The Skin I Live In ***½

Director: Pedro Almodóvar
Cast: Antonio Banderas, Elena Anaya, Jan Cornet, Marisa Paredes
Roberto Álamo, Eduard Fernández, José Luis Gómez, Blanca Suárez

The Skin I Live In is a movie that demands to be seen more than once. The first time, you'll be seduced by Pedro Almodóvar's own kind of trashiness, the one reminiscent of films like Matador and Kika, that has the iconoclastic director revel in shocking his audience with usually outrageous twists and turns.
The second time, after you've received a figurative punch in the gut from the secrets in the plot, you'll be enthralled by Pedro's abilities as a maverick storyteller, by his capacity to rape our minds and make us enjoy it.
Inspired by macabre horror tales like Frankenstein, Eyes Without a Face and exploitation films, The Skin I Live In tells the strange tale of Dr. Robert Ledgard (Banderas), a handsome plastic surgeon, who became obsessed with creating a thicker human skin after his wife and daughter die.
Pedro, as usual, has no care whatsoever for symbolic subtleties and from the start we understand that Robert's intention to make "skin thicker" is a self-preservation matter: he's trying to stop others from breaking his heart again.
However this doesn't mean he's a saint, in fact he's far from it, as he runs all his experiments on Vera (Anaya), a mysterious woman he's keeping captive in his house.
Vera spends her days inside a locked room, where she practices yoga and reads while wearing a body-length suit to keep her recently implanted skin from damage. Anaya grabs on to this role ferociously and develops the moves of a trapped panther, slightly reminding us of Cat People's Simone Simon (in what might be another of Pedro's winks).
The camera seems to be in love with her sensuous movements - even more so than with her naked body which is usually shown in scenes of extreme brutality or as an art object to inspire our darkest voyeurism - and we soon learn that Vera hides some secrets too: her past connects her directly with Robert's greatest misfortune.
As is norm in all of his works, Pedro weaves a tale that combines melodrama and tragedy with dark humor and deep sexual insight, as well as flashbacks and meticulous recreations of previous events. Marisa Paredes is brilliant as Robert's maid who, you guessed it, harbors some secrets of her own as well, and Jan Cornet brings just the right amount of sleaze to a character that eventually becomes the movie's moral centerpiece.
Once again we meet characters that go beyond the notions of heroes and villains and while Pedro has never been particularly known for his realism, he never fully goes for archetypes either. He's a master at creating characters whose humanity thrives despite their caricaturesque features.
Therefore we see a Robert who on the surface could very well be Dr. Delambre, from Kurt Neumann's The Fly, but in the end reaches the tragic crescendo of a film noir antihero who has been inspired by a Shakespearean drama. Banderas - who has never been a particularly gifted actor - brings to the table what might be his best quality: his ridiculous good looks.
By making Robert someone with weathered beauty, we understand that we shouldn't judge him for his current actions, for he once was like the rest of us. That is perhaps the central theme in the film: the situations that lead ordinary people to become monstrous.

A la Hitchcock...

The Skin I Live In was the most intense experience I've had at the movie theater in years. Do not let anyone spoil its secrets for you! Review coming soon.

Mina of Gold.

Apparently Pedro, who on Broken Embraces declared he'd never make sequels, biopics or remakes. Well he didn't declare it but his alter ego...anyway, it's just been announced that Pedro is working on a film about the life of Italian singer Mina.

Indiewire reports that the Spanish auteur has even cast his leading lady and to my dismay it's not Pe (read the full story here)

Also, just how amazing is this picture of his new movie La Piel Que Habito?

You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger **

Director: Woody Allen
Cast: Antonio Banderas, Josh Brolin, Pauline Collins, Anna Friel
Anthony Hopkins, Neil Jackson, Gemma Jones, Freida Pinto
Lucy Punch, Naomi Watts

Throughout his filmography, Woody Allen has been characterized for delivering existentialist meditations filtered through comedy and relationships, yet even his darkest movies have been characterized by something that resembles hope. Yes, even in something like Interiors, we find ourselves finding that there's always more than meets the tragic eye.
It's a surprise then to find the master feeling so jaded in You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger. And it's not that feeling of bitterness itself what makes the film fail where other of his works have blossomed, it's just that it feels more like a work in progress than an actual film.
For all the plot twists, winks at some sort of divine justice and quips Allen inserts here, there's also an unintentional sense of disconnect within the characters who this time merely seem to become puppets in a convoluted plot that doesn't know where it's going.
The plot is quintessential Allen, a series of interconnected characters all trying to find their way in the misery of life.
We first meet Helena (Jones) a woman who has just been abandoned by her husband (Hopkins) who ends up marrying former prostitute Charmaine (Punch). Heartbroken, Helena begins to visit a fortuneteller (a delightful Collins) who begins to fix her life.
Helena's daughter Sally (Watts) has developed a crush on her employer (Banderas who curiously isn't the stranger from the title) while her husband (Brolin) tries to get out of his writer block by spying at their sensual neighbor (Pinto).
Allen's dialogues are fascinating as usual, even if sometimes the quips sound forced and cold and while it would be easy to say that any Allen is better than most things playing out there, the truth is that this film in particular shows that as a writer some of his tricks don't work as they used to.
For all the charm contained in the fact that his characters still say things like "erotic" and study musicology sometimes his lines feel derivative. This movie would've been aided by the use of silence and restraint.
If Allen fails a bit, his actors are mostly fantastic (even if this cast doesn't particularly fit together). Brolin broods marvelously and reaches a level of dishevelment that's an act upon itself, while Watts should get an award for being the actress who reached the lower depths of selfdeprecation in films this year. When she confronts a character to ask him if he ever fathomed the idea of falling in love with her, she asks it from a place of such pain that your heart will be broken along with her character's dignity.
It's interesting to see that when it comes to the two central characters in the film Allen pretty much redoes Interiors.
Jones as the resentful wife gives a layered performance filled with the over the top theatrics muffled by her sensitive British comedic timing, it's like watching Blance Dubois being played by Helen Mirren's version of Queen Elizabeth.
Then there's Punch who proves that nobody writes a hooker with a heart of gold like Woody does. Sometimes she comes off looking as an inferior version of Mira Sorvino's character in Mighty Aphrodite but even in cliché Punch finds an odd sense of beauty. Watch her act next to Hopkins, while he tries a bit too hard, she flows effortlessly like a skanky Eliza Dolittle.
It's the cast that make this stranger more alluring than he has any right to be.

Shrek Forever After **

Director: Mike Mitchell
Cast: Mike Myers, Cameron Diaz, Antonio Banderas, Eddie Murphy
Jon Hamm, Julie Andrews, John Cleese

The best thing that can be said about the seeming last installment in the Shrek series is that nothing in it is cringe worthy.
More of an excuse to get cash out of children and their unwilling parents, than an actual movie, this chapter concentrates on Shrek's midlife crisis.
Despite having a perfect life, a loving wife, babies and loving friends he misses the days when he was just an ogre having fun and wreaking havoc.
The major issue with the film is that, well so do us.
After the refreshing experience that was the first one almost a decade ago, each subsequent film has been a painful pastiche of pop culture references, annoying scatological jokes and a ridiculous attempt to make fun of Disney movies while choosing to respect their parameters and actually accommodating to them.
In this one, when Shrek gets offered a whole day of old fashioned goodness by the conniving Rumpelstiltskin and while he injects the movie with the kind of madcap hilarity last seen in the original movie, nothing in this one justifies its existence.
Shrek discovers that the alternate universe he's in just makes him want to have his old life back and while trying to seduce Fiona all over again and trying to befriend Donkey for the first time only makes it obvious that those of us looking for great entertainment would be better off watching the DVD of the first movie.