All About MY Mother and Almodóvar

by Cláudio Alves

How did you get into Almodóvar? For me, it was a matter of maternal influence. Ever since catching Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown during its 1989 Portuguese release, she's been a devotee to the Spanish director. Even as her movie-going habits diminished, a new Almodóvar was always a reason to go to the theater, attend local festivals, and purchase physical media for re-watches down the road. Through those latter ones, I became acquainted with the filmmaker in my teens, learning to love his melodramas as much as my mom did. Though, of course, as a queer man, mine was a different connection to Almodóvar's cinema of complicated women and melodrama, bright colors and hot men.

To celebrate All About My Mother's 25th anniversary today, I revisited the film with the person responsible for turning young Cláudio into a fellow fan…

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Queering the Oscars: Best Foreign Film 1999, "All About My Mother"

For Pride Month, Team Experience has been looking at LGBTQ+ related Oscar nominations. We've decided to extend the series for a few more episodes. Pretend it's still June for a bit!

by Eric Blume

It’s wonderful fun to revisit 1999’s Best Foreign Language Film Oscar winner, director Pedro Almodóvar’s All About My Mother.  Although it’s a beautifully textured, multi-layered tapestry of themes and emotions, it has to be one of the unusual films to ever win this big prize. The plot involves, among other thing: a nurse going onstage as an unrehearsed cover for Stella in A Streetcar Named Desire; a HIV-positive, pregnant nun; two heterosexual women united by giving birth to sons named Esteban from the same transgender woman; and numerous conversations and jokes about acquired tits.

That none of these unlikely and uncommercial plot strands feel forced or shocking is due to the artistry of Almodóvar. The Spanish auteur weaves stories together nobody else would think of in a million years, wrapped up in the boldest color palettes imaginable, with performances of sheer emotional force that rattle the roof...

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Happy Mothers Day + 'Mother' Recommendations

Nicole Kidman posted this beautiful image this morning to celebrate. Look at baby Nic! Happy Mothers Day to all readers especially the mothers. And happy mothers day to everyone, retroactively, who ever birthed someone who helped bring the world movie magic. 

And for fun after the jump, 12 favourite movies with mothers in the title...

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Links: Bette's bunny theory, Martin & Lewis all wet, and a follow up to "The Father"

• /Film Florian Zeller has already lined up the cast for his follow up to The Father. It's called The Son, also based on one of his stage plays, and will star Hugh Jackman and Laura Dern as ex-spouses dealing with a troubled kid. No word yet on who will be playing the step-mom or the kid
• Cinea If you've been missing Cláudio, here's an essay he just wrote on Jennifer Jones and David O. Selznick for a Flemish film culture site. (It's in English so happy reading!)  
• /Film Trailer to Barry Jenkins upcoming Amazon series Underground Railroad
• MNPP They made a Funko Pop of John Waters?! On a related note The Film Experience will be doing a week long celebration of John Waters starting Sunday. Stay tuned! 

Carey Mulligan, Billy Magnussen, Mariel Hemingway, another Let the Right One In adaptation, and more after the jump...

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1999 with Nick: When "All About My Mother" triumphed over ???

In advance of the Oscars, Nick Davis has been looking back at the Academy races of 20 years ago, spotlighting movies he’d never seen and what they teach us about those categories, then and now.

After that trip back to the Documentary race, we're ending the week by spotlighting the other category that's taken the hugest strides to adjust its nominating process and champion better work. It’s also no accident that I’m ending with a category that Nathaniel has tracked with unusual care and detail since Oscar-focused websites have existed—indeed, long before many of his peers paid more than cursory attention. The 72nd Academy Awards took place eight years before the transformative addition of an Executive Committee to the vetting process that produces the annual roster for "Best Foreign Language Film," which of course this year got rebranded as "Best International Film". This category used to be heavy with inoffensive mediocrities, or sometimes offensive ones. Tracking down the contenders, which was often difficult to do, rarely felt like making contact with the best of world cinema in any given year, and with very few exceptions the winners across the 1990s were an undistinguished lot. (Or maybe you’re a major devotée of Mediterraneo or Kolya?)

By that standard, 1999 was a pretty good year, since I imagine that Pedro Almodóvar's All About My Mother would be most people's choice as the best film to cop this prize during the whole decade. This critical and popular favorite needed no help from any Executive Committee to stay alive during the balloting. In fact, the only mystery is why the movie couldn't make more inroads into admittedly competitive races like Actress, Supporting Actress, Director, Screenplay, Production Design, Costume Design, Editing, or Picture...

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