que sufres como yo he sufrido
Was in danger of succumbing to a cold yesterday, but I've gone at it with zinc and echinacea and Emergen-C and I'm feeling tolerable now. If the Deep Space Nine DVDs get here from Netflix I will feel even better. I am a piranha; I am a hooker with a heart of gold; I am the $100,000 bill that was never in general circulation.
Pedro Almodóvar DVD roundup:
Entre Tinieblas/Dark Babits (1983): Heroin-trafficking nightclub singers, lesbian nuns on smack and LSD, a tiger in the convent! It's very funny in many parts, and poignant in others, but the whole package is just—strange. He's still circling here.
Mujeres al Borde de un Ataque de Nervios/Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988): Laughed my ass off, frightened the cat. One day I hope to be so lucky as to ride the Mambo Taxi.
¡Átame!/Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! (1990): Funny too, though less farcical in many ways than I was expecting. The movie within the movie can't be beat, though.
Carne Trémula/Live Flesh (1997): Somewhere in this seven-year gap (the films from which haven't come out on DVD yet), Pedro got serious and started putting "Un Film de Almodóvar" at the start of the opening credits and so forth. This is where the production values start getting a lot better, either because he has more money or because cameras were just shitty in the eighties. In a lot of ways, this is ¡Átame! redone more seriously. Riveting, though I'll admit the end disappointed me a little—in stories like these I always wind up rooting for the cuckold.
Todo Sobre Mi Madre/All About My Mother (1999): I think this is where he perfects the funny/sad/weird mix. The plot has also tightened to the point that, like Kieslowski's movies, it carries a strange universality—it's an allegory for something indescribable that we all recognize, even if we're not transvestites. The "Streetcar Named Desire" parallels throw more depth lighting on it all.
Hable Con Ella/Talk to Her (2002): See above. Maybe even better.
