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Friday, September 28th, 2007
Ellen and I have been watching a lot of Almodóvar's movies -- first we saw Talk to Her, then Volver, and tonight All About My Mother -- fantastic stuff. I did not like All About My Mother on first viewing as much as I liked the other two on first viewing; but it was also the first of them to make me feel like I need to watch it again. I felt like I missed a lot of the complexity in the characters' relationships and the quickness of the dialog. I definitely want to watch it again this weekend, and then to rewatch both All About Eve and A Streetcar Named Desire in the near future before watching All About My Mother again. So I've got my movie-viewing mapped out a little ways forward.
posted evening of September 28th, 2007: Respond
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Friday, October 5th, 2007
Tonight I was watching A Streetcar Named Desire and thinking about All About My Mother -- as I noted before I wanted to refamiliarize myself with the source material and then watch Almodóvar's take on it again. Really nice viewing experience -- I was able to start imagining that Brando and Malden and Leigh and Hunter were members of the same circle as Almodóvar's characters. Note: Brando seems too young for his character at points. Leigh does too, especially early in the film.
posted evening of October 5th, 2007: Respond
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Friday, October 19th, 2007
Watching All About Eve tonight -- I am being blown away. I'm almost sure I've seen it before at some point, but have no memory of it at all. It is going to be really useful when I am rewatching All About my Mother -- I'm picking up a lot of the references that I totally missed before. Is it a commonplace observation that Susan Sarandon looks like and acts like Bette Davis? Because I am noticing that for the first time. (Ellen points out that Sarandon does not have the imperious persona, which I guess is true -- there were non-imperious moments when the likeness was jumping out at me.)
posted evening of October 19th, 2007: Respond
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Saturday, October 20th, 2007
I'm watching All About my Mother again tonight, for what I think will be the last repetition (for the time being); I am really getting the movement of it, and understanding the scenes individually and in combination. Just pausing the film to note what seems to me like a really brilliant detail -- at the end of the scene showing Manuela acting in an organ donation seminar, the camera pans to her son jotting notes, then back to Manuela. Then the view switches to black and white and you see the movie rewinding -- the camera pulls back and you see the black and white is the videotape playing for a group of nurses who are reviewing the seminar. But in those couple of seconds before the camera pulls back, the impression (at least the impression I get) is that the black and white photography and the rewind are occuring in the mental image of Esteban the story teller, writing a story about his mother. This ambiguity seems really neat to me.
posted evening of October 20th, 2007: Respond
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Check out Ellen's writing at Patch.com.
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