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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Horror Costuming: The Skin I Live In

In October, we'll be celebrating the excellence of costume design in horror cinema.

by Cláudio Alves

Pedro Almodóvar's 19th feature harkens back to a time two decades earlier when the Spanish director was one of European cinema's most shameless provocateurs, an enfant terrible willing to rub the face of polite society in utter tastelessness, jolly amorality, and lustful perversity. Adapted from a novel by Thierry Jonquet, The Skin I Live In is a sordid tale that mixes melodrama with horror, handsome mad scientists and beautiful Frankenstein monsters. More than anything, as its title suggests, this is a film about skin and the places people inhabit…

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Pedro Party: The Outrageous "Dark Habits"

We're celebrating Pedro Almodóvar all week. Here's Nathaniel R on Dark Habits (1983)

Julieta Serrano and Marisa Paredes in DARK HABITS (1983)

It's a Pedro Party! For the next week we'll be celebrating the career of the great auteur Pedro Almodóvar. We were just discussing which male actors we'd love for him to work with but let's let the official party begin with one of his nearly all-female efforts Dark Habits. His 1983 "pelicula" is about a cabaret singer Yolonda (Cristina Sánchez Pascual) who is hiding out in a convent of wacky nuns. But let's not confuse the movie with Sister Act because it would eat that 1992 comedy and then apologize sheepishly over a cake and acid dessert... 

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