Pedro Almodóvar

[John Upham]

I watched

Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown last night and enjoyed it.

Any other Pedro Almodóvar admirers out there? Justin? Jim?

[Jonathan Rogers]

I watched

Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown last night and enjoyed it.

Any other Pedro Almodóvar admirers out there? Justin? Jim?

Jonathan, at any rate.

I found Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown very funny. Less sure about some of his later works, though Volver was excellent.

[John Sellen]

Totally agree about Volver. A brilliant film
Would also recommend All about My Mother

[John Upham]

Possibly my favourite is Talk to Her : Superb!

[JustinHorton]

Claim to fame: we once pulled up outside a cafe/restaurant next to a petrol station below Medinaceli, just off the Zaragoza-Madrid motorway, and Leonor Watling from that movie was outside having a fag.

[John Upham]

We watched

"What Have I Done to Deserve This?" last night

Superb!

[JustinHorton]

I found Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown very funny. Less sure about some of his later works, though Volver was excellent.

Me, I prefer the later works: it's a matter of taste, of course, and there's plenty to be enjoyed in the earlier films, but I prefer the latter-period, more contemplative, less frantic Almodóvar to the earlier, more manic version. There's something - more common here than in the UK, possibly - which I call "running-around comedy", and there are really two distinct halves of Almodóvar's careers of which that description basically fits most of the first half. On the other hand you can't imagine anything much less frantic than the celebrated scene from Hable con ella (2004) where Caetano Veloso sings Cucurucucú Paloma, and it's that film and maybe Todo sobre mi madre (1999) which roughly mark the transition from one Almodóvar, as it were, to the other. (Other musical highlights, and there's a few, include Luz Casals singing Piensa en mi in Tacones lejanos (1991) and, from Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios (1988) Lola Beltrán's Soy infeliz, which as it happens was my wife's mobile ring tone for years. And here's Pedro performing himself.)

All his films have something to them though and I guess in some ways I think of him in the same way as I do the Coen brothers, in so far as they're always doing something interesting (though it might otherwise be strange to compare the brothers' often cold pastiche to Almodóvar's liking for kitsch and the personal) and for this reason I'll always try to see a new film by either, though I haven't actually seen Madres paralelas (2021) yet.

Oh yes, I was going to say that La ley del deseo (1987) is a very gay film for its time - My Beautiful Launderette (1985) is nowhere near - and that if I have a favourite it's probably Julieta (2016). This is partly for local reasons: the scene where Julieta's driven hundreds of kilometres to try and see her daughter, only to be told by the retreat she went to (or perhaps the cult she joined) that her daughter doesn't want to see her again, is filmed very close to Buerba, a tiny and once-abandoned village in a part of the Pyrenees I know quite well. My snout in the Huesca film office says that Pedro found it quite provincial round here, especially when he couldn't find a decent restaurant open on a Sunday evening. This struck me as a strange view to take from somebody who is actually from the arse-end of Castilla-La Mancha.

[John Upham]

I found Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown very funny. Less sure about some of his later works, though Volver was excellent.

And here's Pedro performing himself.)

If only Spain had selected this for their Eurovision entry for that year, it would have won hands down.