Moot Point

It’s a long one this week, kids.

1. Some Like It Hot (Billy Wilder, 1959): I love this movie; it gets funnier every time I see it. I noticed the George Raft gag with the coin flip, but I never noticed the moment where he gets ready to give the guy a grapefruit in the face. I also love how much Jack Lemmon seems to enjoy being a girl and getting engaged to a rich guy.”Why would a guy want to marry a guy?” “Security!” Genius.
2. The Flower of My Secret (Pedro Almodóvar, 1995): I thought this was really Fassbinderian; I’ve read interviews where Almodóvar cites him as an influence, but you can really see it here, in the selection of an obnoxious heroine who spends most of the movie pining over an absent lover. Also, because all the women in Leo’s family kept talking about crazy “Aunt Petra“; that’s got to be an homage. His framing is a lot like that movie too; he doesn’t restrict the character to her apartment, but there’s still the use of odd angles and shelves and glass getting between the characters and the camera to create a distancing effect. (It also looks forward to Volver in lots of ways, especially the fact that Leo’s novel is basically the first half of his movie.) It’s not as quick or funny as some of his earlier ones, nor as…saturated as the more recent ones, but it’s kind of a nice transitional point in his career, post-Kika.
3. Matador (Pedro Almodóvar, 1986): I…don’t quite know what to do with this one. I think a lot of the stuff with the actual matador and sexuality and killing might mean more to a specifically Spanish audience; I get that “matar” (to kill) and “matador” have the same root and bullfighting is this site of violence and machismo, but honestly I felt like there was something I was missing out on. I did like poor crazy psychic Antonio Banderas though.
4. The Royal Tenenbaums (Wes Anderson, 2001): This is actually way funnier and better than I’d remembered it being. In my head it had become way more twee and everyone acted all affectless like Gwyneth Paltrow in it; in reality, it’s pretty awesome. It’s basically the only time I’ve liked Ben Stiller in anything.
5. High Heels (Pedro Almodóvar, 1991): Loved! This was really hard to track down, but I’m glad I did, it’s definitely going to be one of my major thesis films. It’s about this woman who is impregnated by a drag imitator of her famous pop star mother. Oh there’s also some getting away with murder. I think that’s really all I need to say about how neatly this ties family melodrama, postmodernism, and sexuality into a tidy package for me.
6. Labyrinth of Passion (Pedro Almodóvar, 1982): This is really early Almodóvar, when he was still big in the movida (Madrid New Wave) scene; one thing this movie does is really celebrate that moment, and it’s a lot of fun. Pedro himself even appears uncredited and performs a song called “Suck It To Me,” that’s half in English. The other thing this movie does is go insanely far in terms of sexual taboos, even further than Pepi, Luci, Bom. The heroine is a nymphomaniac who has really casual orgies; she falls in love with a gay dude. Oh, and there is also some actual incest, and then some incest-which-is-not-incest-but-one-of-the-parties-thinks-it-is. And a certain amount of parodying the convention of having a childhood flashback explain all of a characters psychological problems (which is a classic Hitchcock move). And bumbling Islamic terrorists. Oh, and a young Antonio Banderas in his underpants! kissing a dude! and having a supernaturally good sense of smell! I keep anding here because I think the fact that one of these things is in the movie isn’t particularly interesting, but having all of them be in there is what keeps it funny instead of offensive. I heart excess.
7. I’m Not There (Todd Haynes, 2007): While I thought that the using six actors and acknowledging how much a construct the whole project was really managed to get around what I hate about biopics, what really surprised me about I’m Not There is how entertaining it was. Like, it was funny. It was also smart and political and I think there’s a reason that Haynes made a movie that considered artistic commitment and whether art really does anything right now in the year 2007. But yeah, the concept is challenging and arty, but the execution’s just, like, fun. Playful. Julianne Moore is really funny in the documentary scenes. And David Cross.
8. Tie Me Up/Tie Me Down (Pedro Almodóvar, 1990): I am generally not a fan of movies where a guy kidnaps a girl and then she falls in love with him. But I am a fan of Antonio Banderas, and also the sort of ambiguous ending in the car, where Victoria Abril looks sad just as everything’s worked out great, because what’s the fun in everything being easy? I think the thing is, while you could take a lot of this stuff as ironic, in this film it’s almost too good an imitation–there’s very little of that gap that lets Almodóvar get away with stuff like this. Man, it’s a great ending though.