One half week until school let's out. Home stretch, buddy.
Movies
I've not seen a ton of Pedro Almodóvar's movies, but of the few that I've encountered, this is definitely my favorite. His incredible use of color is back, and the costuming is next-level while never really being the main focus, which is almost always firmly on the twisty plot that intertwines a "switched-at-birth" potboiler with a rumination on the legacy of Franco's Spain. I've seen a lot of people talking about that the connections between the maternal plot and the reckoning with fascism being kind of forced, and I suppose I will ultimately defer to people who know more (read: pretty much anything beyond the equivalent of an opening paragraph of a Wikipedia article) about the Spanish Civil War and the decades that followed. But I found the resonances between those two threads pretty moving, especially in that absolute banger of a final scene. Grade: A-
An incredibly bleak little Southern Gothic, in a way that often feels as cruel as it does cathartic. But it's directed by Terence Davies, so you know every minute of this is incredibly beautiful. I was kind of slaw-jawed at how stunning this movie looks, even with the crappy library DVD I was watching it on, and under Davies's mesmerizing aesthetic, the story takes on a dream-like quality that turns the bleakness into something more primordial than it might otherwise be, as if it bubbled up from a collective nightmare of the Southern United States. I'm told that Davies considers this movie a failure, and I can't believe someone can be so wrong about their own work. Grade: A-
In terms of creating the first stop-motion feature film, the USSR had the USA beat by almost 20 years and made the better movie overall, too. So that's a point for communism, I guess. But both movies are a snooze. Some really, really nice sets and backgrounds in this one, but the opera (did you know there was a "Hansel and Gretel" opera?) kinda sucks, and the voice acting is some real early-Sunday-morning-public-access-television-core. I gotta stop watching these early stop-motion movies. Grade: D+
"Communist revision of Gulliver's Travels" and "possibly the first stop-motion feature ever made" should have yielded a way more interesting movie than this is. The stop-motion craft is very cool and also a little unnerving, too, with how expressive the characters' faces are on top of fairly nondescript bodies. But otherwise, really boring. Sometimes technical innovation arrives with a bang, but other times, it's just something perfunctory like this. Grade: C
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