Beauty Break: Almodóvar's Eye Candy

by Cláudio Alves

César Vicente in PAIN & GLORY (2019).

Before Martin Scorsese ignited the internet's fury with his comments about the MCU, another master filmmaker had already made headlines with less than complimentary opinions on the matter. Back in April, before he took his glorious Pain & Glory to Cannes, Pedro Almodóvar criticized superhero movies for having no sexuality. According to the Spanish auteur, they are neutered.

When compared against his passionate filmography they are piteously sexless indeed. But so are most movies. Few filmmakers have explored the many permutations of desire as thoroughly as Almodóvar has, usually with a patina of irreverent queerness. From killers in skimpy white briefs to ballets of bulges and sculpted asses, his camera is always ready to lick an actor's body and crystalize them into divinities of wantonness.

You're invited to peruse the director's gallery of beautiful men, starting at the dawn of his career and ending with Pain & Glory's first bloom of desire. Come see Almodóvar's NSFW eye candy…

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Beauty vs Beast: Grassy Knoll Ethics

Jason from MNPP here with an under-the-weather edition of "Beauty vs Beast" - apologies if I am brief and lacking some spark today, I'm staring at my computer screen from the business end of a box of kleenex and with one too many sudafed capsules dotting my system. I bring up my sickness not to be (entirely) self-indulgent but to explain why I didn't make it out to see Jackie this weekend as I'd planned - every cough feels like a cinematic betrayal right now.

So until me and Natalie can rendezvous with our matching pink pillboxes I will ask you today to look backwards at the previous biggest Kennedy assassination movie on the books, Oliver Stone's JFK. I don't remember the Oscar race that year but I'm kind of surprised Costner wasn't nominated for the film - maybe they'd had their fill with Dances With Wolves the year before? Tommy Lee Jones was nominated for the movie though, for the poodle-mopped conspiracy sissy at the center of the mystery, and so I ask you...

PREVIOUSLY We're on an Almodovar kick thanks to the retrospective at MoMA right now so last week we climbed into bed and slipped our hands into the sex ropes for Antonio Banderas in Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! - he took 56% of the vote over Victoria Abril's 44. Said thefilmjunkie:

"If I were voting with my head I'd probably go for Marina, but my vote for Ricky was guided by more, um, prurient interests. I have no shame. I regret nothing."

Beauty vs Beast: Love Bound

Jason from MNPP here back from turkey break and prepping a fresh "Beauty vs Beast" for y'all to feast upon. The Spanish provocateur Pedro Almodovar's latest film Julieta (which our pal Manuel reviewed right here via the New York Film Festival) opens in the U.S. in just a couple of weeks and so the Museum of Modern Art is celebrating all things Almodovar with a great big retrospective, starting tomorrow. The series runs through mid-December and they're showing pretty much everything he's made - don't miss out!

And so in turn for this week's "Beauty vs Beast" I'm asking you to look back to Almodovar's 1990 romantic comedy of kinky kidnapping, Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! (aka ¡Átame!) and its rope-crossed lovers -- Ricky (Antonio Banderas), fresh off the psych ward, and Marina (Victoria Abril), the actress and recovered drug addict who finds herself on the receiving end of Ricky's deranged affections.

PREVIOUSLY Last week's contest between Gaston and The Beast from Disney's Beauty & the Beast went back and forth and back and forth between the two big strapping hairy-chested menfolk in belle's life for awhile, but in the end true romance won out - y'all softies - and The Beast took it home with 55% of your vote. Said Nick T:

"Kudos to Gaston for having such a great song, but The Beast is such a lovely character. Even if my memory of him is blurrier, it's still warm."

I thought, "hey, I can link, I can link." but now I know that I was wrong, 'cause I missed you ♪ ♫

Criterion Collection Pedro Almodóvar write about his experience making Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down (1990). I so love that one. So weirdly romantic in spite of its whole Stockholm Syndrome business
Natasha VC Brad Pitt before and after makeup. Hee
In Contention Tapley wonders if Eastwood's American Sniper will have an impact on Oscar with its Christmas release
The Dissolve John Lithgow has revealed that Pixar's The Good Dinosaur (which he does voice work on) has been completely reimagined
Buzzfeed investigation into 80s arcana: who deserved credit for Flashdance and didn't get it?

 

The Hairpin the best friends of romcom heroines, in order
The Guardian on "my favorite city in film: Blade Runner's LA
i09 Have you ever wondered how Replicants are made in Blade Runner?
Salon interesting piece on Lauren Bacall (and Bogey's) political activism which the obits have steered clear of mostly
Chiseler Bacall's recent death also prompted this look back at Humphrey Bogarts first actress wife, the now forgotten Mayo Methot
AV Club Keanu Reeves moves to television for a series called Rain about a half Japanese half American assassin but...
/Film ...there's also a TV show being developed based on Keanu's hit The Devil's Advocate in which he is not involved. Strange timing, eh?
RogerEbert.com interviews Ira Sachs on Love is Strange. That finally comes out this month. Do NOT miss it 
Cinema Blend Johnny Depp to star with his teenage daughter in Kevin Smith's Yoga Hosers. I do not understand what's going on with that career. I really don't 
Empire Bradley Cooper to headline a new franchise based on the "Mack Bolan" book series about a man at war with the Mafia

Off Cinema
Towleroad Portia de Rossi surprises Ellen DeGeneres on their anniversary
Entertainment Junkie on the Emmy contest for "Best Writing in a Drama Series"
Taye Diggs dancing. That's all. That's enough.
AV Club looks back at the seminal single "Stay" from Lisa Loeb. God, I loved that one. I can't remember if it was written for Reality Bites (1994) or not but if it was Oscar made the worse choice in not nominating it

The Stuff of Nightmares
Cinema Blend Chinese movie theaters projecting audience texts onto screen. 

ahem... I used to worry about keeping The Film Experience PG-13 because I knew teenagers were reading and when the site was first created you didn't want to be labeled NSFW because it shut you off from tons of traffic and search engines and so on and so on. And now I just feel like the biggest prude every day since even mainstream websites that people read at work print photo galleries of "bulges," naked celebrities, and charity events involving random civilians stripping. Case in point in the past 24...

Gawker imagining what's inside Jared Leto's pants courtesy of a quote from Alexis Arquette
Jezebel imagining what Disney Prince Charming dicks look like. 

So basically I am a prude and singing "Class" from Chicago right now as I type this. But I click on all these links, so, guilty.