Pedro Party: The Music of Alberto Iglesias

We're celebrating Pedro Almodóvar all week. Here's Chris Feil on Pedro's standby composer...

Here at The Film Experience, ruminating on Pedro Almodóvar’s list of frequent collaborators would most likely find an actress’s name come up first. But aside from his onscreen talent, there is one now prolific relationship the director has that’s equally worth celebrating: composer Alberto Iglesias.

The Almodóvar/Iglesias collaboration is now ten films deep, dating back to 1995‘s The Flower of My Secret without a single gap film since. His work is inextricable from what Almodóvar creates on screen, a cohesive piece of the melodrama that enhances the tone rather than defining it. Let's discuss five favorites from his work after the jump...

Click to read more ...

Pedro Party: Losing Our Minds Over "Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown"

We're celebrating Pedro Almodóvar all week. Here's Spencer Coile on his first Oscar nominee... 

Almodóvar is always at his best when also at his zaniest. Through a healthy mix of wacky characters and a unique color palette, he manages to imbue his stories with enough humor, drama, and wit to make any skeptic reconsider his artistry. Such is the case with his 1988 film, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. Telling the story of TV actress Pepa (Carmen Maura, Almodóvar most-enduring muse), we are plunged into a world of absurdity, loss, and the cocktails we make to cure us of our loneliness. After serving as his international breakthrough, receiving a Best Foreign Language Film Oscar nomination and inspiring a Broadway musical of the same name, it is no surprise that Women on the Verge has secured its place in the top tier of Almodóvar's filmography... 

Click to read more ...

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... 

Click to read more ...

Q&A: Pretty Boys and the best of Tomei / Collette

It's part two of this week's Reader Questions. If you missed the first installment in which we covered topics like Cynthia Erivo's film future and Star Wars favorites, click here.

Six more reader questions? YES PLEASE. Let's go... 

BHURAY: What are your 5 favorite Toni Collette performances?

I love her so much I have to do a top ten. Hers is surely the star career with the single biggest disparity between how much talent she provides versus how often and well deployed she is by Hollywood. My favorite performances are hard to rank as I think she's the same amount of wonderful consistently but it might go something like this...

Click to read more ...

Q&A: JLaw at the Top, Chris Pine's Future, Trans Characters in Cinema

Bob Fosse on the set of LennyApologies dearest readers about the slow rollout of various columns this month. April is such a weird month, isn't it? What can you do. So you recently asked a bunch of questions and here's 11 answers!  I hope you'll speak out on these same topics in the comments to make this more conversational. I do actually love to hear your opinions, too! xoxo

EDWARD: Have you ever wanted to make a movie?

NATHANIEL: The short answer is "no". The medium answer is I think it might be fun to work on one once, to have the experience (the areas that most interest me in terms of my own potential skills are casting and editing). But my basic feeling is that I love movies too much to commit to one only for years on end as so many filmmakers seem to have to do. The long answer is that I have fantasized about it but usually only in the context of becoming a great director of modern movie musicals since Hollywood so desperately needs someone who is inspired by / committed to that genre specifically. We need a new Fosse/Minnelli/Berkeley/Donen  roughly a billion times more than we need a new Scorsese/Spielberg/Tarantino/Malick/Kubrick/Whomever. There are always people trying to be that latter group of guys!

MARK: If you could bring back any movie star deceased back in a Peter Cushing Rogue One style cameo who would you choose.

Click to read more ...