Tag / Movies

by Edward Champion

Why Did Scott Pilgrim Tank?

Scott Pilgrim was trounced by The Expendables and Eat Pray Love. Is this the end of geek commercialism or just bad marketing?

The Expendables was the top grossing movie over the weekend, raking in $35 million, and beating out Eat Pray Love‘s $23.7 million. The Other Guys finished at third, with $18 million, followed by Inception at $11.4 million and, somewhat astonishingly, Scott Pilgrim vs. The World at $10.5 million. The results have caused some to scratch their heads, while others have reacted with the fury of an aging FOX News anchor just a few steak dinners short of a myocardial infarction.

Scott Pilgrim‘s box office failure over the weekend has little to do with Jeffrey Wells‘s deranged dichotomy of “the rank-and-file” warring with “the elite geek-dweeb set” — an impractical characterization that one expects from a paranoid schizophrenic looking for a few magic beans that will grow a tin foil vine. But it was evident from some of the film’s early reviews that the old reactionary guard — which included the hysterical Wells and the frumpy David Edelstein — were going to trash the movie for its audacious syntax — namely, the very visual language that allowed Kick-Ass to make nearly $20 million in its opening weekend back in April.

I don’t think the lackluster business had much to do with Michael Cera. But it’s worth observing that Cera has yet to prop up a phenomenally successful Hollywood movie on his presence alone. He’s found commercial success as a supporting character, although Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist, a $10 million movie that grossed $33.5 million, might qualify as a modest success. But when one considers that Scott Pilgrim‘s budget was closer to $100 million, the decision to use Superbad/Juno momentum as a selling point wasn’t terribly wise. Cera, assuming audiences haven’t tired of him by now, will probably be just fine if he can figure out a way to reinvent his one-note Williamsburg hipster schtick and keep his acting roles confined to second bananas. The man lacks leading man gravitas, and now has the commercial track record to prove it.

On the other hand, it’s possible that Cera can’t entirely be blamed for Scott Pilgrim‘s failure. One only needs to look at the moronic marketing quacks who pushed this movie as if they were lame ducks. Not only did the film’s bright red poster do everything possible to occlude Cera’s presence in the movie, but it failed to communicate what the movie was about. The “epic of epic epicness” tagline tells someone in the dark nothing at all about Scott Pilgrim. And you have to wonder how much money some Universal wordsmith was paid to whip up such anti-commercial inanity.

The first big mistake made by Universal — and there were many — was in failing to market this as a quirky date movie that a young couple might agree upon. (Or perhaps not. Abigail Nussbaum has offered a provocative post suggesting that Scott Pilgrim is misogynistic.)

The second big mistake was in opening Scott Pilgrim during a weekend in which the audience division came down to gender lines. If you were a man, you were expected to see The Expendables. If you were a woman, you were expected to see Eat Pray Love. The Expendables Call to Arms trailer, released a good month before the movie, permitted enough time for these demographic lines to become fixed. And Universal, rather catastrophically, failed to create a Scott Pilgrim trailer that used the movie’s humor as a self-deprecatory selling point to avoid both movies. (I should also point out that, despite my numerous requests to attend a New York press screening, Universal publicists failed to respond by telephone or email. This is not something I can say about the people at Lionsgate, who were very quick to respond, extremely friendly and accommodating. Guess which film received a 1,400 word essay here.)

While it’s true that Scott Pilgrim received a big Comic-Con buzz, it’s very clear that this didn’t translate into mass moviegoers paying to see the flick. It’s also clear from both Scott Pilgrim and Kick-Ass‘s respective takes that a more daring comic book movie isn’t going to translate into an Iron Man 2-style box office bonanza, even as audiences have signaled their desire to be challenged by plot-heavy movies like Inception. A risk-taking comic book movie with a $20 million budget can certainly make a healthy profit, but it’s a harder sell at four or five times the budget. This weekend certainly isn’t the end of movies like Scott Pilgrim. Just don’t expect future movies of this type to have large budgets or originate from the studio system in a good long while. Indeed, had Scott Pilgrim not been up against two pandering movies, it might have attracted more of the crowd. But apparently there’s gold to be panned when you use the Internet to pigeonhole prospective moviegoers into predictable demographics.

by Edward Champion

Review: The Other Guys (2010)

For the record, I enjoyed Anchorman. I was lukewarm on Talladega Nights. I skipped Step Brothers. But now that I have seen Adam McKay’s disastrous cop-buddy comedy, The Other Guys, I think that I can safely conclude that McKay is turning into a gutless fauxteur more on the level of Dennis Dugan rather than Judd Apatow. He’s a man who might improve his floundering artistry, were he to live by a more literal mantra of the comedy website he co-created with Will Ferrell. Had there been some creep screaming “Funny or Die!” into McKay’s tinnital ears every five minutes or a psychotic aiming a gun at McKay and his co-writer Chris Henchy as they were banging out their flaccid script, it is quite possible that The Other Guys would not be such a stunning sack of shit. At least I’d like to think so. And I’d like very much to believe that McKay is more than Anchorman. I am, after all, an optimist at heart. But the truth here is that McKay has turned out a film that is worse than Kevin Smith’s Cop Out, a movie that is not even worth folding your laundry by. That alone takes a stunning paucity of talent. McKay’s mind is a Costco storehouse of discount humor. He’ll point his mass audience in the right direction. But when it comes time to make a purchasing decision, you’re limited to the stock at hand. You’re then forced to stand in line a very long time for only a few saved bucks. And your only real consolation is the cheap hot dog on the way out.

The cheap hot dog in question is a series of helpful infographics playing during the closing credits, featuring such left-leaning stats as the plummeting value of an average American’s 401K account, the uptick in the average executive’s salary, and the growing disparity between the rich and the poor. There was a part of me very tempted to give McKay more of a pass for having the audacity to pull an unexpected progressive parlor trick at the end of a multiplex film. But then I remembered that I had just endured a particularly unfunny film, sitting next to two annoying ringers who laughed at every dud, that had contained abundant misogynist jokes and several strange potshots at the eco-friendly Toyota Prius. And if McKay wanted to make a statement about corporate greed within a mainstream comedy, then why didn’t he have the balls to do it during the preceding 90 minutes?

I’ve called McKay “gutless.” I’ve called him a “fauxteur.” Let me explain. McKay is gutless because he features a potentially funny scene in which two cops address an elementary school classroom, pointing out that African-Americans and Hispanics are more likely to get involved in crime. These are, of course, racially insensitive remarks. The camera cuts to a reaction shot. And the true horror of what these two cops are saying might have been funny and disturbing if the kids had been composed entirely of African-Americans and Hispanics, an ironic twist that would have improved the joke. But in the reaction shot, it’s a largely Caucasian crowd. McKay is a fauxteur because he doesn’t understand that repeating a gag several times over a movie doesn’t necessarily make it funny — particularly if it’s a tired cultural reference. Case in point: Will Ferrell’s character, Allen Gamble, likes to play Little River Band to rev up his masculinity. It’s somewhat funny to hear “Reminiscing” once, groan-inducing the second time, and nauseating the third time. (Also, if Gamble really was into “River Band,” would his taste not extend into tunes beyond the popular hits?)

Just as McKay disguised his Talladega inadequacies by casting Sacha Baron Cohen as a very funny Frenchman, he resorts to casting a British comedic legend (Steve Coogan this time) to quickly paint over the cracks in the wall. Alas, the astute McKay viewer will recognize quite rapidly just how much the man is slumming it. The criminally underused Michael Keaton fares better than Coogan and even finds some ways of improving the material with his performance, offering a spontaneous wink just after a so-so line to get a big laugh. But these living legends are merely the supporting players.

So it falls upon Mark Wahlberg and Will Ferrell to anchor the comedy. Both fail spectacularly. In Wahlberg’s case, it’s not his fault. He previously demonstrated that he had comic timing as a stiff sergeant in Martin Scorsese’s The Departed. But in The Other Guys, McKay has directed him to be a one-note caricature of that role. And his presence becomes needlessly tedious. Wahlberg’s character, Terry Hoitz, is stuck to his desk because he accidentally shot Derek Jeter. (Because of this, he is partnered with Ferrell’s Gamble, which I’ll get to in a mite.) Hoitz has an estranged relationship with a ballet teacher and even shows up at her studio to demonstrate his dance moves. But Wahlberg just doesn’t have the material to sell his character. He rants and complains about his failure to get some action on the streets, about Gamble’s reluctance to take a radio call. He makes goo goo eyes at Gamble’s wife. But none of these qualities offer us enough to care.

As for Ferrell, one must now ask the perfectly reasonable question of whether the man is still funny. I’m becoming increasingly convinced that he’s blown his wad and will end up starring in lackluster family films like Eddie Murphy: a withered husk of whatever jones he had in the first place. Allen Gamble falls into the same one-note Ferrell archetype. Suburban middle-aged dork has a crazy past and a wild streak that comes out from time to time. Which we saw before with Old School‘s Frank Ricard and on countless Saturday Night Live sketches more than a decade ago. In this case, before he became a police accountant, Gamble was a pimp in college. Aside from the fact that a police background check would make it utterly impossible for Gamble to be employed, the flashback that reveals this backstory relies not so much on wit or character detail, but on Ferrell increasingly resembling a pimp. Chains appear around his neck. He starts to talk in ghetto cliches. In short, it’s the kind of humor one can easily discover in a high school drama class, not what one expects of comedy professionals.

Hoitz and Gamble are paired together, but they never get any action on the streets (thus motivating the movie’s raison d’etre: “comedy” fused with noisy car chases and constant shoe pilfering). These guys are NYPD office drones. Gamble sifts through paperwork and finds the buildings erected without construction permits. And all this is, in Hoitz’s eyes, rather boring. The movie could have had a stronger premise if it had played this idea up. What if Hoitz and Gamble, these ostensible bureaucratic stiffs, actually uncovered greater danger than the assaults, robbery, and mayhem on the streets? Certainly, the end credits suggest that this angle may have been a stronger priority in an earlier screenplay draft. But had the film maintained this emphasis — similar to Ron Burgundy’s sexist values being challenged by the 21st century or the clash between Ricky Bobby and Jean Girard in Talladega Nights — it would have played more to McKay’s comedic strengths: namely, finding the comedy within ideological conflict.

But McKay and company appear more interested in wallowing in misogyny. Gamble is ridiculed for having a man purse. “I feel like we’re literally driving around in a vagina,” says Hoitz upon driving in Gamble’s Prius. Gamble gives Hoitz a gift: an FBI mug that spells out the acronym FEMALE BODY INSPECTOR. But McKay reveals just how much of a women-hating frat boy he is by having Eva Mendes show up as Gamble’s wife. The joke here is that Will Ferrell can’t possibly have married such an attractive woman. But despite Mendes’s character being a resident doctor, we never really see Dr. Sheila Gamble at work. We see her constantly cooking, constantly encouraging, and being told by Ferrell that her dinner tastes like dog testicles. And what’s the draw here in the relationship? That the Gambles have wild sex. It apparently hasn’t occurred to McKay that Mendes’s character may possess a professional life that supersedes such throwback I Love Lucy duties. Contrary to McKay’s fantasies, women are interested in more things than fucking and supporting their men. So it turns out that Ron Burgundy’s misogyny isn’t terribly removed frmo McKay’s. And if that isn’t enough, McKay thinks it’s funny that the homeless here like to engage in circlejerks (“It’s called a soup kitchen!”) within any abandoned Prius.

Much like a loutish neighbor who believes that skimming an issue of The Economist makes him a responsible citizen, The Other Guys would like its audience to think that its a liberal bomb trapped within a mainstream comedy. Hardly. The comedy here is a bit like watching a white supremacist group attempt to make sense of Brown vs. Board of Education. You really hope that the participants will become enlightened, but the atavism won’t go away.

by Edward Champion

Review: [REC] 2 (2009)

Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza really love making movies — in a way that seems to have eluded the pretentious and the avaricious. Review of the long-awaited horror sequel.

Nobody seems to agree on the precise pronunciation of [REC]. And I haven’t even brought up the potentially controversial notion of pronouncing the brackets. (A throat-clearing sound?) I had been saying it wrek — in large part because I spent some of my childhood living in a sketchy apartment complex with a dubious “rec room,” and enjoy a little symmetry in my horror nomenclature. I talked with a friendly horror aficionado before the screening who insisted on spelling it out ar-ee-see, as if the title were an acronym. Another film critic pronounced it with a long e. I must presume that the film’s title, much like the film itself, is what you make of it.

But just how do you name a sequel in a franchise based around a camera button? [REC] Again has little zip, suggesting to the audience that they’ve made some mistake, perhaps missing the taping of some vital House installment. [REC] with a Vengeance insinuates that the button has become sentient, transforming into some mechanical Charles Bronson-style vigilante. (This wouldn’t be entirely out of line for the [REC] films, seeing as how the camera is just as much of a character in as the reg folks gone aggro.) In the end, writer-directors Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza have opted for numerical superscript for their sequel — much like the Aliens films. I am pleased to report that the camera perspectives do indeed live up to this squared sensibility.

For those of you who have no idea what the hell I’m talking about, you should probably check out the original [REC]. Unlike many mindless horror franchises, the [REC] movies feel as if the filmmakers have given serious thought to the environment. (Or perhaps they know how to improvise better. The Saw series’s endless “twists” — in which the Jigsaw Killer’s plan becomes increasingly more baroque and laughably improbable with each installment — have readily revealed the creative bankruptcy in milking a cash cow.)

But with [REC] 2, you may be just as lost as the survivors if you haven’t experienced the previous film. Made in 2007, the first [REC] is a pretty terrific little horror film that presents a zombie plague entirely from a single camera perspective. Like The China Syndrome, there isn’t any music. But the results aren’t obnoxious like Mike Figgis’s disastrous (and dated) Timecode — surely the last decade’s answer to Woodstock or More American Graffiti.

A cameraman and a television presenter named Angela Vidal — both filming a disposable reality TV series called While You’re Asleep — visit a firehouse to find out just what firemen do. Angela awkwardly asks the fire chief, “You’re the boss, right?” She puts on a firehat and a uniform, jumping about for camera-friendly frivolity. She suggests to another fireman she’s interviewing that the alarm should go off for full dramatic effect. There is a basketball game that is interrupted by an alarm, which takes yawning firemen and bored camera crew to an apartment building, where a zombie infection is underway.

Life, in other words, needs to be shaped into a juicy narrative by the camera crew. But the viewer is part of a different narrative, thanks to the unedited tape that comes with the epidemic. While this may seem to echo the setup of George A. Romero’s Diary of the Dead (more satirical), The Blair Witch Project (a narrative designed out of a savvy marketing strategy), and Cloverfield (the handheld gimmick used to present a pedestrian Hollywood narrative in a “different” way), [REC] works so well because the camera is instrumental in portraying the panic. When the camera is hit, the audio gets bumped right along with it. Near the end of the film, the camera must rely on night vision.

The camera crew makes desperate efforts to maintain some journalistic facade when sealed in the building by mysterious government forces, continuing to conduct interviews with the survivors. But these efforts soon dwindle as the need to survive becomes more pressing. As the environment becomes more unruly, the cuts between the camera being on and off tell additional stories. Where Diary of the Dead placed its faith in the idea that young people would continue to seek fame when there wasn’t much of an audience left, and where Cloverfield‘s camerawork often proved ridiculously stable near cantilevered edifices, [REC] considered how people would act to apocalyptic events and how the camera would be instrumental in conveying this behavior. And this approach, thanks to Manuela Velasco’s fish-out-of-water performance as Angela and the more naturalistic acting (for horror, anyway), strongly suggested that Balagueró and Plaza had carefully studied The Battle of Algiers (certainly a good deal more than the Blair Witch bunch, who should be commended for bamboozling the American public).

[REC] 2 doesn’t quite match the first film’s gripping suspense, but it comes extremely close. Like the first film, the behavior, dictated by the camera, changes through the movie. We’re introduced to soldiers who are rather by-the-book and not particularly insubordinate. The ostensible commander insists on recording everything. But as the film progresses, a more human element of fear and frustration creeps in, and, with this, a very pleasing sense of revolt that is perhaps best signified by the liberal use of firearms.

[REC] 2‘s narrative feels more like a Valve video game or the Sunday New York Times crossword puzzle — a journey to be filled in once you’ve explored the unknown space.

OBJECTIVES: 1. Get blood vial. 2. Go downstairs. 3. Find Patient Zero.

You get the idea. And if you can’t get behind this crass fun, then I sentence you to a lifetime of soporific Merchant-Ivory movies.

One POV shot, in which a soldier blows away zombies with a machine gun, comes across like a Left 4 Dead installment five years from now, with a better engine and more heat-sensitive hardware. There is a moment in which snipers shoot at the building that had me wondering if I was re-experiencing Half-Life 2. There is even a secret door leading to a bonus world, further cementing the gaming comparisons. Should cinema resemble a first-person shooter? In most cases, I would advise against it. But because the [REC] films are very much about playing with our narrative expectations with the camera-audience relationship, this cross-media mimesis somehow works. It wouldn’t work without the camera. And while sometimes this feels like a cheat, we are given enough unexpected developments to keep feeding in our quarters.

There are more cameras here than the first film — including several lipstick cams placed upon soldier helmets, reminiscent of the second Aliens film, that are occasionally patched into. There’s a second perspective emerging midway through the film. There are more characters — including a group of foolish teenagers. But there are also more opportunities for zombie destruction. Aside from some head explosions, there is also a very satisfying moment in which a zombie flails about with a bottlerocket in its mouth. At one point, when a zombie runs towards the camera, the image freezes on its quite open and terrifying mouth. The filmmakers also offer a greater attention to accumulating scrapes and bruises as our intrepid heroes are attacked.

If you can accept that [REC] 2 is a carnival ride, then you’ll probably like this flick as much as I did. I certainly enjoyed [REC] 2, despite all of its supernatural contrivances, considerably more than the boring art house film I’d seen earlier that day. And maybe that’s because Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza really love making movies — in a way that seems to have eluded the pretentious and the avaricious.

by Edward Champion

The Bat Segundo Show: Michael Haneke

Michael Haneke appeared on The Bat Segundo Show #316. Mr. Haneke is most recently the director of The White Ribbon, which opens in theaters on December 30th.

The Bat Segundo Show expresses profuse gratitude and thanks to translator Robert Gray for assisting in this conversation, which is presented here in German and English.

Condition of Mr. Segundo: Tying a white ribbon ’round the old oak tree.

Guest: Michael Haneke

Subjects Discussed: The roots of human behavior within Haneke’s films, the film as a ski jump, the relationship between the cinematic spectator and semiotics, the spectator’s lack of freedom, the director as god and Martin’s spared death on the bridge, the baroness’s moral choice, truth and the denial of inherent human nature, Anna Karenina, social status and imprisonment, terrorist acts that are tied to specific occupations, the mistreatment of young children, planning a film for open-ended interpretation, whether or not a film can be entirely calculated for the spectator, the use of the Z-axis to accentuate a prewar setting, the perception of daily life, the role of the police in Haneke’s films, the trouble with dramaturgical constructs, and the impracticalities of theory in everyday situations.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Correspondent: In Funny Games, you have a scenario in which we don’t actually understand the motivations of the two killers. Cache, same thing. The actual motivation behind the videotapes is not entirely spelled out. And, of course, in The White Ribbon, we have a similar situation in which its more about the consequences than it is about the origins. And I’m curious why your films tend to not dwell upon the origins of terrible acts, as opposed to the consequences. Do you think that looking for the root cause of human behavior is a folly? At least with these particular characters in your film?

Haneke: (through translator) Mainstream cinema raises questions, only then to provide immediate answers so that the spectator can go home feeling reassured. But I think if film is to take itself seriously as an art form, then, like every other art form, it has to allow the spectators a certain freedom of possibility — of investing themselves, of grappling with the issues that are involved, of bringing their own feelings and explanations to the work that they are receiving. I always say that not only film, but every art form should provoke the spectator so that they feel motivated. The work has to be constructed in such a way that the spectator is led to investing himself in search for his own answers. I always say that not only film, but books too, are like ski jumps. They have to be built in such a way that people can jump properly. But the film is the ski jump and it’s up to the spectator to jump.

BSS #316: Michael Haneke (Download MP3)

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by Edward Champion

NYFF: Broken Embraces (2009)

[This is the second in a series of posts relating to the 2009 New York Film Festival.]

brokenembraces

There once was a time in which I flocked to a new Pedro Almodovar film with a mad and unstoppable gusto, wondering just what iconoclastic ideas Almodovar would unleash upon the screen. You never knew if you were going to get an extended rape scene brazenly challenging gender assumptions (the notorious sequence in Kika) or Antonio Banderas confronting some dormant and out-of-left-field sexual feelings (well, just about every Banderas-Almodovar road show). But then came All About My Mother, a perfectly respectable film that softened Almodovar and revealed that there was a pedestrian melodramatic filmmaker underneath the madness. Almodovar, like many filmmakers in their fifties, lost his bite. And all he had left was the lachrymose material.

And it is my sad duty to report that Broken Embraces represents more of the same. Broken Embraces may offer a film within a film (Girls with Suitcases) that bears suspicious similarity to Almodovar’s Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. Girls with Suitcases is intended to be Mateo’s masterpiece, maligned by other hands. But when we actually see the footage, even the good takes that Mateo approves of aren’t particularly funny. And Almodovar falls into the all-too-common artistic trap of having other characters comment upon how brilliant and side-splitting an alleged comic masterpiece is, without injecting hilarity into the material itself. “Films have to be finished,” remarks a character at Broken Embraces‘s close. And it’s something you do blindly. But is Almodovar really all that blind?

Here’s a filmmaker fond of staging dialogue scenes by dollying the camera from character to character, instead of panning. Here’s a filmmaker fond of split diopters. Here’s a filmmaker who gets winning performances from his two leads. Here’s a filmmaker who can make a half-decent film in his sleep. So why does Broken Embraces feel like Almodovar settling for something less? Even a moment featuring a DJ doing drugs, with the obligatory MDMA reference, feels as if it’s been directed by a guy who hasn’t set foot in a club in at least a decade.

Almodovar certainly tries to inject his contrived story with a few interesting elements. He gives us filmmaker Mateo Blanco (winningly played by Lluís Homar), blinded by an automobile accident and denied his visual strengths. He also gives us a lip reader hired by a wealthy businessman named Ernesto Martel to make sense of secretly videotaped video. There’s the hint here of a broader moral dilemma concerning the relationship between sensory limitation and media saturation. Is Mateo really blind? When a mysterious stranger knocks on Mateo’s door, Mateo looks through the door’s eyehole. And we’re left to wonder whether Mateo is playing a role, just as the actors he once cast in his films played a role. (In the case of Penelope Cruz’s Lena, it’s an Audrey Hepburn wig.) We believe initially that the film itself may be using melodramatic elements to uproot our expectations. Unfortunately, Almodovar doesn’t quite follow through. It turns out that Mateo really is blind. And the roots of his blindness, both literally and metaphorically, are pounded home with all the subtlety of a jackhammer filling in for a clock radio at an early morning hour. Secret lovers? Check. Cliched fuck bunnies? Check. Animalistic sex scenes? Check, but the feral nature of these scenes just doesn’t ring true. Almodovar’s promising subtext subsides for an easy-to-guess storyline that is all about his father figure.

Almodovar’s strengths have worked best when there’s a natural edge and energy laced within his narrative. It’s not so much the story elements that have mattered, but the way in which Almodovar’s characters disclose wholly unexpected personality qualities at moments we can’t possibly predict. For Broken Embraces‘s first 30 minutes, Almodovar comes close to these instincts. He has Mateo (now in the self-made role of Harry Caine, a screenwriter who pretends to be a former adventurer) bed an attractive woman who has helped him cross the street. The camera dollies along the edge of a couch, eventually focusing on this woman’s raised foot and painted toenails, which fall beneath this line of demarcation upon seismic satisfaction. It’s a typical Almodovar moment: fun, perverted, and wildly improbable. One detects the indelible fingerprint of a younger and hungrier Almodovar. But this regrettably subsides to a pre-Internet flashback to the early 1990s, where Mateo falls in love with Lena, who is Ernesto’s mistress and the father of Ernesto, Jr., known in the present day as Ray X. Get it?

I was complaining on Twitter this morning about the needlessly bleak programming in this year’s New York Film Festival. I’m certainly not against depressing films, but the human spectrum also includes hope and felicity. But Broken Embraces‘s “comedy” feels stale and septuagenarian. And if Broken Embraces is the “comedy” to balance out all the heavy and esoteric dramas, then I suspect that this year’s programmers are probably humorless and terrified of letting anyone know that they enjoy ice cream. I don’t think it’s Hoberman’s fault. And for all I know, the insufferably smug Scott Foundas might even have a few decent jokes in him. But Broken Embraces isn’t comedy in the way that great films are comedy. It feels more like a Golden Girls rerun, which is strange given Penelope Cruz’s presence. It’s something you tolerate because nothing else is on. But you know deep down that Almodovar can deliver more. Let us hope he doesn’t calcify like Woody Allen.

* * *

On October 7, 2009, the New York Film Festival held a press conference with writer/director Pedro Almodovar and star Penelope Cruz. To listen to the press conference, as recorded and mastered by Edward Champion, click on the podcast below. Almodovar answered questions in both English and Spanish, with English translation provided by Richard Peña.

Press Conference: Pedro Almodovar & Pedro Cruz — October 7, 2009 (Download MP3)

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