Browsing: Spain

Reviews
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Increased life expectancy is generally a good thing but it does mean we have to deal with growing old differently now that the final stage in life is more than a brief wait for the inevitable. This potentially lengthy stage is often ill-served by films content to show aging people as sparky invalids, cantankerous sages or juveniles regressing into adolescence. Not so with Sebastián Lelio’s delightful portrayal of a woman adjusting to this new reality with gentle determination.

Gloria (Paulina Garcia), first introduced across a crowded room at a middle aged singles disco, is a 58 year old divorcee with 2 grown up children. She lives a solitary life in a small, cluttered apartment, but this is not an existence of lonely desperation. Although she’d like to see her son and daughter more often, she seems to have close relationships with both. Yet there is a space in her life that she’d like to have occupied and it’s not as simple as getting a pet if the neighbour’s cat she frequently removes from her home is anything to go by.

Home Entertainment
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Director Pedro Almodóvar is well known for his fascinating characters and psychologically impacting feature films. His previous film The Skin I Live In is a prime example of the darker explorations of social preconceptions that are manifested in his narratives. He’s a director that’s hugely invested in his work and has become one of the most talked about Spanish filmmakers of the past couple of decades. It’s not unusual that, when he announces he’s working on a comedy set on an airplane, a few eyebrows were raised. Normally he’s quiet and reserved when asked about current projects, never revealing too much because the plot twists and character depth are a key trait. This is one of his best qualities for dealing with press junkets and interviews. He knows just how much information he wants to leak and believes in the power of experiencing a film. Needless to say that for I’m So Excited he wasn’t talking in detail about the content, brief context descriptions were enough to garner responses of interest. The driving point of attraction here is the dark comedy and strong themes of sexual liberation and frantic panic induced thrill.

Film Festival los-wild-ones-1-1
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Down in southern California there’s a bit of a cultural time warp happening. The Rockabilly music scene is an underground movement that generally tries to maintain the aural and visual aesthetic of 1950’s teen culture. Of course the Rockabilly scene isn’t limited to California, but Reb Kennedy’s Wild Records is based in California and that’s where Elise Salomon spent five months shooting her documentary Los Wild Ones.

Film Festival The-Fear-1-1
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From the word go, the audience is treated to unpleasant imagery in The Fear, a film by Jordi Cadena about the horrors of domestic violence, from a shot of urine filling up a toilet to the concluding bloodshed. Dark, disconcerting and deeply disturbing, The Fear doesn’t shy away from harsh reality of its content matter and rather attacks the issue full force to deliver an infinitely sad film that won’t be forgotten in a hurry.

Reviews SAMSUNG CSC
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As technology advances we grow ever closer to the science fiction visions of yesterday. The proliferation of smart phones, tablets and basically everything Apple is a near realization of many of the ideas dreamed up by countless authors. Amongst these advancements of physical technology are plenty of those that cannot be so obviously held in our hands. The internet alone has forever changed the way we digest everything. Feeding our thirst for more and faster, it houses more information than we can imagine sifting through in our lifetime. Google and the World Brain attempts to be an exploration of where technology is leading us, but amounts to little more than an account of legal proceedings.

Blu Review 666_BD_box_348x490_original
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What’s been somewhat lost in the internet’s clamoring for a Pacific Rim prequel is just how frustrating it would be to see such a restless imagination conjoined to a single blockbuster franchise for the forseeable future. Mercifully, the fine folk at Criterion have decided to take measures to temper this rhetoric with their recent Blu Ray release of Del Toro’s first masterpiece, The Devil’s Backbone.

Reviews
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You needn’t have read Sally Nicholls’ novel to know that Ways to Live Forever, the sophomore feature effort of Spanish director Gustavo Ron, is an adaptation. The glaringly expository voiceover reveals that immediately, its giveaway stature as the awkward last bastion of the frustrated screenwriter—at least as it’s used here—the first clue that all is not well in the cinematic translation of this text. The difficulties are unsurprising given the epistolary structure of the book; pitched as the diary of twelve-year old Sam, a leukaemia patient, its stream-of-consciousness style is intensely and intently literary, the kind of thing calling on considerable grace to be woven into a film narrative.

NP Approved demybanner
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Like a love letter to a dead soulmate, The World of Jacques Demy reminds us of the thoughtful joyous anguish of Jacques Demy’s intriguing oeuvre and the unique voice that left an indelible mark on cinema as Agnes Varda (Demy’s wife of nearly thirty years) uses their shared artform to tell the story of her beloved husband and cinematic icon. The film admires Demy’s work less as a wife pining over the loss of a dead husband, but as one cinematic master paying homage to another on an equal playing ground, showing the disparity between the works of the two spouses and the mastery that each posited over their shared versatile artform.

Reviews Im-So-Excited
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Pedro Almodóvar is one of the seminal filmmakers of the modern era –it’s a nigh on unquestionable fact. His skill is only matched by his sheer range of projects, in the last few years alone we have witnessed everything from the utterly fantastic schlock horror of The Skin I Live In (Or –for the grammatically pedantic- The Skin in Which I Live) to the romantic melodrama of Broken Embraces. Alas, even the brightest of stars must have their darker days, and I’m So Excited –an often pathetic excuse for a farce, draped in a political allegory- represents one of the gloomier moments of the Spanish auteur’s often shining career. In returning to his raunchy sex-comedy roots, Almodóvar has produced a film of few laughs and even less substance, a half-assed attempt at a movie –it’s almost like something the cast and crew put together on their lunch breaks for the fun of it. If only I’d had more fun watching it.

Reviews Im-So-Excited-
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Writer-director Pedro Almodóvar takes three steps back – actually, three decades worth of steps back – with his 19th feature film, I’m So Excited! (“Los Amantes Pasajeros”), a light, lightweight sex farce. Thirty years ago, Almodóvar made his reputation as a prolific writer-director of transgressive, subversive films, but what was transgressive and subversive then (necessarily so, it should be added), isn’t as transgressive or subversive after three decades of rapidly shifting social, cultural, and political views toward non-heterosexuals. Despite Spain’s status as a Catholic county (with all the conservative values that implies), Spain has moved forward toward recognizing the rights, including marriage equality, for gays and lesbians (and to a lesser extent, transgendered men and women). Progress still needs to be made, however, but there’s seemingly little recognition of those changes in I’m So Excited! There should have been.

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