All About My Mother

Rating:
Summary: Engrossing, fantastic and splendid film
Review: ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER is a great film. Though it requires its American audience to read subtitles it is still a truly engrossing and wonderful film. The storyline is unique, making the film very watchable. The acting is superb from the likes of Cecilia Roth and Penelope Cruz. If you enjoy foreign films, interesting plots and characters, or films that keep you hooked from beginning to end ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER is a must-see. I recommend you buy or rent this film today.

Director Pedro Almodovar takes his viewers on a journey through the life of a troubled woman. This woman has an important job, a handsome and loving son, and a comfortable life. In a split second, it all comes to a halt. Her beloved son Esteban is killed. After a period of grief, she goes in search of a new life. She finds a new life full of nuns, transvestites, and traces of the great writer Esteban would have been. Almodovar does a splendid job telling the story and makes the film one few will forget.

I think the thing about this film is its honesty and reality. The film is so true to life and shows the faults of humans. The actors all bring a gritty reality to the picture. The film won Best Foreign Language film in 1999. It was well-deserved on the part of all involved. Pedro Almodovar wove a story that many people will enjoy.

If you don't enjoy foreign films, films dealing with transvestites, or if you are looking to escape from life by watching the movie, ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER is not for you. If you enjoy innovative films with great actors, unique plots, and Academy-Award winning films, this a picture you should see. However, my suggestion would be to rent the film first to see if you like it. If you do, buy it from Amazon.com. Either way, you're in for a treat.

Rating:
Summary: Interesting, To Say The Least
Review: My indoctrination into the world of director Pedro Almodovar still has my head spinning. Simultaneously touching, poignant, funny, tragic, and silly, watching ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER is like trying to eat a delicious five-course meal that carries a troubling aftertaste. Satisfying, but where are the antacid tablets?

Cecilia Roth, a stunning beauty who quietly dominates every scene she is in, plays protagonist Manuela, whose tranquil life suddenly has been shattered by the tragic death of her only child, a 17-year-old aspiring writer. Motivated to find her son's father, she travels across Spain to Barcelona, where she is immediately immersed in a bizarre world of dysfunction that--based on the portrayal of her character thus far--literally comes out of nowhere. Manuela suddenly becomes friend, caretaker, and advisor to a transvestite prostitute, a pregnant nun with AIDS, and an aging stage actress on the downside of her career. The interaction of these characters (including a compelling performance by Penelope Cruz as Sister Rosa) is warm, tender--feminine. Yet Almodovar's placing all of these outrageous characters together in an attempt--as I suspect--to demonstrate the sheer diversity of the human condition just didn't work for me. My first impression of Manuela as the film began was ingrained in me: a modest, unassuming woman, completely and totally detached from the subsequent zinginess she would encounter as the film progressed.

Inconsistent and uneven, ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER is still a beautiful, well-made film. I will definitely check out some of Cecilia Roth's other movies, as I found her most intriguing. And that sure beats a handful of antacid tablets.
--D. Mikels

Rating:
Summary: Even if you hate this director - it is a great film
Review: I do not like this director. I saw two of Almodóvar's previous films and they left me stone cold. But this film is quite different and much it leaves the viewer well satisfied. Celia Roth plays Manuela who lives with her seventeen year old son. After he is killed in an car accident, Manuela leaves Madrid for her home town Barcelona for unfinished business with the boy's father.

She meets her old friend, a transsexual prostitute Agrado. Through Agrado she connects Rosa, a caring nun who is both pregnant and sick. In time, she becomes this nun's surrogate mother as she faces her dreadful fate.

In a plot similar to All about Eve, Manuela becomes a personal assistant for Huma, an actress currently playing Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire - a play that Manuela was in when she was younger and then gets a part in the play.

There are impossible coinicidences throughout the film, but it all works somehow and it is even vaguely believable. The plot is actually secondary to emotional depths of this film. It is about grief, healing, motherhood, friendships and fatherhood. It looks at transexuals and the bonds between some very different women.

Roth is superb in the lead role - both vunerable but strong. The scene with all the main women characters drinking and talking is brilliantly put together. The whole film has a superb pace and the direction if excellent.

I would not say he has entirely softened, but Almodóvar's shows some merciful restraint and it works far better than his previous films.

Rating:
Summary: "I always thought I could make it big in the third world."
Review: Director Pedro Almodovar is a great favourite of mine, and this film, "All About My Mother" is a perfect example of both his genius and his world view. Cecilia Roth and Marisa Paredes star in this remarkable film, and they are two of Almodovar's greatest leading ladies. Almodovar loves women--real and otherwise--and this film is a homage to women everywhere. Almodovar smoothly scatters references to other great female characters in "All About My Mother. " You will recognize a scene from "How to Marry a Millionaire," excerpts of "All About Eve," and scenes from "A Streetcar Named Desire."

I love to watch Roth on the screen--her intensity matches that of Isabelle Huppert. Roth plays the role of Manuela--a woman who is dealt the cruelest blow--the loss of a child, yet from this horrific event Manuela salvages her life, emerges and triumphs--as a mother and as a woman.

Manuela (Cecilia Roth), a single mother, is a nurse in Madrid. She enjoys a very close relationship with her only son, Esteban, and for his eighteenth birthday, they see Huma Roja (Marisa Paredes) play Blanche in a production of "A Streetcar Named Desire." Following the performance, Esteban is tragically killed, and Manuela finds herself fleeing to Barcelona for "unfinished business" with Esteban's father--a transvestite named Lola.

But in one of Almodovar's strange twists of fate, Manuela again meets the actress Huma Rojo--a woman who is struggling with her own demons. Fate has even more in store for Manuela when she becomes involved with a HIV positive nun, Sister Rosa (Penelope Cruz).

Special note here for Antonio San Juan who plays La Agrado--the transvestite prostitute who gives up the streets but not her tendency to be agreeable. In one of my favourite scenes in the film, Agrado takes the stage and improvises, explaining to the audience just how much his plastic surgery cost.

The ultimate message of this film is acceptance--acceptance of those who love us, those who fail us, those who are different, and those we lose. This is not some sort of feel good I-am-woman--hear-me-roar film--it is far more than that--this is Almodovar's perfect statement about women, and this film made it to my Top Ten best film list.

Rating:
Summary: A movie to remember
Review: This movie is one of the few movies that you will want to see over and over again, and will still make you cry time and time again.

Rating:
Summary: I LOVE THIS MOVIE
Review: My main reason for renting this movie was due to a homework assignment in college for Spanish class. And I am so glad that I did, in fact I now own the DVD. Almodóvar is a brilliant director. Since I am focused on learning castilian, I watch the movie over and over again. And by doing so I have caught the director's fine details at making a great movie that I seemed to have missed the first time. The colors are so rich, the actresses are amazing, Cecilia Roth is probably one of the most "real" actresses I have ever watched on screen.
I have also watched "Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown" and it seems to me that Pedro Almodóvar is focused on putting men in negative (for the most part)stereotypical rolls...as weak, cheating, using, non-caring.(Has anyone noticed this besides me?) And the women are running the show, doing "right". Which is fine by me, I enjoy the tremendous combination of talented actors grouped together.
Great job Pedro, keep up the wonderful work!

Rating:
Summary: Best of 1999!
Review: Pedro Almodovar shocked me w/ this release. The man famous for bright-colored farcical fare has turned over a new leaf and launched himself straight into TRUE DRAMA. Hot Brazilian momma Cecilia Roth evokes enough emotional overload (followed by restraint) to keep our interest throughout. Almodovar doesn't leave his past antics behind completely (read: transvestites, homosexuals, drug addicts, &c). However, beyond the anomolies, the actors in this film deliver full-bodied characters, and we draw ourselves closer to them, hoping their lives will turn out for the better. Beautiful camera work. Great script. Terrific acting. Mondo director. Eat your heart out, "American Beauty." THIS film deserved Best Picture...

Rating:
Summary: Heartbreaking and Powerful
Review: Cecilia Roth shines as a woman whose only son is cut down in the prime of life while she watched helplessly. After his death, she commits to finding his father, and so begins a telling search for the truth that is at once tinged with sadness and yet filled with wondeful spirit and light. Aldomovar is a genius of perception, and this film - rightfully an Oscar Winner for Best Foreign Language Film - ranks up there with his own "Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown" as one of the best films to ever come from Spain (or any foreign country for that matter.) Funny, fast, furious and frightening at once, the tale is spun through Roth's point of view - that of a heartbroken mother who finds redemption via a cast of unseeming characters who both ooze humanity and pathos. A brilliant film, not to be missed!

Rating:
Summary: gotta love your mom....
Review: easily considered the greatest film of almodovar's career and i am in absolute agreement. all about my mother has it all from plenty of almodovar outrageousness which we've come to love and an unforgettable touching story. cecilia roth gives a sweet and convincing story a woman who's son was killed in a car accident. after losing her only son, she sets off to find his father whom evidently has never been in the picture. along the way, she meets the most outrageous but certainly lovable characters one could ever have hoped to meet. we meet two lesbians actresses, a transvestite model, and a young pregnant nun all of whom are in need of help in one way or another. what unfolds throughout the film is glorious, tragic, and always engaging. mr.almodovar makes several references to classic films like all about eve as well as tenessee williams' famous play a streetcar named desire. easily pedro almodovar's most compelling film and i can't recommend this film enough. just see it !!! you won't be disappointed.

Rating:
Summary: Unsettling and brilliant
Review: This is my first experience with a film directed by the acclaimed Spanish film maker, Pedro Almodóvar. It is very complex on both a technical and emotional level.

It is first and foremost a kind of absurdist parody of contemporary life with Almodóvar simultaneously questioning bourgeois values and celebrating the community of those with alternative life styles. He makes the burghers in the audience feel uneasy in their assumptions, especially about questions of gender and about the lifestyle of cross-dressers and gender-unspecific/variable people, who, he wants us to know, live and breath and love and hate just like anybody else.

Cecile Roth stars as Manuela, who is a nurse at a hospital in Madrid where she helps to coordinate the organ donor programs. She is also an amateur actress who plays in the simulations that the hospital makes to educate staff and patients. Her 17-year-old son with whom she is very close tells her she is a great actress, but Manuela is modest. She is also secretive about his father's identity. After seeing a production of Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire, the son and the mother await outside the stage door so that he can get an autograph from the actress who plays Blanche Dubois, Marisa Paredes, who is named Huma Rojo in the film. Tragedy ensues as the son is hit and fatally injured. In just one of a number of plot mixings that emphasize the sometimes tragic and often ironic nature of the human experience, the son becomes an organ donor before he dies, and Manuela, who had previously arranged for organ donations, now has to sign the papers to donate the organs of her beloved son.

Now she goes to Barcelona to look up the father, who had once played the crude and boorish Stanley Kowalski to her Stella, again from A Streetcar Named Desire. In Barcelona Manuela again sees the play, but this time meets the star, Huma, who is a grande old dame of the Spanish theater, a Lesbian genius who has taken her theatrical cue in life from Bette Davis (and her smoking habits as well). In a salute to Davis and a remembrance of one of her greatest roles, we see posters of Bette Davis from the classic Hollywood film, All About Eve (1950), and then a kind of take off on the action as Manuela becomes in a sense Eve Harrington as she befriends Huma and begins working for her. (Waiting outside the stage door for a autograph is also a scene from All About Eve.) Nina (Candela Peña) Huma's heroin-addicted lover becomes jealous and accuses Manuela of seeking Huma's friendship just so she can become a star herself, a la Eve Harrington. To top it off Manuela is called upon to play Stella when Nina cannot because of an overdose, and miraculously she relives her role from twenty years before, and does a great job, because she is, as her son knew, a gifted actress.

Okay, we can see the complexities. I have merely given the premise of the film. Enter now Antonia San Juan as Agrado, an old friend of Manuela's who is a professional transvestite. (San Juan is brilliant in the part as a woman playing a man playing a woman.) Enter also Penélope Cruz as a pregnant nun with AIDs. What evolves is a kind of sisterhood among variously gendered females. There is also a sense of a middle class, soap opera-ish even, action and resolution, but with Almodóvar's tongue firmly in cheek.

Men, however, do not come off very well in this film. The grandfather-to-be apparently has Alzheimer's and does not even recognize his daughter. Manuela's son is dead. A theater male is depicted as a kind of stagehand Stanley Kowalski, boorishly insensitive, seeking only his own pleasure; indeed Tennessee Williams's crude, animalistic Kowalski appears as a metaphor for men in this film. Manuela is his long-suffering Stella, and Huma has always, as she actually says, depended on the kindness of strangers. Finally, there is "Lola" a tall, handsome, gender-modified Kowalski, played inadequately by Toni Cantó, in what may be a bit of purposely bad casting for effect by Almodóvar--or perhaps I should say, played shallowly and unconvincingly on purpose by Toni Cantó. It's hard to tell. Indeed part of Almodóvar's technique is a blurring of distinctions with ironic parallels, showing how some things are the same, but different depending on your point of view, the organ donors, Lola's fatherhood, Manuela as Stella and/or Eve, etc.

Bottom line this is an unsettling film, brilliantly acted by Paredes, Roth and San Juan, and cleverly directed in a most original style by Almodóvar. It will not play well with Disney aficionados or with devotees of action cinema--and put the kiddies to bed, please.