All About My Mother

(from the 1999 Holiday Movie Roundup)

Pedro Almodovar's latest poses problems for me as I review it, because I became extraordinarily sick while I was watching it, yet I enjoyed it anyway. How does that work? On the one hand, you would normally expect a movie you watched while you were sick to take on less esteem in your mind. On the other hand, my sickness may have blinded me to real issues in the film. On the third hand, my sickness did not blind me to smoldering-eyed Penelope Cruz, who is the hottest pregnant HIV-infected nun ever to grace the silver screen, I am sure. In any case, this film delivers Almodovar's customary sexual deviants and reminds us that they are people, and creates an oddball community in which comic and tragic things happen, and generally doesn't beg for one's sympathy in any way but gets it anyway. Things, in other words, that European filmmakers do better than American filmmakers, who think of "creating an oddball community" as that scene in the seminal film "The Rock" where everyone is complaining about being taken hostage by psychotic insane ex-Marines during their tour of Alcatraz. Probably the funniest person in the film is Agrado, one of the two transvestite prostitutes in the film and certainly the more agreeable one. Plus, I cannot overstate the hotness of Penelope Cruz, not even if I try really hard. It's no coincidence that the two movies I've seen in Spanish this year both had Penelope Cruz in them. This film didn't change my life or anything, but it diverted my attention agreeably from my onsetting sickness so that I only realized when I exited the theater that I would be lucky to get home without passing out and would have to spend the next five days basically immobile while the virus in my stomach and my immune system discussed things (and certainly left me unable to write movie reviews). And any movie that can distract a person from that has to be worth something.

Attractive Man Count: Gregorio Villalobos and I both came up with 3.

Attractive Woman Count: 1.

Attractive Fake Woman Count: 1.

Overall Grade: B+.

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