Word: madrid
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...about My Mother opens with dramatic cinematic technique as the camera in close focus follows an IV line. The sense of determinism continues to operate as an amorphous force in every subsequent scene. The next shot is a scene in an impeccably furnished apartment in Madrid. Manuela, an organ-transplant nurse played by Cecilia Roth (a luminary of the foreign film industry, with an uncanny ability to evoke tears) sits watching All About Eve with her son, Esteban (Eloy Azorin). Esteban is turning 17 the next day, and his eyes seem bright with literary genius and joie d'vivre...
This enchanting chatterbox, with the round face and electrified hair of a Madrid muppet, makes you believe the oldest myth of cinema: that the magic is real, that movie people in person are as delightful, as bigger-than-life, as they are on the giant screen. Thus the truest compliment to pay his movies--those tangy, nourishing stews of bent men and brave women, of comedy and melodrama, passion and grief--is to say they are every bit as beguiling as he is. And the only thing to say about his new film, All About My Mother, is that...
...Runaway Bride and, he says, "anything with drag queens." But though he hopes to make a film soon in Florida, based on Pete Dexter's novel The Paperboy, Almodovar's roots are deep in the Iberian psyche. He has never filmed outside Spain. Indeed, he hadn't shot outside Madrid until he made All About My Mother, set mostly in Barcelona...
...chance or fate, she meets her flock: Sister Rosa (Penelope Cruz), a nun who deserves many fretful prayers, and her bitter mom (Rosa Maria Sarda); Huma Rojo (Paredes), an actress who is playing Blanche in the touring production of Streetcar that Manuela and her son had seen in Madrid; Huma's druggie lover Nina (Candela Pena); and Agrado (Antonia San Juan), a transsexual prostitute who has raised artifice to a philosophy. "You are more authentic," this dear creature says, "the more you resemble what you dreamed you are." Manuela helps all these women resemble their dreams on their...
...missing are still technically victims of kidnapping, one can only assume that they are dead. The criminal activity of Pinochet's forces knew no borders. His government's secret police, the DINA, assassinated prominent Chileans in Washington and Buenos Aires, and tried unsuccessfully to kill Chileans in Rome and Madrid...