Your thoughts?

SPOILERS galore.

it looked beautiful as is to be expected from almodovar but was otherwise a complete mess. a collection of poorly explained, uninteresting characters who made generally unlikeable actions based on generally unclear motivations. the acting was okay but the script basically refused to make the characters compelling so they had little to work with. the characters were all granted a similarly low level of substance by the script, and blanca portillo was definitely the most successful at polishing her turd. penelope cruz isn't bad but she has very little range and very little magnetism especially considering her striking looks; i have no idea what almodovar sees in her, other than the fact that a hell of a lot more people have bought tickets to see this film and volver than would have if the top billing in both was, say, blanca portillo. she might as well have been playing the same character in this as in volver. the actor who played harry was okay bordering on good, the actor who played diego was okay bordering on bad.

the plot was just awful, both in construction and pacing. if this film had been a car journey the gearbox would have been completely destroyed by the end, so many abrupt downshifts and downshifts having been forced through it. the decision towards the end to show us a full scene from "girls & suitcases" for no reason whatsoever, which very nearly caused the bottom to fall out of the whole damn film, was one of the most embarassing pacing catastrophes i have seen in a film in a long time. films like this which crammed with contrived plot devices and strange detours generally end up by the time the credits roll with a whole collection of stuff that you have to be reminded was actually in the film, so irrelevant to the plot did it ultimately end up. lena's father's health problems are quite extensively detailed then completely forgotten about. the only thing we're given as a clue to what her actual feelings are towards martel sr are her martel jr-captured "monster on top of me" conversation to harry. did she always feel like that? was she happy with him before becoming attracted to harry (for some reason that is also never explained)? was her father still requiring medical treatment? was he even still alive? why was the device of her father even used? couldn't the plot have been altered to make her just a standard wearied trophy wife whose patience with her elderly husband was running out?

what was the point in the overdose plot device? couldnt harry just have told diego the story because, like, i dunno, he felt like it? they clearly had an established friendly rapport anyway, so WHY? the film wastes time establishing that diego likes music and DJs to a club where people, who are possibly attracted to him, do drugs. who the hell cares. could have used the time (if it even needed to be used) to add another couple of exchanges between diego and harry. but of course that might have run the risk of actually making either of them slightly interesting and this film just won't stand for that sort of shenanigans.

what was the point in the sex scene in the beginning? to establish that he's a lecherous pervert? so later on we can agonise over lena's decision to leave an unpleasant bald pervert for a slightly less unpleasant and slightly less bald pervert? to establish tension between him and judit? could have done that probably much more effectively without the awkward sledgehammer plot device of the blonde girl.

and what, lord of lords, was the point in making harry and diego father and son? that added absolutely nothing to anything. it detracted from the film if anything; the element of mystery in judit and harry's relationship was one of the only remaining interesting things in the film by that point. it's like the film was being improvised and performed live and, after a glance to the unmoved, bored audience, the actors decide to throw in a zany dramatic plot twist. the only way it could have got any more crass was if judit suddenly announced she was pregnant by harry, or perhaps harry suddenly deciding he was attracted to diego, or perhaps the reanimated corpse of penelope cruz emerging from the boot of a ford granada.

almodovar's films have been getting steadily worse since talk to her. i cant wait to see the disaster he's got lined up next

I didn't notice how long the film was so must have enjoyed it. Can't really expect anything less from Pedro.

I thought it was absorbing overall, but it did drag on a bit.

I own the Jelena Jankovic board

i think Almodovar is the most over-rated filmmaker of our time -- perhaps of all time.

[deleted]

There was a period in my life when I was really into designer clothes. I scoured chichi discount stores and sample sales for fancy labels like it was a hobby. Because a hobby like that has the potential of making you spend wads of good money on piles of worthless junk, I developed a rule when buying these things. When contemplating buying a piece of clothing, I would always ask myself: "Would I still want to buy this if it didn't have the Moschino label on it?" As you can imagine, there were plenty of occasions when the answer was a definite "no".

It's the same with movies. I am a big fan of foreign and indie cinema, but there are occasions when I feel like the movie did not leave me particularly enraptured or even entertained, yet I am still compelled by convention to praise it because it was made by an acknowledged great director. In those times, I have to ask myself, "Would I still like this movie if it wasn't made by Pedro Almodovar?" In the case of Broken Embraces the answer is definitely "no". It's a glorified soap opera. It is trite, over-dramatized, melodramatic to a nauseating degree, and represents an attempt to cash in (once again) on Almodovar's previous work. It doesn't help that this is "meta-cinema", a genre of which I am personally very wary and which, in my opinion, almost invariably produces schlock; it isn't unusual or even reprehensible for a great artist to be self-enamored, but in making movies, he still has to care about his audience more than he does about himself. My husband enjoyed Broken Embraces, but almost entirely on account of Penelope Cruz. Alas, since I am not a heterosexual male, her value as eye candy is virtually nil to me; and while I acknowledge that she is a fine actress, not even she can pull a script so awful out of the saccharine dregs of twee melodrama. Yes, yes, I appreciate Almodovar's use of color and the splotches of red (danger) and blue (melancholy) -- but come on, he's done it to death. Give us something new and original, for Pete's sake.

Basically, I think Almodovar has run out of steam. I enjoyed his earlier work, but over the years, I've felt more and more ambivalent about him. To a large extent, Broken Embraces is a rehash of Bad Education (now, with straight people), and he spends an inordinate amount of time stroking himself on account of Women on the Verge of the Nervous Breakdown. As to that last one, I have to say I found it cute, but not, as film critic gods made it obligatory to say, "hilarious". Women belongs in that category of "quirky" comedies that are cute, but not funny. Like I said, I liked it, but I don't think it deserved all the gushing praise it got.

The last movies by Almodovar that I enjoyed were All About My Mother (despite its tapping heavily into emotional pornography) and Talk to Her. But, I only liked them as particularly deviant gags had at the expense of the viewer. At the heart of both of those movies is a dark, perverse and mostly misogynistic joke -- but one that's brilliant and flew completely by all the critics and most of the audience.

There is, of course, a silver lining. I have to say, I get a kick out of all those critics bending over backwards to read something into this overpuffed soap opera to make it seem "deep". I found this bit from Pajiba particularly hilarious: "Almodóvar fools us by spooning out low-minded intrigue that is, in fact, a vehicle for sophisticated cinematic statements. As ever, he is exploring the formation of identity in Broken Embraces, but this is perhaps his most explicit gesture in the way cinematic canon plays a role in that identity — Broken Embraces is stacked with reference, homage, pastiche, and the metaphorical insistence of selfhood through visual artistic creation." Yeah. Whatever.

Woody - not ceetain if you have had the chance to see it yet.
Hopefully you have, in which case you should share your observations and thoughts.

I thought it was a terrific film on multiple levels. It was the first film I have seen that employed the technique of 'A film within a film within a film' - not one, not two but three movies going on and we are engaged in all of them.

It 'out Avatar's' Avatar as it's characters move in and out of three different lives.

It is an absolutely beautiful essay on the force of art in culture and the impact of art on it's practitioners. In that way I might compare it a bit to Woody Allen's Bullets Over Broadway.

It has glimpses of Hitchcock (maybe even more than glimpses - sometimes it feels to be an homage) and Truffaut.

More than anything it is an essay on the power of love - and the behavior of love. Of how love is lived.

A wonderful film by an explorer of the human condition.

It was good, but basically it was one long hommage to other films, which of course is part of an Almodovar film. I thought it was interesting to see a film which referenced Goldie Hawn and 'Private Benjamin', 'Peeping Tom', Marilyn Monroe, as well as doing a complete remake of the opening scenes of 'Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown'. It was also uncanny in the way that Penelope Cruz was made to look like Audrey Hepburn in her 'film within a film' scenes. But I'm a complete film geek, and the people I saw the movie with didn't get any of that.