Pain and Glory (Almodovar)

What is this? Drama or Comedy?


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Almodovar reckons with his lonely gay twilight years via Antonio Banderas? Very much here for this...



There's a long interview in The Guardian too where he fully admits the character is himself - not that it's exactly hard to figure out.
 
Annoyingly I’ve just seen there’s a preview of this this evening at Harbour Lights. I’d have gone if I’d known earlier...
 
Of course I'll be watching but I find his late period JAGGED MELODRAMA does nothing for me. He basically admitted he doesn't know how to write for normal people anymore so instead we get all these stilted dramas of mothers and daughters and pained lovers that are a world away from any sort of fresh naturalism which was what made him famous and popular in the first place, at least in Spain.
 
I love me some Antonio but I can't say the trailer does anything for me either. It doesn't look very powerful but maybe I'll be tempted to see it.
 
If was far from his finest work as I found it just a bit, well, GLOOMY, until the ex showed up, when it picked up marvellously. The final third was really quite good.

Banderas is superb though. I thought the women were (unusually) a little underwritten/used but then I guess that wasn’t the focus. Shame he couldn’t have wheeled out Rossy out for a cameo.

Anyway, 7.5/10 which I shall round to an 8 for poll purposes.
 
I very much enjoyed this, but it did feel a bit plotless and, ultimately, rather pointless.

I’d much rather have watched a full version of “The First Desire”.
 
Saw this yesterday. Felt a bit cumbersome initially and I found it hard to care about the characters though the Penelope Cruz segments were rather lovely. It did pick up and genuinely moved me and made me think in the second half. Overall I enjoyed it but felt a bit more “ooomph” was needed. I was hoping for something a little more zany and off the wall. There was one scene that made me feel a little uneasy but I understand the point it was trying to portray.
 
Well I LOVED this, his best film since The Skin I Live In, and probably since Volver (I can’t even remember anything about Julieta apart from bald Rossy and a man in a big jumper :D )

I thought Antonio B was MAGNIFICENT, down to his mannerisms he totally embodied the character, it was refreshing to see (a hint of) an older gay romance on screen and it balanced comedy and melodrama perfectly for me. Nothing life changing, but an ideal Sunday afternoon watch - I truly felt the Spanish fantasy for a couple of hours :disco:
 
Julieta was the last 10/10 film I saw, I think...

That wasn’t necessarily a slight on Julieta, I very much enjoyed it at the cinema, but 2 years (?) on I genuinely can’t remember much about it.

From memory I would rank it about on-par with Broken Embraces - not top tier, but still WONDERFUL.

IMAGINE trying to do a ranking of Almodovar films :D I basically love nearly all of them (aside from I’m So Excited obv, and Ive never been keen on Dark Habits either)
 
Oh how I LOVE Dark Habits! And Broken Embraces and Julieta are both 10/10 for me, but yes, not the 11/10 status of All About My Mother or Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown.

I've been on a (very slow) rewatch of them all the last few months and am up to "What Have I Done To Deserve This?". I note that the arthouse cinema in Southampton has an Almodovar season starting tomorrow and I'm half tempted to go along to those, albeit that it'll throw me out of sync watching them all in order.
 
I rewatched WHIDTDT the other day, genuinely one of the few films I would quite happily have go on for another hour watching all the amazing characters run around doing various bits of mild insanity :D
 
I rewatched WHIDTDT the other day, genuinely one of the few films I would quite happily have go on for another hour watching all the amazing characters run around doing various bits of mild insanity :D

I feel that way about a lot his movies. I wanted Volver to never end...
 
I really liked this. Pleasantly surprised, it's his best film in DECADES. I didn't think it was plotless at all. I didn't know Leonardo Sbaraglia was in this and I thought he was WONDERFUL (I've always been a little bit in love with him).
 
It was good but it felt like something missing. It needed another 15-20 minutes or maybe just a couple more big scenes to finish off. But otherwise enjoyable. I doubt it'll be one of my all time Almodovar favourites in years to come though.
 
This was the best, most beautiful thing I’ve seen for a long time. It all clicked for me already when the title came on with all the colours in the background. It had everything I love in a movie/story.

He basically admitted he doesn't know how to write for normal people anymore so instead we get all these stilted dramas of mothers and daughters and pained lovers

Normal people don’t love that?
 
I really enjoyed this although all the maladies were a bit much. I mean if someone like Antonio Banderas is so broken in his old age what do the rest of us have to look forward to.

I was glad it didn’t end up being a movie about heroin and that has to be the best kiss I’ve seen in a while. Also I appreciated the penis.
 
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Normal people don’t love that?

Sorry, I didn't explain myself well. I think the point he was trying to make is that his 80s stuff was a mixture of his usual inspirations (Jean Cocteau, Douglas Sirk and all that) and the realities of what he knew and was experiencing at the time (the Catholic church, the underground gay scene in 80s Madrid, his group of friends, etc). Once he became consecrated he sort of stopped having that connection with reality and all he is left with is his melodrama roots to which he keeps returning in more and more convoluted ways (Broken Embraces and Julieta are good examples).

A lot of his later period dramas live in some sort of weird time bubble where he is trying to imagine how normal people act and talk and to me it comes across as totally unnaturalistic which is the opposite of his 80s films, which still feel fresh because he is not inventing characters, he's lived through it.
 
For anybody that has Mubi, you can see The Human Voice with Tilda NOW!
I went to see it at the cinema, but when I got there apparently the screen wasn't working (?) so I'm very happy I finally got to see it.



Anyway, it's a very enjoyable watch if obviously being VERY slight. The apartment itself is almost as much as a character as Tilda and the dog, and is probably the most typically Almodovar part of the film considering it's an adaptation of a Cocteau play. Certainly worth 30 minutes of your life.

In completely unrelated news - I cannot recommend Nina Wu which is ALSO currently playing on Mubi highly enough. A truly fabulous and beautifully shot film.
 
OMG! I saw Pain and Glory for the first time last night. What a film!

The ending was so clever and made perfect sense. I was thinking that the old woman who played his mother wasn’t really believable as an older Penélope Cruz. To have the rug pulled from under you like that was genius.

I also loved how the film shows how event s in life and major life choices are connected by chance. If Salvador hadn’t taken heroin with Alberto then Alberto never would have performed Addiction, which Federico wouldn’t have seen. He wouldn’t have got back in touch with Salvador, who wouldn’t have got the desire in him to live again and wouldn’t have gone for the operation to have the calcium build up in his internal eating tube (whatever the correct medical term is) and probably would have died.
 

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