A few mini reviews from a recent movie splurge while visiting Rio, dodging the bad guys in the streets ....
"Volver" (Return), Pedro Almodovar-
This Almodovar still another slog through compelling domestic strife. And I'm feeling lonely once more. Everyone else likes his work.
The film mother of leading lady Penelope Cruz's excellently portrayed character returns ("volver"...) after 20 years away. Ever since that night so long ago when she set her husband and his hippy lover afire as they slept- the lover the mother of her good friend now dying of cancer. One imagines the murder was not especially for the betrayal of her marrriage bed, but because her daughter had also been impregnated by daddy, thus rendering Penelope's daughter her sister. Confusing, but it gets better...
Penelope's stand in father Paco tries to molest her daughter-sister in the kitchen, who of course stabs him to death as any decent, adopted daughter-sister would. And as any hysterical, dysfunctional wife-mother-sister also, Penelope stuffs Paco in the freezer until she has a moment in her busy life to bury him at their favorite, riverside trysting site.
The rest of the movie has Almodovar maneuvering characters between assassinations, incest, "the return" ad nauseum, cooking to pay the bills and XLNT plot complexity as everyone pretends or believes the returned mother must be a ghost. (?)
Driving home the title, we are treated to multiple "washing" and "revolving" (read: "returning") images. Endlessly repeated scenes of spinning windmills, a revolving front end loader washer closeup, characteristically Almodovar bird's eye views of Penelope washing the dishes, washing the blood off, washing clothes. Washing up, period. Out, damned spot!
But all's well that ends well, as the family- less Paco, the mother's ex husband and her friend's hippy mother- are happily reunited. And mother gets to wash away (again) her guilt. First, by caring as a ghost the family and villagers are somehow unaware of, for Aunt Paula until her death. Then, for her cancer ridden friend, the one whose mother she set aflame.
And like that. The rewards of of the life of your typical, dysfunctional Spanish family.
"Little Miss Sunshine", by an unknown duo with a recent, surprise nomination for an Oscar as Best Director(s)
Speaking of dysfunctional.... Wonderful acting and portrayal of the banality of goodness, an oxymoronically honest Hollywood reply to Tarantino and clones banality of evil of flicks, like Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, etc. It's hilarious, in your face, worth seeing. A failed Success Guru, his heroin addicted father kicked out of the nursing home, the dark, brooding son who has taken a vow of silence until his career as an astronaut takes off, the much suffering mother, and of course Little Miss Sunshine, whose hopes of mini stardom are doomed from the beginning. Great fun trekking down the highway, the whole family push starting their old VW bus with the by now dead father in back. A must see.
"White Planet", by some French photographers whose names I'll never remember anyway.
Tour de force photography in the Arctic, under, above and within the ice cap. What's left of it, that is, as the global warning finale graphically highlights. It's one of the best scenes, too. An aerial shot as an extremely anxious looking polar bear, grovels - swims - grovels across intermittent, crumbling ice flows and water until he finally reaches solid ice- and absolutely goes apeshit with joy. Closeups of whales, polar bear family, octopuses in mortal combat with crabs and eels, foxes, wolves on the hunt, fur seals and their pups hunted, walruses, elephant and leopard seals, birds of all kinds, etc. Photography not what you would call esthetically rendered, but truly impressive technology in a forbiddingly austere, beautiful world. One I for some reason found sad. I don't know why. An accessible, graphic natural history version of the otherwise excellent but statistic ladened Al Gore's "Inconvenient Truths", without the preaching. Worth seeing.
"Casino Royale".
Simply the best James Bond flick in 30 years. If you like glitzy action spook films too, don't miss it. A "real" JB, for a change, no smarmy English poseur this one. Tough guy who references all previous Bond flicks to his drinks waitor suggestion of a Martini, "stirred, not shaken" with a "You f****** nuts?"
Daniel Craig (who?), the new Bond recently visited Txai Resort in Itacaré, Bahia, not far from our home on the Marau Peninsula. When I met with Txai's developer at the Marriott in Copacabana earlier this week, he mentioned meeting him at Txai recently. When I asked what Daniel Craig was like, he replied "Just a typical nice guy like anyone else. Oh yes, accompanied by two (2) lovely ladies." Afterall...
"The name is Bond..... James Bond."
