Each month before the Smackdown, Nick Taylor considers alternates to Oscar's ballot...
I bet Pedro Almodóvar's filmography would be a fun one to watch in order. His visual ideas and narrative fascinations recur throughout his films, yet his deployment and examination of them take on different textures at different points. Murder, art, cinema, romantic passion, heartbreaking yet inextricably devoted family ties, queerness, as filtered through the generic keys of farce, melodrama, and thriller, it’s all there from his earliest works to last year’s tremendously moving Pain and Glory, each film recognizably guided by the same hand. There’s great fun to be had in watching different stylists and performers interpret Almodóvar’s very tricky vision, and no collaboration largely specific to the earliest stages of his career is quite as gratifying as Carmen Maura’s heroic work with him throughout the ‘80s.
Granted, I’ve only seen...
I bet Pedro Almodóvar's filmography would be a fun one to watch in order. His visual ideas and narrative fascinations recur throughout his films, yet his deployment and examination of them take on different textures at different points. Murder, art, cinema, romantic passion, heartbreaking yet inextricably devoted family ties, queerness, as filtered through the generic keys of farce, melodrama, and thriller, it’s all there from his earliest works to last year’s tremendously moving Pain and Glory, each film recognizably guided by the same hand. There’s great fun to be had in watching different stylists and performers interpret Almodóvar’s very tricky vision, and no collaboration largely specific to the earliest stages of his career is quite as gratifying as Carmen Maura’s heroic work with him throughout the ‘80s.
Granted, I’ve only seen...
- 11/19/2020
- by Nick Taylor
- FilmExperience
Spanish producer-distributor Wanda Films is set to co-produce Antonio Méndez Esparza‘s “Madrid Is It,” a thriller with comedic touches produced by Pedro Hernández’s Aquí y Allí Films, the Madrid-based outfit that has backed all of the features directed by Esparza, one of Spain’s most laureled and lauded directors.
“Madrid Is It” focuses on Lucía, who leads a discrete life, has a peculiar sense of humor and sense of duty, and a dreamy personality. Her quiet life suddenly changes, however, when her boss embezzles funds at the company and everybody lose their jobs. She decides to reinvent her life, working as a taxi driver. When her life finally seems to regain a certain stability and ease, Lucía sees how everything takes another turn for the worst and the film, to this point a comedy, turns into a revenge thriller.
“‘Madrid Is It’ will also be a road movie across Madrid,...
“Madrid Is It” focuses on Lucía, who leads a discrete life, has a peculiar sense of humor and sense of duty, and a dreamy personality. Her quiet life suddenly changes, however, when her boss embezzles funds at the company and everybody lose their jobs. She decides to reinvent her life, working as a taxi driver. When her life finally seems to regain a certain stability and ease, Lucía sees how everything takes another turn for the worst and the film, to this point a comedy, turns into a revenge thriller.
“‘Madrid Is It’ will also be a road movie across Madrid,...
- 11/18/2020
- by Emilio Mayorga
- Variety Film + TV
Allee Willis, the songwriter perhaps best known for writing the theme song to the long-running sitcom “Friends,” died on Tuesday at age 72, according to her official Instagram page.
She died of cardiac arrest, according to Variety.
A 1985 Grammy winner and 2018 inductee into the Songwriters Hall of Fame, Willis produced an extensive body of hits that included multiple songs for Earth, Wind & Fire, including “September” and “Boogie Wonderland.”
Also Read: Ed Aschoff, ESPN College Football Reporter, Dies on His 34th Birthday
Her other hits included the Pointer Sisters’ “Neutron Dance,” Dusty Springfield’s “What Have I Done to Deserve This?,” Patti Labelle’s “Lead Me On,” and the theme from “The Karate Kid,” “You’re the Best.” She earned a Grammy in 1985 for her contributions to the “Beverly Hills Cop” soundtrack album.
In 2006, Willis earned a Tony nomination for co-writing the original score to the Broadway musical adaptation of “The Color Purple,...
She died of cardiac arrest, according to Variety.
A 1985 Grammy winner and 2018 inductee into the Songwriters Hall of Fame, Willis produced an extensive body of hits that included multiple songs for Earth, Wind & Fire, including “September” and “Boogie Wonderland.”
Also Read: Ed Aschoff, ESPN College Football Reporter, Dies on His 34th Birthday
Her other hits included the Pointer Sisters’ “Neutron Dance,” Dusty Springfield’s “What Have I Done to Deserve This?,” Patti Labelle’s “Lead Me On,” and the theme from “The Karate Kid,” “You’re the Best.” She earned a Grammy in 1985 for her contributions to the “Beverly Hills Cop” soundtrack album.
In 2006, Willis earned a Tony nomination for co-writing the original score to the Broadway musical adaptation of “The Color Purple,...
- 12/25/2019
- by Thom Geier
- The Wrap
Songwriter Allee Willis, famous for her work with Earth, Wind & Fire as well as the “Friends” theme and the “The Color Purple” Broadway song score, died Tuesday in Los Angeles. She was 72. The cause of death was cardiac arrest.
Prudence Fenton, the animator and producer who is described by a family friend as Willis’ “partner and soulmate,” was said to be “in total shock” over her best friend’s sudden death, which occurred just after 6 p.m.
Willis was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2018 for a catalog that included hits like Ewf’s “September” and “Boogie Wonderland,” the Pointer Sisters’ “Neutron Dance,” the Pet Shop Boys’ and Dusty Springfield’s “What Have I Done to Deserve This?,” Maxine Nightingale’s “Lead Me On,” Patti Labelle’s “Stir It Up” and the theme from “The Karate Kid,” “You’re the Best.”
“I, very thankfully, have a few songs that will not go away,...
Prudence Fenton, the animator and producer who is described by a family friend as Willis’ “partner and soulmate,” was said to be “in total shock” over her best friend’s sudden death, which occurred just after 6 p.m.
Willis was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2018 for a catalog that included hits like Ewf’s “September” and “Boogie Wonderland,” the Pointer Sisters’ “Neutron Dance,” the Pet Shop Boys’ and Dusty Springfield’s “What Have I Done to Deserve This?,” Maxine Nightingale’s “Lead Me On,” Patti Labelle’s “Stir It Up” and the theme from “The Karate Kid,” “You’re the Best.”
“I, very thankfully, have a few songs that will not go away,...
- 12/25/2019
- by Chris Willman
- Variety Film + TV
In Pain and Glory, Pedro Almodóvar’s 21st feature and his eighth with Antonio Banderas, the star plays Salvador, an aging filmmaker struggling to continue working due to an oppressive cocktail of pain and his new habit for heroin. A repertory screening of his breakthrough film, Taste, gives way for Salvador to face various, unreconciled fragments of his past: his late mother’s chilly regard for him, his budding sexuality, and his first relationship, as well as a tumultuous friendship with an estranged collaborator.
Almodóvar’s cinema is an amass of messy folks in flux, like Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown’s Pepa or Volver’s Raimunda, suddenly trying, the best way they know how, to pacify inharmonious, frayed strands of their lives. In an interview at the 72nd Cannes Film Festival, Banderas said this film, more than an addiction narrative, is about closing the circles and...
Almodóvar’s cinema is an amass of messy folks in flux, like Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown’s Pepa or Volver’s Raimunda, suddenly trying, the best way they know how, to pacify inharmonious, frayed strands of their lives. In an interview at the 72nd Cannes Film Festival, Banderas said this film, more than an addiction narrative, is about closing the circles and...
- 10/15/2019
- by The Film Stage
- The Film Stage
The 31st entry in an on-going series of audiovisual essays by Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin. Mubi's retrospective, The Art of Transgression: The Cinema of Almodóvar, is showing August 18 – October 19, 2019 in the United Kingdom.It’s an enabling paradox of Pedro Almodóvar’s films that he became a principal export standing for Spanish cinema by importing so much into it from other countries and traditions. And this is especially so in relation to his starring female characters. Our audiovisual essay (the first in a series of three for the Notebook on Almodóvar) looks at some of the many allusions in two of his early features, Dark Habits (1983) and What Have I Done to Deserve This? (1984), to diverse forms, genres, and directors—from Italian neo-realism to R.W. Fassbinder. In every case, Almodóvar does not merely borrow or pastiche, but reinvents these idioms as his own.
- 9/6/2019
- MUBI
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