Beauty Break: Maribel Verdú, Goya Darling and Birthday Girl

This post has been updated from its original form, years ago...

Those Goyas must be heavy!

Happy 50th birthday, today, to Spanish beauty Maribel Verdú of Y Tu Mama Tambien and Pan's Labyrinth fame. How many women can claim to have terrorized Snow White and been tag teamed by Gael García Bernal and Diego Luna, and knifed a dictator's officer right in the face? How many women have been nominated for a Goya eleven times and won twice*. Just Maribel, that's who... 

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The Furniture: On Frida's Mirrors and Diego's Walls

Daniel Walber's series on Production Design. Click on the images to see them in magnified detail.

Nearly 20 years on, Julie Taymor’s Frida remains both breathtaking (those Quay Brothers puppets!) and befuddling (why isn’t it in Spanish?). It holds up better as a visual experiment than as a biopic, despite the richness of Salma Hayek’s performance. Filmmakers have long struggled to bring the lives of visual artists to the screen in dynamic, resonant ways. Some fail.

When Frida does succeed, it’s largely due to its Oscar-nominated team of art director Felipe Fernández del Paso and set decorator Hania Robledo. Their work doesn’t simply represent the art of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, but interprets it. By transforming Kahlo’s paintings into the stuff of cinema, they directly engage with their meaning - or, rather, Taymor’s own interpretation of those meanings. The result is a film with a lot to say about materiality and identity, the value of brick and the value of life.

We begin with Frida’s bedridden journey to her first solo show in Mexico City. She is carried out of the house aloft, head resting on an embroidered pillow that reads “Amor” and “Tesoro Mio.” But then we see her through her eyes, as she looks up to the mirror into the canopy of her bed, the flowers reflected back at her.

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Horror Actressing: Rita Macedo in "The Curse of the Crying Woman" (1963)

by Jason Adams

Happy Cinco de Mayo, everyone! For this week's edition of our "Great Moments in Horror Actressing" series we're tackling the five-century-old Mexican folk-tale of "La Llorona" aka "The Weeping Woman," who's become perhaps the most iconic of all their legends and whose terrifying presence has graced the screen at least a dozen times, up to and including last year's middling Blumhouse production (part of their ever expanding and worsening Conjuring Universe) titled The Curse of la Llorona. 

We will not be talking that most recent version though, because despite perfectly acceptable screaming from a slumming Linda Cardellini (an actress I very much like)...

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Best International Feature: Norway, Taiwan & Mexico's contenders

by Cláudio Alves

In a few days, we'll know the ten finalists for the Best International Feature Oscar. Until then, I shall continue exploring some of the 91 submissions. This batch includes last year's champion, Mexico, a prize-winning literary adaptation from Norway and a queer tragicomedy from Taiwan that's currently on Netflix. They're a varied bunch and represent the offerings of countries that have previously achieved great success with the Academy.

First, let's peruse the wintry wonders of the Scandinavian submission…

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That time when one of the great cinematographers hooked up with Jake Gyllenhaal...

by Nathaniel R

Here's a little teaser for a forthcoming interview with Rodrigo Prieto, the two-time Oscar nominated DP whose latest film is Martin Scorsese's The Irishman. The famed Mexican cinematographer turns 54 next month. We'd always seem him in photos, handsome, crouched down behind cameras with tightly cropped hair. In person he's a tall silver fox and he's let his hair grow out. He could have been in front of cameras but instead got behind them from an early age. And what a career he's had. Standing majestically amongst his classics is Brokeback Mountain (2005) so during a lengthy sit down we had at the Middleburg Film Festival this past weekend, we asked him how he ended up with his only onscreen role.

We don't know if you knew this but he plays the Mexican hustler who Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) picks up during a quick trip south of the border. That's the trip that Ennis and Jack fight about, later in the movie, lighting a bonfire of scorched feeling in that famous 'I wish I knew how to quit you' scene...

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