The Skin I Live In (Saturday, October 22, 2011) (92)

This is a very nice film, beautifully executed and directed by Almodóvar and a real pleasure to watch. I think it's about the creation and consumption of art as much as anything. It's a loose update of the Frankenstein story, but as a contemporary psychodrama. The narrative gets a bit lost in the middle act, but it all ties up nicely. I like how it functions as an exploitation film, a virtual ode to Val Lewton, and I don't really think it has much more depth than that. It's a bit of a trifle. I think it's Almodóvar's best work since some of his early films, possibly because it's so uncomplicated by other noise his recent works have been surrounded by. Overall a very good, but not perfect work.

Stars: 3 of 4

Even the Rain (Friday, June 19, 2011) (46)

Iciar Bollain's Even the Rain tells the story of a Spanish film crew who show up in Cochabamba, Bolivia to shoot a movie about Christopher Columbus and Bartolome de las Casas. The crew is filled with liberal actors and artists, including director Sebastian (Gael Garcia Bernal), who all agree that the natives were treated badly by the Spanish explorers, but they are a bit less aware of the sociopolitical situation they find themselves in contemporary Bolivia.

It seems at the exact time of the shooting of this movie, Bolivians are getting upset at the government's agreement to sell water rights to private overseas companies. One of the leaders of the "free water for all" movement is Daniel (Juan Carlos Aduviri), who has been cast as the Indian chief in the film. On top of this, the reason the film is shooting in Bolivia, and not, say, the Carribean where Columbus actually landed, is because they can get very cheap labor there. They're exploiting the people of contemporary Bolivia the same way the Spanish exploited the Indians in the 15th and 16th Centuries.

This all sounds like a very straightforward moral tale about parallels between contemporary times and early precolonial times, and it is. There really isn't that much depth here. Everything is spelled out very clearly in broad moral brushstrokes. At one point, the producer talks on the phone with some financier in the States and says how happy he is to be able to pay the extras $2 a day. Of course Daniel overhears this, and he totally understands the producer because he used to work in the States himself and speaks English. Oh - burn! You see the producer is embarrassed and Daniel is upset.

Toward the end of the film, the story turns into a commentary on civil-disobedience and rioting. It turns into Hotel Rwanda or The Last King of Scotland: lots of overturned cars, fires and hurt children who can't get to the hospital. The problem is that to this point the film has been such a mishmash of political story lines that you get confused about who is doing what to whom and who is responsible for it.

As much as we want to make the moral equivalent between the Spanish explorers, the Bolivian government and the Spanish film crew, it's a false connection. Water rights are a major concern in Bolivia (they have been from Che Guevara to Evo Morales); rioting by people against the government can be dangrous, but film crews who hire extras for $2 are not really the problem in this context.

I couldn't help but think about Werner Herzog as I watched this film and how he used Cochabamba as one of his headquarters when he shot Fitzcarraldo. He had an deep respect for the Bolivian people and understood issues like fair pay, water rights and keeping peace. Not only is this a movie about filmmakers who do the opposite, but it also seems to have been made by a writer/director who never learned Herzog's lessons. For him, the respect was absolutely endemic to shooting the film and he took it for granted; for Bollain it seems like "respect" is enough of a concept to center a story around. It's not really, because it's so banal.

Stars: 1.5 of 4

Biutiful (Wednesday, December 29, 2010) (167)

Biutiful gets its name from a moment in the film where Uxbal (Javier Bardem) is helping his son with his English work. Rather than knowing the exact spelling of the word, the father lets the son get it wrong and moves on to some other catastrophe in his life without correcting it. This is exactly what this film is: a dirty collection of broken stuff, generally taped together, but mostly ugly and aesthetically unpleasant. This is not at all to say that I don't like this film. It is a good movie, but is totally challenging and sometimes repulsive.

The film is about Uxbal, an unusual man with a dark life in Barcelona. He's a black-market hustler, a loving, devoted, if imperfect father and a medium who speaks to the dead. We see him going about his every-day life, struggling to keep it together through mundane things and exotic things. He hatches a get-rich-quick plan with Chinese gangsters and tries to keep his fucked-up family from totally crumbling. He sorta fails at both, but not for trying his hardest.

Director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu constructs a beautiful tale that keeps us always on our toes and on the edge of our seats. His style is always uncomfortable and always beautiful... if beautiful is unsettling and uncomfortable. There are things that don't really work, like the Chinese gangsters...and things that work beautifully, like their guest workers' deaths and them later washing up on-shore. I rally like that he presents Uxbal as a man who straightforwardly talks to the dead, but is not really thrilled with his "gift". (This is treated differently here than in Clint Eastwood's recent Hereafter... a film about talking to the dead. Here, the talking to the dead is just one of many things that Uxbal does.)

Uxbal's relationship with his wife is both very painful and very beautiful. She doesn't know how to deal with normal life with her kids and family, and he doesn't know how to deal with her sensibly, and how to protect their kids from her, but also make sure they have a relationship with her. He doesn't want to cut them off totally from her, but also doesn't want to expose them to her corrupting influence.

He is able to make money in many ways, but still insists on living in poverty and squalor because, like Jesus, a poor life is a comfortable one for him. It is this Jesus life that makes him feel good. This film feels a lot like the Leonard Cohen song Suzanne. Dark, melancholy, stormy.

I like this film, but it doesn't all totally come together for me. Somewhere between the talking to the dead and the sadness it just feels like a bunch of parts that never totally feels complete.

Stars: 3 of 4

Broken Embraces (Sunday, November 22, 2009) (166)

To say this film is 'lesser Almodovar' is like saying that The Curse of the Jade Scorpion or Scoop are lesser Woody Allen films. Yes - it is totally true that these are not good, but these films are basically as good as Woody is going to get in his winter years. Everything that Almodovar has done in the last ten years has been 'lesser Almodovar' - though this film might be even less than most of those.

In this film, a blind film director (oooh, the symbolism), finds out that a one-time film financier has died, so he recounts to his assistant the complicated story of their business relationship. Of course, the director had an affair with the millionaire's mistress and there is also a creepy gay son who worked with the director at some point. Considering it's Almodovar, there are three stories inside the one story and several different love affairs (strangely mostly between straight folks this time) with a few different betrayals and mistaken identities.

For a rather easy story (man tells story of falling in love with another man's mistress), this feels like a very complicated (probably too complicated) movie. Almodovar is, as always, obsessed with Hollywood cliches, so there's a playfulness, and a tiredness to the whole thing. Some of these trite elements are outright inventions by themselves - where they feel like old banalities, but are totally fresh (in art, one would call these 'simulacra').

Still, it does get rather old to see the same things again. Of course the director is blind; of course he is a sex machine and lady-slayer who can lay any woman he meets, and has no problem getting the most gorgeous ones (not that he would care if they were not beautiful); of course there's a young man with mommy issues who has unknown paternity; of course there's a story within the story and a story within that story. It's all a bit overdone at this point. I don't care that there's a subplot about the director re-inventing himself with a new name, so he essentially has two identities. That's boring at this point.

One thing Almodovar does well is make movies that look pretty. Most of his shots are filled with bright colors and interesting decorations. The photography is crisp and clear and always looks great. His characters look amazing, both old and young, and everyone is dressed in the most beautiful clothing.

But nice costumes can't cover up the lack of anything close to a cohesive or compelling story. It seems like Almodovar is on auto-pilot recycling plot points and narrative switchbacks from older films just for the sake of doing it. What we get is an overly-complex, dull story. It's not loathsome, but it's far from good.

Stars: 1.5 of 4