Viva Pedro
October 27 - November 9
The Cinema Arts Centre offers the opportunity of a cinema lifetime: Brand New 35mm Prints of Eight Films by the magical Pedro Almodovar. It is truly a celebration of genius.
Live music by Eric DiVito during the Friday
10/27,
Friday 11/3, and Saturday 11/4 receptions
Special thanks to Katy
Vernon and Adrian Perez Melgosa, Department of Hispanic
Languages and Literature, SUNY, Stony Brooks
Pedro Almodovar is the exhilarating magical Genie of Grand Serio-Comic International Cinema. While Pedro is rooted in indigenous Spanish culture, encompassing cosmopolitan Madrid and the rural countryside, his mercurial films are universal in their appeal. That universality transcends national borders, class, color, race, ethnicity, and of course gender in all its rich diversity. He writes and directs films that can and do range from the abrasive manic-madness of the Marx Brothers to Ingmar Bergman's in-depth plumbing of the human soul. And his work has that wonderful anarchic spin, often hilarious that unseats our traditional mores.
Ticket Prices
All Festival Pass: Members $50, Public $70
Single Films or Panel: Members $6, Public $9
Double Feature: Members $8, Public $12
Mon. - Thur. Matinee (before 5pm): Members $4, Public
$6
Single Film w/ Reception or Sunday Schmooze: Members
$9, Public $12
For reservations to Receptions, Sunday Schmoozes, or
the Panel Discussion, or for further information, please
call the Cinema box office at 631-423-7611.
NO REFUNDS
Friday, November 3 — Monday, November
6*
Matador
Guest Speaker: Adrian Pérez
Melgosa * (Includes Reception with
live music by Eric DiVito)
** Hot Bagel Schmooze
(Film @ 11am)
Friday 2pm, 7pm* / Saturday 4pm, 9:30pm
/ Sunday 10am**, 4pm, 9pm / Monday 2pm, 7pm
Ah, Spain... Land of Flamenco, bullfights, and Pedro
Almodovar. Rude, irreverent, often outrageous, his
films have upended the image of Franco’s Spain.
His willfully perverse genius transforms lurid material
into high-spirited, hilarious work. Maria (Assumpta
Serna) is a beautiful, talented, and successful lawyer.
Her very nasty proclivity is picking up young men and
killing them with one neat matador thrust of her hairpin
to the base of the neck. When a student (Antonio Banderas)
confesses to the killings, Maria assumes the task of
defending him. What ensues is a curious courtship in
which the two take turns playing seducer and seduced,
circling each other with a matador’s measured
steps, while moving toward a consummation and end they
both recognize as inevitable.
Spain, 1986, 101 min, color, Spanish w/English subtitles • Dir./writer:
Pedro Almodóvar • Cast: Assumpta Serna,
Antonio Banderas
Friday-Monday, November 3-6:
Law of Desire /
Matador
Friday, November 3 — Monday, November
6
*
Guest Speaker: Isolina Ballesteros
(Includes Reception
with live music by Eric DiVito)
Law of Desire
Friday 4pm, 9:30pm / Saturday 2pm, 7pm* /
Sunday 2pm, 7pm / Monday 4pm, 9pm
"Big-bosomed, long-legged Tina (Carmen Maura) has a hot roiling temperament
given to overacting" and, overacting was, according to Pauline Kael, Almodóvar’s
theme. As a male teenager, Tina ran off with her father, had a sex change operation
to please him, but he left her and she hasn’t had anything to do with
a man since. Tina’s daughter Ada is really the child left behind by her
lesbian lover whom she passes off to the befuddled choirmaster who knew Tina
as a choir-boy. Almodovar’s social-political views were given in a NY
Times interview: "My rebellion is to deny Franco. I refuse even his memory.
I start everything with the idea, What if Franco had never existed."
Spain, 1987, 102 min, color, Spanish w/English subtitles • Dir./writer:
Pedro Almodóvar • Cast: Carmen Maura, Antonio
Banderas
Tuesday, November 7 — Thursday, November
9
Bad
Education
Tuesday 2pm, 7pm* / Wednesday 4pm, 9pm / Thursday 2pm,
7pm
* Guest Speaker:
Katy Vernon (Includes Reception)
Bad Education transports Almodóvar’s signature
themes of artifice and reality, sex and death, into
what many call an autobiographical film noir. Two school
boy chums meet many years later. Enrique, a gay film
director is visited by Ignacio (Gael Garcia Bernal)
who offers his friend a short story recounting their
unhappy childhood experiences at Catholic school: The
child molester principal was jealous of the boys’ close
friendship and separates them. As usual Pedro’s
dazzling plot machinations, part memory- part fantasy
deliver profound lessons in desire and duplicity.
Spain, 2004, 106 min, color, Spanish w/English subtitles • Dir./writer:
Pedro Almodóvar • Cast: Gael Garcia Bernal,
Fele Martínez
Tuesday, November 7 — Thursday, November
9
Live
Flesh
Tuesday 4pm, 9:30pm / Wednesday 2pm, 7pm / Thursday
4pm, 9pm
Melodrama is characterized by suspenseful, sensational
episodes, romantic sentimentality and conventional
happy endings. In Live Flesh, Pedro transforms soap
opera into high art. The birth of the film’s
anti-hero is a wildly hilarious prologue as a prostitute
gives birth at midnight on Christmas Eve in an empty
bus headed for the garage. The remarkably inventive
character development and plot spin around the themes
of love (true and possessive) and its driving force
- tortured jealousy. The results are a person made
wheelchair-bound and sexually impotent and an innocent
person taking the rap. In prison he dreams of revenge – reality
intervenes only momentarily.
Spain, 1997, 103 min, color, Spanish w/English subtitles • Dir./writer:
Pedro Almodóvar • Cast: Javier Bardem,
Francesca Neri
PAST FILMS
Friday, October 27 — Monday,
October 30
*
Guest Speaker: Marvin D’Lugo (Includes
Reception with live music by Eric DiVito)
All About My Mother
** Hot Bagel Schmooze (Film @ 11am)
Friday 2pm, 7pm* / Saturday 3:45pm, 8:45pm / Sunday 10am**, 8:45pm
/ Monday 2pm, 7pm
Pedro won Best Director at Cannes for this film concerning
a very proper mother (Cecilia Roth) who travels from
conservative Madrid to Barcelona to fulfill her dead
son’s last wish - to discover the father he never
knew. In her search, she becomes involved in the lives
of Almodovar’s usual cast of zany image-breaking,
serio-comic characters, including a pregnant nun played
by Penélope Cruz, her own possessive mother
and her doddering dad. Marisa Paredes (The Flower of
My Secret) is Huma, her late son’s favorite actress
(who inadvertently caused his death) and the transvestite
La Agrado who will lead her to the tall, handsome,
but very changed, father of her son.
Spain/France, 1999, 101 min, color, Spanish w/English
subtitles • Director/writer: Pedro Almodóvar • Cast:
Cecilia Roth, Penélope Cruz
Friday, October
27 — Monday, October 30
Women
on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown
Friday 4pm, 9:30pm / Saturday 2pm, 7pm / Sunday
7pm / Monday 4pm, 9pm
Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown confirmed
that Pedro was a post-Franco inspired funnyman and
a director with the force to remodel Cinema to his
own idiosyncratic vision. Women… was a bold
leap in form and unbridled lunacy, a work whose inventiveness
made it one of the most appealing works to reach the
screen in our time. Pepa (Carmen Maura), a popular
TV star, is bearing a series of emotional upsets that
begin when she listens to a message from her lover
telling her that he’s ending the relationship.
As Pepa frantically attempts to contact her lover she
careens back and forth between her TV studio and apartment
picking up a cast of characters - among them discarded
women. What glues these zany escapades together is
Almodóvar’s evident sympathy for his characters.
Best Foreign Film NY Film Critics Circle
Spain, 1988, 92 min, color, Spanish w/English subtitles • Director/writer:
Pedro Almodóvar • Cast: Carmen Maura, Antonio
Banderas
Tuesday,
October 31 — Thursday, November 2
*
Guest Speaker: Katy Vernon (Includes
Reception)
The Flower of My Secret
Tuesday 2pm, 7pm / Wednesday
4pm, 9:05pm / Thursday 2pm,
7pm*
Employing Marisa Paredes, Pedro explores a troubled
woman’s journey to self-realization. Leo is the
unhappy wife of a professional Spanish Army officer.
On the side, she writes dreadful soap-opera novels
under the pseudonym Amanda Gris. Enter fat, fortyish
Angel, an editor who loves old Hollywood movies and
is devoted to Amanda Grís novels (Leo doesn’t
tell him she is the author). Things heat up when he
asks her to write a critique of Gris’ work. For
an escape, Leo returns to her family’s small
village home, like the one where Pedro grew up before
departing for Madrid at 16, Gay and empty-handed.
Spain, 1995, 105 min, color, Spanish w/English subtitles • Director/writer:
Pedro Almodóvar • Cast: Marisa Paredes;
Juan Echanove; 1995 NY Film Festival
Tuesday, October
31 — Thursday, November 2
Talk
to Her
Tuesday 4pm, 9pm / Wednesday
2pm, 7pm / Thursday 4pm, 9:15pm
In the 1990’s, Pedro continued to transform into
one of international cinema’s most celebrated
filmmakers. In Talk to Her, he transforms absurdist
melodrama into real-life experience by creating a torrid
one-sided love story between a man and a comatose woman.
Pedro melds the deep friendship between two men whose
loves are in a state of permanent coma. Marco, a Madrid-based
journalist loves Linda, a bullfighter badly gored into
a coma. His friend, the gentle Benigno, becomes a male
nurse to attend to the woman he loves, a ballet dancer
struck down by a car. The title Talk To Her is Benigno’s
ever-hopeful advice to Marco... maybe they can hear
Spain, 2002, 112 min, color, Spanish w/English subtitles • Dir./writer:
Pedro Almodóvar • Cast: Javier Cámara,
Dario Grandinetti; 2002 New York Film Festival
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