criterionforum.org

Pedro Almodóvar (1949-)



"My directors of photography light my films, but the colors of the sets, furnishings, clothes, hairstyles - that's me. Everything that's in front of the camera, I bring you."

Filmography
Features
Folle... folle... fólleme Tim! (1978)
Pepi, Luci, Bom y otras chicas del montón / Pepi, Luci, Bom (1980)
Laberinto de pasiones / Labyrinth of Passion (1982)
Entre tinieblas / Dark Habits (1983)
¿Qué he hecho yo para merecer esto? / What Have I Done to Deserve This? (1984)
Matador (1986)
La ley del deseo / Law of Desire (1987)
Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios / Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988)
¡Átame! / Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! (1990)
Tacones lejanos / High Heels (1991)
Kika (1993)
La flor de mi secreto / The Flower of My Secret (1995)
Carne trémula / Live Flesh (1997)
Todo sobre mi madre / All About My Mother (1999)
Hable con ella / Talk to Her (2002)
La mala educación / Bad Education (2004)
Volver (2006)
Los abrazos rotos / Broken Embraces (2009)
La piel que habito / The Skin I Live In (2011)
Los amantes pasajeros / I'm So Excited! (2013)
Julieta (2016)
Dolor y Gloria / Pain and Glory (2019)
Madres paralelas / Parallel Mothers (2021)
A Manual for Cleaning Women (2022)

Shorts
"Film Político" (1974)
"Dos putas, o historia de amor que termina en boda" (1974)
"La caída de Sódoma" (1975)
"Homenaje" (1975)
"El sueño, o la estrella" (1975)
"Blancor" (1975)
"Tráiler de 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?'" (1976)
"Sea Caritativo" (1976)
"Muerte en la carretera" (1976)
"Las tres ventajas de Ponte" (1977)
"Complementos" (1977)
"Sexo va, sexo viene" (1977)
"Salomé" (1978)
"Tráiler para amantes de lo prohibido!" (1985)
"Pastas Ardilla" (1996)
"La concejala antropófaga" (2009)
"The Human Voice" (2020)


Books
Patty Diphusa and Other Writings by Pedro Almodóvar (1992)
A Spanish Labyrinth: The Films of Pedro Almodóvar by Mark Allinson (2001)
Pedro Almodóvar: Interviews by Paula Willoquet-Maricondi (2004)
Pedro Almodóvar by Marvin D'Lugo (2006)
Pedro Almodóvar by Ernesto R. Acevedo-Munoz (2007)
Almodóvar on Almodóvar by Frederick Strauss, ed. (Revised, 2007)
All About Almodóvar: A Passion for Cinema by Brad Epps and Despina Kakoudaki, eds. (2009)
Juan Gatti: Photographics by Pedro Almodóvar (2012)
A Companion to Pedro Almodóvar, by Marvin D'Lugo and Kethleen Vernon, eds. (2013)
Desire Unlimited (3rd Edition) by Paul Julian Smith (2014)
The Pedro Almodóvar Archives by Paul Duncan (2017)
Aesthetics, Ethics, and Trauma in the Cinema of Pedro Almodóvar by Julian Daniel Gutiérrez-Albilla (2018)

Web Resources
2002 interview with Jose Arroyo, The Guardian
2006 profile by Karin Luisa Badt, Bright Lights Film Journal
2006 interview with Penélope Cruz and Maria Delgado, The Guardian
"The Women of Pedro Almodóvar", by Daniel Mendelsohn, The New York Review of Books (2007)
2009 interview with Paul Thomas Anderson, Interview Magazine
2013 interview with Dave Calhoun, Time Out
2015 interview with Raphael Abraham, Financial Times
"The Evolution of Pedro Almodóvar", by D.T. Max, The New Yorker (2016)
"Understanding the Women of Pedro Almodóvar’s Movies", by Manuel Betancourt, The Atlantic (2016)

Forum Discussion
Almodovar on DVD
855 Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown
722 Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!
Volver (Almodóvar, 2006)
Broken Embraces (Pedro Almodóvar, 2009)
The Skin I Live In (Pedro Almodóvar, 2011)
I'm So Excited (Pedro Almodóvar, 2013)
Dolor y gloria [Pain and Glory] (Pedro Almodóvar, 2019)

his blog, news about his new film (with pics). You can choose español, English and French languages.

Every fall, say October and November, I always find myself gathering Almodover discs from my shelves. There's something wonderfully "autumn" about his films, especially the recent ones from Live Flesh to Volver. The sense of longing for renewal and a glimmer of celebration and love in the admist of falling leaves.

Michael wrote:Every fall, say October and November, I always find myself gathering Almodover discs from my shelves. There's something wonderfully "autumn" about his films, especially the recent ones from Live Flesh to Volver. The sense of longing for renewal and a glimmer of celebration and love in the admist of falling leaves.

What a beautiful thought, Michael! I immediately thought of Live Flesh when I read that. What remains with me from Live Flesh (which I believe is even set in the fall)is a feeling of forlorn resignation and loss, mingled with the orange glow of a love finally realized. A very "autumn" movie indeed! You've prompted me to re-visit all the newer Almodovers this month!

I must ask...does anyone else greatly prefer his newer films (well, 1995 or so-on) to his older output? Maybe it's the "look" of his 80's films that just doesn't grab me, but as someone who started out with Bad Education, it's harder to appreciate rougher, less...refined work than to what I am accustomed. A large part of my love of his films is the vivid, sharp and splashy display that is every single scene, and while his older films that I've seen were filmed well and have an ostensibly interesting plotline, they didn't have the same finesse that he obviously has cultivated over the years, and this holds me back from appreciating them a vapid filmfan I am, apparently.
Maybe I just need to pick up Dark Habits or Law of Desire and try again..

Though I'm far from dismissing his newer output and can't claim to dislike a single film in his oeuvre, I do prefer those works that were made previously to All About My Mother.
Which was actually my first, LQ, being the youngster that I am.
I mention this as contrast to your theory that your preference may have to do with your popping your cherry with Bad Education and so on since I came to know his films backwards as well.
And I really believe that it's unfair to compare them. They should 've enjoyed, or derided, on their own terms.
Yes, nowadays he's less racy when it comes to themes, ideas and sexuality.
But he's also grown more sophisticated, much more skilled.
He no longer feels like breaking taboos and there's no need to, really.
He can concentrate on his characters and reworking genres.
And on being the airtight technical perfectionist he's grown into.
So. If I say I prefer the earlier films, there's a very simple reason for it.
They 're way more fun, daddy-o.
Following Michael's canny observation, spring and summer have certain graces that autumn does not and viceversa.

What ripples through Almodovar's late films is tremendous melancholy (swirled with very humane humor) - the loss of and longing for innocence, freedom, mom, child, love. As we get older, the more loss we experience. Almodovar is showing that more and more in his films.

After Kika, his films darken in colors - more brown, orange, gold-yellow, red, no more bubbalicious colors. With a bit of green and blue thrown in the palette, the small glimmers of "renewal" peeking through the piles of autumn leaves. Talk to Her dissolves into a full-screen splash of summer green foliage. Volver ends in the black-dark hallway as Carmen Maura reaches the slant of light coming from her bedroom. Black hallway leading to the black sand of his next film. Almodovar fell in love with the "sombre monochrome beauty" of Lanzarote's black, lava beaches and cactus deserts so I won't be surprised to see his color palette reaching its "winter" stage.

I will return with some thoughts of Law of Desire, one of my favorite Almodovars, a rare, gutsy gay masterpiece. I also love Bad Education, certainly Almodovar's most painful film. The horrible tragedy surrounding the real Ignacio I find incredably unbearable to breathe through. It just reminds me so much of some friends lost to drugs or diseases. Their brilliant talents wasted forever. I remember feeling so rejuvenated after leaving its screening the first time, saying "Finally we have our own Vertigo".

I've recently become infatuated with Almodovar and have loaded my netflix queue with his films. So far I have only seen Talk to Her and Live Flesh, and have adored them both in their melancholy and sparse humor. Although I must admit that Flesh is my favorite of the two for how intricate its story was and how well it connected the different relationships in the end. Talk to Her was endearing mainly for the performance of Dario Grandinetti, who I could not help but be captivated by his every reaction and word, he oozed with such passion and love that has been sorely lacking in modern-day leading men; he reminded me of Rock Hudson in All That Heaven Allows with his suave charisma and, well, sheer manliness in how he projected himself. I hope I take to his early work as much as I have to his later films, but I fear that my reaction will be the same of LQ.

i just love the glossy style of his films, remindes me of the classic technicolor
era. Besides it fits his movies themes so well, who could forgot about the towel scene in volver

Almodovar is adapting Women On The Verge Of A Nervous Breakdown into a TV series for Fox.

La piel que habito, his new project will be filmed this summer with Antonio Banderas and without Penélope Cruz.

Interview with Pedro today

http://www.elpais.com/articulo/cultura/ ... icul_1/Tes" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

I may have mentioned before on this forum, but that new Almodovar was one I heard about MANY years ago and I've been hoping for it ever since, assuming it is the same story.

Yes, it's a 10 years old projetc since he filmed Todo sobre mi madre. In the Pais article, he mentiones that is working with 4 scripts at the same time.

1st day of shooting in the green Northwest (yes, we exist) and witout the fucking guitars in the beautiful Santiago de Compostela.

http://www.abc.es/20100820/cultura-cine ... 01318.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Another article

http://www.elpais.com/articulo/revista/ ... irdv_3/Tes" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

1st picture

http://www.elpais.com/fotografia/agenda ... age_3/Ies/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

He is working with Silencio, his new film.
Good afternoon tea interview with F.T at London

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/568f623a ... abdc0.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Casting and shooting of Silencio

http://cultura.elpais.com/cultura/2015/ ... 95102.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

The cast and plot details sound pretty good but shouldn't they maybe change the title considering Scorsese's already filming "Silence"?

Anhedionisiac wrote:The cast and plot details sound pretty good but shouldn't they maybe change the title considering Scorsese's already filming "Silence"?

Marty should change his title instead. And Bergman's The Silence should have its name retroactively changed.

Julieta is getting terrific reactions and reviews BUT the Almodóvar's brothers have been affected by the Panama papers and they have cancelled all the Madrid promotion. Thus Friday I'll see it.

Agustin has also released a statement regarding The Panama Papers:

Late Sunday, Agustin Almodóvar issued a statement to El Confidencial apologizing and citing his lack of experience for a decision to set up an offshore company aimed at expanding the brothers' international film business in the 1990s.

Agustin Almodóvar said he launched the company, Glen Valley Corporation, in the British Virgin Islands in 1991 and closed it in 1994, during the early years of box-office success for the Spanish director, who shared some of his international award nominations with his brother.

Agustin Almodóvar said he shut down the company "because it did not fit with the way we worked."

He apologized for the "damage my brother's public image is suffering, caused only by my lack of experience in the first few years of our family business." He added that he and his brother have met all of their tax obligations.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/life/movi ... /82611710/

I have liked Julieta a lot. The best train meeting sequence since Before Sunrise.

Some interviews:

http://cultura.elpais.com/cultura/2016/ ... 74807.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

http://www.elmundo.es/cultura/2016/04/0 ... b4674.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

I just noticed this in the Beaver release calendar, but haven't seen mentioned elsewhere:

Almodóvar Collection [Blu-ray] (What Have I Done to Deserve This?, Dark Habits, Flower of My Secrets, Kika, Law of Desire, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown) RB UK Studiocanal

It's a 6xBD Studiocanal release scheduled for August 29th, according to Amazon.co.uk.

Really looking forward to this. I just wish Pepi, Luci & Bom was part of this collection. It's conspicuously absent––but then, it's conspicuously absent on blu-ray in Spain, too, where most of these are already available. Hopefully, they will address the aspect ratio issues people have had?

http://moviecitynews.com/2016/08/sony-p ... m-library/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false; Sony Pictures Classics announces they have acquired the full library of Almodovar films

I have the RB Studio Canal Almodavar blu ray set in my hand now. Structurally, it's designed like their Godard box. The films inside look exquisite, with thick, appealing grain, thorough depth of field, and brilliant color. The only one where the picture quality suffers a little is The Flower of My Secret––that's the only picture that has any dust and speckles, and it seems to have some noise reduction that makes the image a little flatter and the grain less visible. It isn't atrocious, and all the other films look rapturously great. I don't know if there are aspect ratios that are preferred for these films; everything in the box is in 1.85:1, and looks great that way. There are some extras, which I haven't delved into. If you enjoy the films, I think the box is definitely worth it. I had the Spanish blu-ray of Women on the Verge and of Dark Habits previous, and the picture quality on those discs doesn't come anywhere close to what it is on this set.