Women On The Verge Of A Nervous Breakdown (1988)

Before this, I’d never seen a Pedro Almodovar film before. Shocking, isn’t it? Don’t get me wrong, it’s always been on my list as something to do, knowing that he’s probably one of the most famous Spanish auteurs ever. So yes, I had to watch something, anything, by him. So it was good luck when my work threw up this fabulous opportunity  to watch Women On The Verge Of A Nervous Breakdown, his breakthrough film.

It stars Carmen Maura as Pepa, a woman desperate to know why her lover Ivan has left her over the space of two days. She goes to see Ivan’s wife and son, but they are just as clueless as she is. Meanwhile, Pepa’s friend Candela (Maria Barranco)  is convinced that the police are searching for her after she slept with a member of a Shiite terrorist cell. She turns up at Pepa’s flat and tries to commit suicide. Luckily, Pepa’s self-appointed son-in-law (through Ivan), Carlos (Antonio Banderas), turns up at the flat with his fiancée Marisa (Rossy De Palma) for a viewing and they help to pull her back up from the side of the building. Marisa accidentally drinks a gazpacho made by Pepa with a packet of sleeping pills in it while searching for water for Candela. And here starts a series of strange and farcical events where the characters get more tangled up in each others’ lives than they may have first anticipated.

The movie has more of the feel of a stage play than a full cinematic piece: most of the action takes place in Pepa’s flat, where the layout is pretty much open-plan with a huge terrace, and other locations are used frequently, such as the back seat of a Mambo Taxi and the studio where Pepa works. The backdrop on Pepa’s terrace also seems a little too fake, although it’s strange things like this that give the movie a quirky charm that is hard not to fall in love with.

The characters have a great deal of chemistry, where it’s hard not to believe the tangled up relationships between them. Each actor’s performance is also very strong, and the fact that Spanish is such a fast language lends well to the fact that some of the characters are losing their minds while others are simply panicking and highly-strung. Some of the costume, of course, is a little dated (hey, it was the 80s!) but apart from this detail you get the impression that this movie could have been made at any time and it still would have been fresh as a daisy.

Something about the film reminded me of some of the farcical situations of Woody Allen movies, which I was actually surprised at since Almodovar is known for his works in melodrama. But Women is hilarious and never seems try-hard. The laughs are genuine and even though the characters are suffering from hysteria most of the time, it’s not hard to sympathise with Pepa and her acquaintances. You even feel just that little bit sorry for her at the end. But hey, pathos is what great comedy is all about.

The TV Week That Was #5

It’s been a slow week in TV. Barely anything new. Barely anything of interest aside from This Is England 86, Mad Men and Dexter (shock aftermath this week!)

So I ended up watching The Special Relationship (BBC2). It saw Michael Sheen reprising his role as Tony Blair for the third time. But this wasn’t about the famous special relationship.

No, the film decided to focus it’s attention to Blair and his friendship with Bill Clinton, played convincingly by Dennis Quaid. I swear if you shut your eyes you’d be able to hear the real Clinton. He was that good. We followed the pair from 1992, to the 1996/1997 elections, the Monica Lewkinski scandal and most interestingly of all, the Kosovo crisis. Unfortunately, it takes a bit too long to get to the situation involving Kosovo and when it did finally come around it all seemed a bit rushed. Plus, Sheen wasn’t the most magnetic Blair, particularly by his own standards. He was a bit flat and the script seemed to place Blair as more serious in comparison to Sheen’s previous portrayals.

So we were left with an hour of build up to a climax that dusted it’s hands a bit too promptly. Clinton’s last line in the show was very telling and perceptive though. After telling Blair he’d have to be less of a centre-left progressive politician with Bush, he says “But then again, I’m not sure you were one in the first place.” So commences a montage of news footage showing Blair and Bush getting on like a house on fire. We learn they use the same toothpaste. Thus ends a bit of a disappointing mini-movie that tried to be a Brit-centred West Wing and fell short of the mark.

Also new this week was Seven Days (C4), billed as “a new kind of reality show”. Hmmm, yeah, well it does seem to go over some suspiciously familiar ground. A brief group of people from Notting Hill are filmed over the course of seven days.

The audience gets to mail in and tell them what they think about the people and what they should do next. So you could tell the young interior designer (who irritatingly calls her mum “mummy” in the most annoyingly middle-class way possible) that she should get back together with that bloke she met for a drink down the pub. Or you could tell the dark-haired model to get a grip and stop crying just because she got told her hair wasn’t tidy enough for the event.

I only actually like 3 of the people on the show: the interior designer with dreadlocks, the wannabe rap star and Moktar, the only one of the whole lot whose name I can actually remember. He’s a student at Brunel Uni. Everyone else is either irritating, pathetic or completely stuck up. Hopefully some emails will come in saying what I’m thinking just so I can see them squirm.

Thrown into the mix is a combination of sweeping panoramas, sudden close-ups and a terrible megamix of commercial power pop that makes it all a bit of a disorienting experience. In the interludes everything is neon and exciting but when we actually follow the various people they have awfully dull lives: we see tiny bits of them on the phone, them walking down the street or sitting in cafes… And that’s kind of it. It’s like Big Brother Live. But at least BB had some conflict/excitement to show in the hour long show at the end of the day. These guys do bot all in a whole seven days: no wonder they had to inject some hyperactive music in there or we’d all gouge our eyes out with boredom. A BB successor this ain’t.

Not that it’s going to stop me watching their reactions next week. But if the interactive element doesn’t make this more interesting it’s getting ditched.

On a side note, in Jamie’s American Food Revolution this week, our happy chef tries to encourage the kids to eat healthy. But his plans backfire as the little tykes still wanted to eat cheap chicken nuggets free learning they were all giblets, gizzards and connective tissue sliced together like Frankenstein’s monster. Oh, and thought a potato was a tomato. It just gets more depressing….

Boardwalk Empire: The Long Wait To Go

It’s too long to wait. Okay, this may just be a one-off series, it may be extravagant but it’s got great reviews! It’s a critics darling, much better than vampire stories and all of that jazz. Oh yeah, I’m talking about Boardwalk Empire, a HBO TV production that premiered on the 19th in the states. Which means I’ll have to wait another year or so before I can even get a small part of my mitts on this. Blasted UK.

Set in Atlantic City in the prohibition era, Boardwalk Empire centres on Enoch “Nucky” Thompson, played by Steve Buscemi, a man who straddles both sides of the law, can be completely charming and other times a complete jerk. Just like all our other favourite antiheroes then. When Prohibition finally arrives in the area, Nucky seizes the opportunity to try and get booze to whoever can afford to pay him for it. Step forward Michael Shannon as Nelson Van Elden, the boardwalk’s prohibition officer. Now for obvious reasons I haven’t seen the show, so when I think about what Van Elden might be like, images of The Simpsons’ stuffy Rex Banner come to mind, all telegrams, fedoras and old-fashioned slang like “hooch” and “bushwah” (oh, wait, that last one was Truman in Futurama…)

Okay, so other than a couple of star names it doesn’t sound that exciting right? Right!?

Wrong! The show came from the mind of Terence Winter, one of the producers of The Sopranos, who in turn took the idea for the show from Nelson Johnson’s book “Boardwalk Empire: The Birth, High Times and Corruption of Atlantic City.” Plus, the show has caught one heck of a big fish in the form of Martin Scorsese, who directed the pilot episode – now that’s one hell of a seal of approval of old Marty wants in on the act. The show was also given a massive budget to fiddle around with, allowing the producers to build a real replica of the 1920s boardwalk… in a parking lot!

The thing is, it’s been a while since there were any sweeping crime shows on TV. Both The Sopranos and The Wire ended ages ago, leaving a gaping void in the market for shows that looked at the side of the criminal, rather than that of the cop (where a whole wave of shows come in, with a varied degree of success). Sure, if you want gritty then you could say that True Blood is a good start but to be honest, I’ve watched it without any initial prejudices and it’s basically Twilight with a lot more sex and violence (but I do love the dirty theme song). True love stories don’t sit well with me when it comes to drama. It’s all a bit… tacked on. You can make a much more interesting piece of work out out the horribleness of human nature, as both The Sopranos and The Wire showed. Heck, even Dexter has a terrible flipside to his apparently perfect home life.

And don’t get me started on what we Brits have to offer. We’re still leaning, praying, hoping that the new series of Spooks will turn out okay because heck, we’ve run out of ideas for shows. The last drama we produced of any real weight or worth was the brilliantly brutal Red Riding, and that was ages ago! So to me imports are the only serials worth watching: they’re unpredicatble, gritty, fresh, actually have some good acting in them and don’t have a scripts that are so patronising or clunky it would make your four-your-old sister embarassed.

So yes, I want to see Boardwalk Empire right now. But I can’t. I must wait, patiently. Luckily, coming soon is the newest drama from the wonderful guys who brought us The Wire and Generation Kill, Treme, so that should help to fill that gap…. For a while.

iTunes Single Of The Week Review #5

This song was a bit of a letdown. Having heard a lot about Tame Impala in the past I thought this effort would’ve been a bit more interesting. Sometimes iTunes makes non-singles available (which was the case with Everything Everything a couple of weeks back) but I learned that this was going to be a single, which disappointed me further. I guess fans of the Beatles will like this: it has that kind of hazy Revolver and White Album-esque quality to it but to be honest, the vocals aren’t as passionate as they could be and the song gets by on using the same melody all the way through. There’s a few interesting seconds near the end that break the mould. And to be fair, the way this song is produced is good, with that spiralling quality that I love so much. But that’s perhaps the only thing that drags this song to having a three-star rating. I just found this repetitive. But not in a good Daft Punk kind of way. More in a bad “I’m boooored” kind of way.

But I bet you disagree:

Sacha Baron Cohen: Is He Freddie?

I’m not a fan of Queen at all.

Queen are the bastion of all things middle-aged-man. Queen can be heard playing at every social occasion where age groups are brought together, they can be heard on every karaoke machine and have soundtracked the lives of many a man. Which is exactly why I don’t like them. I can’t listen to anything by Queen without having a horrible image of dad-dancing. Not specifically my dad dancing but the type of dad who perhaps might have let his hair grow, mistakenly, so it’s straggly on the ends and exaggerates that thinning, balding patch on the top of the head. Who wears waistcoats. And completes their music collection with Status Quo, sin of sins. They make me think of Martin Kemp, who provided the reasons why Queen were the best band ever on I’m In A Rock’n’Roll Band. Which is terrible, because there’s something horribly slimy and newt-like about him. The Spandau Ballet factor.

Those were the numerous reasons that I don’t like Queen. I won’t be moved on this subject. So I’m not very excited by the fact that Peter Morgan is writing a script for a new Queen biopic. Because the cinemas will be filled with Kemp-a-likes, which is a terrible turn-off. No, the only reason that I’m interested in this is because of the casting of Freddie Mercury. Okay, you probably all know who it is already, but dun-dun-DUUUN, it’s Sacha Baron Cohen:

“That’s Niiice” (in a Borat voice. Doesn’t really work in print, does it?). Yes Mr. Cohen is going to be Freddie Mercury. The question, then, is why? Well, Sacha is best known for his roles as spoof people who go and irritate others in real-life situations, causing scandal. But you might remember he was also in Sweeney Todd. Remember that? Well, he didn’t do an awful lot of warbling in the film, but he was there, giving it what-for. To land the role, he also had to sing in the audition so he must have some pretty decent vocal chords going on there (but then again, he likes doing voices, so maybe this isn’t such a surprise).

Plus, if we only learned one thing from Borat, it’s that Sacha looks good with a ‘tache:

Left: Freddie Right: Borat - separated at birth?

So that might settle it then. Besides, with the flamboyant tendencies of his creations, surely Sacha can’t mess up being a flamoyant person who actually existed? Isn’t that logical? Well, only time will tell. At least we covered the reasons why Mr. Borat will be Mr. Mercury, even if it was a little… quickly.

But we did discover why I don’t like Queen.

What do you think? Should Sacha Baron Cohen really play Freddie Mercury?

Maximum Balloon and Royksopp Reviews

If you fancy knowing how I rated Maximum Balloon’s debut (well, you probably already know I’ve been banging on about it so long!) and the new ambient record by Royksopp then head on over to the reviews section.

Oh, and I would have had a School of Seven Bells review there too but that was messed up – the first SVIIB CD I bought wouldn’t work on track 6 onwards. Then my second copy wouldn’t work from track 5 onwards. Then when I bought these albums I forgot to pick up a copy of SVIIB actually in a shop instead of online and kicked myself for not doing it. What a screw up!

Moon (2009)

If you’re going to make a sci-fi movie, you could do worse than to be the son of David Bowie, Mr. Space Oddity himself, who also starred in The Man Who Fell To Earth: well, classic movies like his father’s acting zenith was very much the inspiration for Duncan Jones’ Moon, a film so retro you could well be in a time warp.

The film stars Sam Rockwell as Sam Bell, an astronaut about to finish his three-year mission on board the Salang Moon Base, where he’s been helping to harvest energy from the surface of the planet to use back on Earth. But strange visions start to haunt him, and he has a terrible accident with a harvester. When he wakes up, he is greeted by his robotic pal Gerty3000 (voiced by Kevin Spacey) and another Sam Bell. So starts an eerie tale of self-discovery.

Moon excels in being a sci-fi where very little actually happens. Despite the strange scenario that the original Sam finds himself in, he adapts and we are exposed to the tedium and monotony of everyday life. He builds a model village, tends to a few plants, and plays ping-pong – he’s had so much time to do this that he’s become a pro. The isolation can be felt by the audience too. Despite the relative space in Salang, and the high-key white light that engulfs the whole facility, the whole place seems enclosed and claustrophobic. This sense of being trapped develops through the film. The camera works hard to find itself in awkward, small spaces (beside a toilet, in the small gap between Sam and the control panel, on the floor in the shower, above the cramped sleeping space… the list goes on!) This just adds to the tension and mistrust between the two Bells, and heightens the sense that in some way they are both losing their minds, underpinned by the haunting score.

Despite the very limited cast of characters, Moon is acted brilliantly: Rockwell does well to carry the slightly differing personality traits of the two Bells, and Spacey’s flat tone does justice to the fact that Gerty is simply a machine, built to serve Sam. Duncan Jones does really well to make the copies convincing, sometimes using body-doubles to stand in for Rockwell, but other times, such as the still above, the achievement of placing the two Sams in the same room, facing the camera, without being able to see any joins or shakiness in the technology used. It really is a great feat, considering that this is a small-scale production for a sci-fi.

As I previously mentioned, Jones obviously loves his classic sci-fi movies, as there are a massive amount of influences that you can spot buried here. To name a few, Sam’s tending for his plants echoes the way that Huey, Dewey and Louie look after Earth’s last nature reserve in Silent Running. The monotony of Sam’s everyday life is clearly inspired by Dark Star (although a lot more actually happens in Dark Star than in Moon). The visions that Sam sees and the attachment he feels to his family back on Earth are both similar to Solaris. Jones also gives homage to 2001: A Space Odyssey in the movie, from the name “Gerty3000” (very similar to Hal3000), to the movie poster that is reminiscent of the approach to the shuttle, and on to the final scene where Sam’s face is lit up with colours, a direct link to 2001, which shares nearly exactly the same final scene. Sci-fi fans will know then that Moon is nothing particularly new or groundbreaking, but you have to appreciate that this is a story about life and the you have to applaud its stunningly high production values.

It’s a welcome change of pace from the high-octane, special-effects-laden sci-fi movies that we’re all so used to now. And this probably explains why Moon did so poorly at the Box Office. But then again, most truly great movies fail to gain a large audience and most people who originally saw posters for the film were probably put off by its sci-fi genre. But don’t let the location put you off: this is more a claustrophobic tale of mortality and what it means to be human. And that could beat frenetic space battles any day.

The TV Week That Was #4

It’s been a week of gorging. Gorging. Hmm, that’s not really a nice word is it? I have to say that I don’t watch a great deal of food programmes (er, other than my secret shame of Come Dine With Me (C4), which thankfully is frequently watched by a whole wealth of other people I know) so I was surprised when I actually sat down to watch three, yes, three whole foodie programmes this week. By choice. You heard me.

First on the menu was Jamie’s American Food Revolution (C4) which, I’m told, won an Emmy. I think this may be because Jamie Oliver cried real tears at the end of this first episode.

He comes across mountains of food in Huntington, West Virginia, officially America’s unhealthiest town – he proudly announces live on radio that it was mesured by the government using a death scale, not a fat scale. Actually, you feel a bit sorry for Jamie. He meets a lot of people who don’t care about his message of healthy eating (this isn’t celery sticks either, this is proper spaghetti bolognese made from fresh) and are downright rude to the poor guy. The local radio presenter says he shouldn’t go around telling people what to do, the dinnerladies at the biggest elementary school are unsympathetic and don’t care that they’re feeding the kids crap and he’s swimming against a barrage of fast food that could clog even the fittest person’s arteries.

It’s all a bit grim actually. Having never tuned in willing to any of Oliver’s programmes before this I didn’t know what to expect but he’s actually a likable chap on a worthwhile mission. He’s even got time to slip in the odd witticism here and there too (“I thought we only had miserable b******s like that in Britain”) so even though it has the distinct air of a semi-cheap US documentary, it’s well worth having a peek at. Next Monday: the kids think a tomato is a potato. Oh dear.

Time for a bleedin’ massive portion of beef wellington and a heck-load of veg. It’s only Ramsay’s Best Restaurant (C4). The premise is simple, take Gordon Ramsay and get him to judge what he thinks is the best restaurant out of a series of categories, analysing both the food and the service.

This week, it’s the turn of the Italian restaurants. Ramsay cruelly buses in thirty guests to each of the two competing restaurants and expects them to able to cope with such a barrage of customers all at once. This was actually a battle of tried-and-tested cuisine (where the service was pretty rubbish) and an avante-garde take on Italian food (where the service was in the “don’t you pick on my boys” style – the chefs were brothers, the waiter and waitress the mum and dad – and the trout was undercooked in a water bath). Ramsay then did the whole thing again with secret diners, then put the chefs to the test with venison. Because Ramsay didn’t feature much at all, I luckily didn’t have to cope too much with his foul mouth and over-active way of talking (he goes on his toes a lot, waves his hands around and raises his eyebrows too much. Notice that?). What was worse was when the final decision came. Watching the previous fifty minutes was pointless, since Ramsay didn’t just summarise the events, he went over them in great detail again. It was worse than those “dramatic” pauses. I think my beef weelington’s a bit dodgy.

Finally, a sickly sweet addition to proceedings. Thank god it’s not a pavlova. Instead it’s a very airy chocolate mousse…

FOOD (C4, again) is a magazine show dedicated to everything you ever wanted to know about your favourite foods, and the parts you didn’t want to know at all. So in this first episode, we witnessed meat rotting, the content of fruit juices (some were more than a small pastry!), if anyone can tell the difference between butter and marg, the reason why we should eat more langoustines and we tracked the journey of green beans from Africa to the supermarket. Oh, and we learned the difference between premium and basic potatoes (other than a bit of easily washed off dirt, there is none) and saw that pigs’ cheeks can be turned into a nice ragu. Phew! That’s a lot for just 40 mintes worth of programming! But it’s all very lovely stuff, and the quickfire nature of the show means that it doesn’t feel preachy/heavy/tedious. It’s all fluffy with quick camera shots and neon title sequences. If you don’t like one thing, there’s something more interesting round the corner. But is it just me or did Anna Richardson not do anything, despite being listed as a presenter? Curious….

Two last things of note (the cheese-board, if you will). First, The Inbetweeners (E4) returned for a third series, and it’s just as hilariously cheeky as ever. The geeky, forever unpopular foursome were embroiled in the sexual politics of the school fashion show, where it turned out the boy they were raising money for turned out to be a complete jerk, even if he was in wheelchair. Simon ended up in an incredibly embarassing scenario while Neil narrowly avoided being molested by the perviest teacher in the school. Jay caught an ear infection from an earring, which he’d got because he thought it’d give him a good chance of being in the show and Will becomes a hypocrite after an old flame asks him to model with her. It was all silly fun, simply because the four lads remind you exactly of boys you knew at school. If they don’t, then you were either lucky or went to private school.

Grand Designs (C4) returned for a new series too, and Kevin McCloud continues to be initially baffled by the “scale of the project” before being bowled over by the end result. His usual, predictable statements are all there, but that’s not why we watch it, really. It’s just an excuse to gawp at what people want to live in, and then feel weirdly sad that we don’t have houses like that. Curse those people!

iTunes Single of the Week Review #4

Well this is a strange coincidence: no sooner had I bought Maximum Balloon’s debut album than this appears as iTunes’ single of the week. And with good reason. This is probbably one of the best tunes to appear on the site’s weekly freebie section for some time, even outdoing Andreya Triana’s effort from a few weeks ago. But the real mystery here is why no-one on the site seems to appreciate Dave Sitek’s nuanced and interesting take on hip-hop and dance. Either they accidentally got a completely different song in its place or… well, I was going to say something cruel, but I won’t. Each to their own, and I love Sitek’s new project: check it out on their MySpace page or don’t bother if you’re one of the many haters…. Love it though:

Aeroplane: We Can’t Fly

Huh? What’s with that title? It must be some kind of in-joke. Either that or Aeroplane are some of the most unconfident people ever. Oh, yeah. It must be the first answer.

Aeroplane want you to think that disco isn’t dead. And heck, if this is what new disco is going to sound like then bring it on: this track sounds like classic Grace Jones with a modern twist. No, no, not Hurricane, that album was completely different: I mean that it’s like “Island Life” with Ibiza-tinged sunglasses on. Oh God, not more sunny pop tunes I hear you say? Never fear. You’ll thank me for this when we’re being overwhelmed with either really rubbish winter weather or really rubbish bleak music that doesn’t speak to us. Dark is good, but let’s keep it sunny for now: