favorite teen soap — on drugs!

Fri, 28 Jan 2011 01:30:00 +0000

A delirious and lighthearted pop spectacle with a dark undercurrent of apocalyptic horror, "Kaboom" is about 95 percent of the movie that writer-director Gregg Araki's fans have been waiting for. Now, it's not like there are so damn many Araki fans out there at this point -- I probably know a lot of you personally, with your apartments in Silverlake or the Lower Haight, your exhaustive collections of offbeat pop music and your dioramas involving Japanese monster figurines. So it probably behooves me to explain the deal with this giddy, hilarious and stylish SoCal fever dream, which is partly glossy teen fantasy and partly nostalgia for a future that never quite got here.

Penelope Cruz and Javier Bardem get married while no one is looking

Wed, 14 Jul 2010 16:15:00 +0000

Adding to the list of couples tying the knot or getting engaged this summer (Harrison Ford and Calista Flockhart, Megan Fox and Brian Austin Green, Bristol Palin and Levi Johnston), Spanish actors Penelope Cruz and Javier Bardem were wed in a very small ceremony earlier this month in the Bahamas. The couple have been together since 2007, and co-starred in Woody Allen's "Vicky Cristina Barcelona" along with Scarlett Johansson -- a movie for which Cruz took home an Academy Award. Bardem won the Oscar for his bone-chilling turn in "No Country For Old Men," so they have a matched set.

The wedding was confirmed to People magazine by a rep for the couple, and if you're into speculation, Life & Style claims to know Cruz is pregnant, hence the hush-hush nuptials. Up next for the couple, Bardem is set to appear on Sseason 2 of "Glee," confirmed by E!Online, and Cruz is filming the fourth installment of the "Pirates of the Caribbean" franchise with Johnny Depp. MTV had an interview with the film's producer, Jerry Bruckheimer, last week.

How to fix the Oscar nominations

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 01:30:00 +0000

See, the underlying problem with the Oscars is that members vote only for the films and craftspeople whose work they've seen, not for the best films and craftspeople whose work qualify for the awards. That will never change, so the best will never (or seldom, or only inadvertently) emerge to win, or even be nominated. Membership in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences numbers about 6,000. Perhaps the voting membership should be pared down, to 1,000 or fewer.

It only takes four hours per week for a voting AMPAS member (or anyone else) to watch 100 films a year. That should be the minimum requirement for voting. Impossible to prove or to monitor? So what. Maybe a few more members could at least be guilted into screening a few more of the hundreds of eligible films, in all categories. I truly believe most AMPAS members try to exercise their voting privilege earnestly, even when they're ill-informed of the options. (I honestly believe that 90 percent of all AMPAS acting branch members who voted for Sandra Bullock in "The Blind Side" would have voted first for Catalina Saavedra had they seen "The Maid.")

Andrew O’Hehir’s best movies of 2009

Mon, 28 Dec 2009 02:01:00 +0000

All I have to say about 2009 in film is that I'm sure they'll find movies to give those 10 best-picture Oscar nominations to, but it won't be any of the ones on my list. That's not a shocking development, but in this year of global recession, the distance between the massive pop-Hollywood spectacles and the little-noticed obscurities way out on the cultural margins seems to have widened into a yawning abyss.

Actually, though, this has been a pretty good year for the independent-film sector, at least in economic terms. I know, that goes against both perceptions and the headline news: the implosion of Miramax and the pseudo-indie, mid-budget bombs churned out by mini-major studios like Fox Searchlight (e.g., "Amelia" and "Whip It"). But it's true anyway.

“Broken Embraces” and the ties that bind

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 00:19:00 +0000

The downside to being an expressive and unrepentantly passionate filmmaker like Pedro Almodóvar is that by the time you've been making movies for more than 30 years, it becomes harder to spring surprises on your audience. By now, even those of us who love Almodóvar, who relish not just the resplendent morning-glory quality of his filmmaking but his joyful rejection of most of the things polite society considers good and proper, have a pretty accurate idea of what to expect from him.

And so in some ways, "Broken Embraces" is hardly a surprise at all. The picture, complicated and multilayered, is a melodramatic fantasy about what it means to live for movies -- to treat them as your lifeblood, or a source of oxygen. This is a picture with not one but two movies-within-a-movie nestled inside, Russian-doll style. In the movie's early moments, a blind screenwriter named Harry Caine (Lluís Homar) learns that an infamous, scandal-ridden Madrid captain of industry, Ernesto Martel, has died. That name means nothing to us -- yet -- but clearly it means something to him, as well as to his longtime friend and assistant, Judit (the wonderful, strong-willed and strong-jawed Blanca Portillo). These two are further perplexed, and distressed, when a mysterious and possibly untrustworthy documentary filmmaker, with the club-kid name Ray X (Rubén Ochandiano), appears at Harry's door, proposing a collaboration with him. As the picture unfolds, we learn that Ray X hasn't always been Ray X. And Harry Caine has not always been Harry Caine, nor has he always been blind. Seemingly in another life, he was a director named Mateo Blanco, and Martel (played, with lizardlike precision, by José Luis Gómez) bankrolled one of his films. The link between all of these characters is a woman of almost unearthly charisma, an actress with an unsavory past: In "Broken Embraces" Penélope Cruz's Lena is less a character than a spirit -- she's the ghostly representation of every face you've ever seen in the movies that you can't forget.

Pedro Almod

Sat, 14 Nov 2009 00:14:00 +0000

Whether by accident or design, Pedro Almodóvar never utters the name of Francisco Franco. He refers to the self-appointed generalissimo who cast such a long shadow across 20th-century Spain only as "the dictator." Yet there will always be a strange historical linkage between the two men. It was Franco's death 34 years ago that began to open Spain to the world, and it was Almodóvar's emergence as a major film director that symbolized his country's post-fascist cultural renaissance.

Having reached the implausible age of 60, Almodóvar today is no longer the hedonistic queer-cinema rebel who exploded out of Madrid's underground art scene with such mixtures of high camp, wrenching emotion and frank sexuality as "What Have I Done to Deserve This?," "Law of Desire" and "Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown." Both the filmmaker and the world around him have changed immensely during the intervening decades, and with his new film, "Broken Embraces," Almodóvar reveals himself as one of the last great champions and defenders of classic European cinema.