Pedro Party: All About My Mother

It's a Pedro Party all week. Here's Lynn Lee on her introduction to Almodóvar...

To all actresses who have played actresses.  To all women who act.  To men who act and become women.  To all the people who want to be mothers.  To my mother.”

All About My Mother was the first Almodovar film I ever saw, and as it happens, I saw it with my own mother.  I don’t remember why I picked it for us to see together.  It certainly wasn’t because of the title or because I thought it would be something she’d particularly like.  In fact, if I’d thought about it more, I might have been anxious that she would find it too outré.  Or for that matter, that I would; as both a movie lover and a young adult, I was just beginning to learn what was out there and how far it stretched beyond my own personal experience.

To our credit, or rather to Almodovar’s, there was no reason for such trepidation...

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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...

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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... 

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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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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...

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