Hit Me With Your Best Shot: "MATADOR"

In the Hit Me With Your Best Shot Wednesday evening series we look at a pre-selected movie and choose what we each think of as its best shot. Anyone can play and we link up. (Links and next week's topic are at the end of the post.) This week, to coincide with the opening  of the Cannes film festival we thought we'd look at the one (or two) of the earliest Pedro Almodóvar / Antonio Banderas collaborations since the men are reuniting at Cannes to show off their first collaboration in two decades, The Skin I Live In (2011). I gave participants the option of either Matador (1986) or Law of Desire (1987) the films which elevated Banderas to Pedro Muse status, the only actor with a penis to hold that honor.

While Law of Desire (1987) is my all-time favorite Pedro, I chose to rescreen Matador (1986). Why? I thought this absurdist mystery about men and women who think of killing as an art form, might prove a fine companion piece to the director and star's new film, given the similarly violent and grotesque subject matter.

The title character trains new bullfighters in retirement.

So did I change my mind about Matador, my least favorite from my very favorite auteur? The answer is both No and Yes.

The opening credits of Matador seem to be challenging the audience to throw tomatoes and openly hate the movie as the title character, a retired matador named Diego (Nacho Martinez) masturbates to images of extreme violence against women. Moments later we see an explicit sex scene turn murderous. This time the corpse will be a man. All moviegoers have different levels of stamina with explicit material and I have the opposite constitution from the MPAA. Which is to say that I'm totally fine with sexually graphic imagery but I have a hard time watching people be brutalized. Pedro, a subversive artist and equal opportunity offender, is still working his way out of his "shock" phase. It's definitely a confrontational first reel but the rest of the film is much easier to watch.

The thing I forgot about Matador (I haven't seen it since... 1990?) is how completely erotic it is. Yes, all of the characters are either killers or caught up in the drama of death, but they're all horny about it.

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BOB: Sucker Punching Dead Horses

Today's Box Office Blather is short, though hardly sweet. The weekend had only two wide openings which fought it out for two markets: the family and the fanboys. Though girls ruled and boys drooled on Friday when Sucker Punch triumphed, family-market films always grow over opening weekends rather than fade like normal movies.

Carla Gugino, Jena Malone, Abbie Cornish, Emily Browning, Jamie Chung and Vanessa Hudgens at the Sucker Punch premiere

So the weekend went to Wimpy Kids rather than Violent Girls.

01. Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Rodrick Rules $23.7 new
02. Sucker Punch $19 new
03. Limitless $15 (cumulative: $41.1)
04. The Lincoln Lawyer $10.7 (cumulative: $28.7)
05. Rango $9.7 million (cumulative: $106.3)

Limitless and Lincoln held well in week 2 indicating that people who saw them last week maybe didn't regret their ticket purchases. Rango is now the top grosser of 2011, a title it seems likely to hold until the end of May when Johnny Depp will overthrow himself by way of Pirates #4. (Sigh) Unless Thor gets deified by general audiences or Jane Eyre busts out of her bodice on a record breaking 6,321 screens... all of them sold out for the rest of the summer. (Sorry, fever dream on account of the feverishly Fassbending podcast. But wouldn't it be great if box office were THAT impossible to predict? Hypothetical question. The answer is yes.)

What did you see this weekend? Besides Mildred Pierce, I mean.

Finally, in Shamelessly Beating Dead Horses news: the PG-13 version of The King's Speech opens this Friday. Begone naughty fuck word, you have no power here! The King's Profanity has been redacted. Oscar campaigns don't pay for themselves, people. Although, the $15 million dollar budgeted film has already earned $361 million worldwide so now they're just being greedy fuckers.

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TwitVid Jake Gylllenhaal and Pee Wee Herman. tee hee.
Cinesnatch runs down that Streep Tease show in LA for you. It sounds fun. I especially love the idea of a one-man conversation between multiple Meryl characters. Hopefully I'll get to see it next time I'm in LA. Whenever that is...
Business Spectactor Speaking of Meryl Streep, this is how you know someone's cinema achievements (of any sort)  have totally entered the realm of the popular mythic, when they're brought up in totally non-cinema related ways. Streep as defense of aging executives! Haha
Awards Daily I keep meaning to link up to this article on astrology and Oscar. Super interesting chart if you're into signs, baby. And it's all about Aries apparently.
The House Next Door Gregg Araki's new muse Thomas Dekker.
Twitch has a piece on how the PG-13 rating killed the films it was meant to protect, the films aimed at very young teenagers.
Senses of Cinema here's an interesting piece on Leo McCarey, his 1937 Oscar win and his preference for his drama Make Way For Tomorrow over his indisputable screwball classic The Awful Truth. I haven't seen Make Way... but I've never though artists were the best judge of their own art.
Rants of a Diva has an Oscar winning dream.
Serious Film has great advice for screenwriters of romantic comedies.
Capital New York. A fine review of Certified Copy starring Juliette Binoche though I'd urge you to see the movie first before reading it. It's a must-see film but one of the most beautiful things about it is the sense of evolving surprise as the film keeps shifting. So maybe read no reviews at all until afterwards. Then you'll want to read them all.

Finally La Daily Musto shares the news that that Barbra Streisand version of Gypsy that we were all excited / worried / shocked about has been cancelled already. Just as we'd gotten used to the idea. Apparently Stephen Sondheim is to blame. So here is Babs singing one of her best songs about nostalgia for what once was or what could have been.

Take it away Babs.

I love the guy bouncing up and down in the audience as she starts (notice him to the far right?). Babs fans were very excitable from the very start!

The King's Profanity Free Speech?

Was Harvey Weinstein just missing his old Harvey Scissorhands moniker (culled from his love of demanding cuts from the movies he'd bought from his days at Miramax)? A couple of days ago the story was making the rounds that The King's Speech would be reedited to get a family-friendlier MPAA rating. I ignored it because it seemed like a publicity stunt but like all good publicity stunts (if that's what it was) it stuck in my head. It's such a strange idea, to reedit a movie while it's playing. But perhaps it's no stranger than the R rating the film won in the first place. The last time I heard the naughty F word used so innocuously in a movie was Four Weddings and a Funeral when there was a string of them for comic effect when people were running late to one of those multiple weddings -- I don't remember which.  Or is just yet another publicity stunt to keep people talking about The King's Speech about which maybe there's not that much to talk about as it's entertaining but not exactly deep or as editorial ready as its main rivals to Oscar glory?

Between this and Blue Valentine I'm really beginning to wonder if the MPAA wasn't actually dissolved a year ago and is now just a front organization for the Weinstein Company's publicity department.