6:35 PM – ARRIVE
7:00 PM – FILM STARTS
• NO FOOD OR DRINK •
Pain and Glory tells of a series of reencounters experienced by Salvador Mallo, a film director in his physical decline. Some of them in the flesh, others remembered: his childhood in the 60s, when he emigrated with his parents to a village in Valencia in search of prosperity, the first desire, his first adult love in the Madrid of the 80s, the pain of the breakup of that love while it was still alive and intense, writing as the only therapy to forget the unforgettable, the early discovery of cinema, and the void, the infinite void that creates the incapacity to keep on making films. Pain and Glory talks about creation, about the difficulty of separating it from one’s own life and about the passions that give it meaning and hope. In recovering his past, Salvador finds the urgent need to recount it, and in that need he also finds his salvation.
“Gathering his obsessions together like old friends, Pedro Almodóvar has made one of his richest and most sombre films yet.” from The New Yorker
Cinematiki Maui 
It’s still shimmering….the film and the comments were superb!! Thanks to all…xoxoxo
THE PAIN AND GLORY OF PEDRO ALMODOVAR
Pedro Almodovar is an iconoclastic film director who creates his own evolving iconography…
“Almodóvar has consolidated his own, very recognizable universe, forged by repeating themes and stylistic features”, wrote Gerard A. Cassadó in Fotogramas, Spanish film magazine, in which the writer identified nine key features which recur in Almodóvar’s films: homosexuality; sexual perversion; female heroines; sacrilegious Catholicism; lipsyncing; familial cameos; excessive kitsch and camp; narrative interludes; and intertextuality movie- Almodóvar has also been distinguished for his use of bold colours and inventive camera angles, as well as using “cinematic references, genre touchstones, and images that serve the same function as songs in a musical, to express what cannot be said”
Since he erupted into the Spanish film world of the early 1980’s shaking up the parochial , staunch world of folksy Spanish movies with his bizarre plots and characters and queer eye for details Almodovar helped Spanish films to became internationally recognized, viewed and acclaimed…
Almodóvar achieved international recognition for his black comedy-drama film Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988), which was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, and went on to more success with the dark romantic comedy film Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! (1990), the melodrama High Heels (1991) and the romantic drama thriller Live Flesh (1997). His subsequent two films won an Academy Award each:
Almodóvar has taken influences from various filmmakers, including figures in North American cinema, particularly old Hollywood directors George Cukor and Billy Wilder,[78] and the underground, transgressive cinema of John Waters and Andy Warhol.[79] The influence of Douglas Sirk’s melodramas and the stylistic appropriations of Alfred Hitchcock are also present in his work.[80][81] He also takes inspiration from figures in the history of Spanish cinema, including directors Luis García Berlanga, Fernando Fernán Gómez, Edgar Neville as well as dramatists Miguel Mihura and Enrique Jardiel Poncela.
Some directors have chosen their favorite actors as an extension of themselves in film…Fellini had Marcello Mastroianni as his alter ego in “8 1/2”, Truffaut had Jean-Pierre Leaud in “the 400 blows” and “La nuite Americain”, and Almodovar has Antonio Banderas as the declining film director in his latest film ” Pain and Glory “….
their collaboration started early on when Almodovar cast the young actor in his 1982 movie debut Labyrinth of Passion. Five years later, he went on to appear in the director’s Law of Desire, making headlines with his performance as a gay man, which required him to engage in his first male-to-male onscreen kiss. After Banderas appeared in Almodóvar’s 1986 Matador, the director cast him in his internationally acclaimed 1988 film, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. The recognition Banderas gained for his role increased two years later when he starred in Almodóvar’s controversial Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! as a mental patient who kidnaps a porn star (Victoria Abril) and keeps her tied up until she returns his love.[4] It was his breakthrough role in Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!, that helped spur him on to Hollywood.[6] Almodóvar is credited for helping launch Banderas’s international career, as he became a regular feature in his movies throughout the 1980s.[7]
“Pain and glory” is Almodovar’s 21st film and his most intimate portrait of his life as an artist…
Regardless of how one feels about Almodovar films there seems to be always a curiosity about what he is going to show us…
i am definitely curious…
How about you ?
JJ