Getting ready for it still far off American Release date, attendance was high for its debut at Cannes. Its interesting to see what he does after Talk to Her. I really liked his turn towards more dramatic, contempation. It really suites him, perhaps more so than the comedies. Still, I'm sure he's using his new found fame to really open up exploartion of new styles and content.

Can't wait. It's not that far. Limited release on November 19.

its already here, but i havent had a chance to see it!
some friends told me its very good!

Friday im going to the movies, but im seeing The Exorcist!!

Rottentomatoes has it sitting at 91% fresh right now 23 reviews. I'm getting psyched!

http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/bad_education/

Apprently he's embraced Film Noir esthetics and has really done something new with them here.



Sounds gooooooood. Seems Almodovar really has taken a turn for the better with his more serious side since Habla Con Ella (Talk to Her). Anyone else seen it already want to drop their thoughts?

-Dolce

I love Almodovar. Women on the Verge, Talk to Her, All About My Mother, etc.

I can't wait. Whether it's a comedy, a drama, a thriller, whatever. I'm sure he's done a great job.

http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/bad_education/

Its dropped to 89% over at RT with 27 reviews. I'm getting impatient for it the more and more I think about his past films. Be prepared for what I'm sure is going to be a bitter Hero-esque review. Whenever I build a movie up too much in expectations, I'm usually let down.

But Almadovar has a tendency to deny audiances too much on first viewing, which is good, because it means one has to abstain from posting thoughts to immediately. Its inevitable that every one of his films got better with a second viewing and some extra thinking for me, so perhaps I won't have such a negative visceral response to Bad Education...despite me overly heavy anticipation of it.

-Dolce

4 days until it opens in NYC.

Opens here today! I won't be able to see it until later this weekend. But I will put up an official review as soon as I do.

Updates: It got slapped with an NC-17 for some sexually "explicit" stuff. Which is just hilarious, but whatever. I think its unfortunate because there are muture teens that can handle it, but ultimately, I don't think its going to affect that movie all that much. Lets see if it outgrosses "The Dreamers." I'm sure it will, but NC-17 normally doesn't bring in too much money. Taboo you know. But he may just have a big enough name that anyone who can will run out and see it anyways? I think it will do Dirty Pretty Things type numbers around 8-10 million.

Rottentomatoes has it at 86% fresh with 36 reviews and 7.5 rating. Cream or the Crop only at 75%. He's a tricky guy, I have nostalgic attachment to WOmen on the Verge, and warmed up to Talk to Her, but I can't say I've loved all his movies. Sometimes he has trouble bringing it all together. We shall see.

I'm gonna have to have a little chat with a friend working at the theatres about getting me in...

They didn't card me at A Dirty Shame, though.

*It's Official! The First A I've given to a 2004 film!*

Everyone run and see it and tell me what you think. Almodovar is a genius. This one ups his other films for me, with the expert way in which he woves several characters and several interpretations of events that happened to characters together. Storytelling both as far as dialogue, visuals, characters, soundtrack, and anything else I'm not thinking of, at its best.

Didn't you give an A to Eternal Sunshine?

How sexually explicit is the film? I dunno if I want to make a last effort to see it in theatres (when it expands, since I don't think it's yet playing here) and risk getting kicked out (god damnit, MPAA...why couldn't they just make this "unrated" like Y Tu Mama Tambien? Then everyone can see it ) or to just wait for video.

Nope, gave sunshine an A-. It is pretty damn sexually explicit. Call it unrated, call it NC17 it almost shows everything and quite often. More importantly its the tone and content in which the expose comes that makes it taboo. But seriously, my parents let me see anything and everything I wanted since I can remember, so I guess if someone older goes with you and just kind of buys the tickets, the office might now notice. Again, they might. I got kicked out of Smoke for crying out loud, and it was only rated R and I was already 14 or 15.

You might have to wait, depending on how your parents and you feel about such content, but judging from the fact you've seen so many of his past movies (plus all the other ones I've noticed you watched), I think you'll be fine. Good Luck....

Everyone else whose permitted in no problem, Go see it.

It depends on the nature of the sexual stuff. Sometimes stuff in a PG-13 film can be as disturbing as stuff in an R rated movie (Moulin Rouge comes to mind, well, parts of it).

For the most part, I tend not to mind it. People make a fuss about certain movies, and, once you get to watching them, more often than not you find that it really ISN'T much. Hell, I wasn't even that disturbed by the Pulp Fiction Rape scene or half the stuff people complain about in Deliverance.

If there's an abundance of sex and nudity, I'll wait for video. Hell

Getting in isn't the problem. On two occassions, I wore a Michigan sweatshirt in D.C., and cashiers asked me whether I went to the school. Both times I wore my glasses, though. I got into A Dirty Shame w/o an issue, so I'm not really focused on that and moreso whether I'll walk out of the theatre and feel I'm losing my innocence and childhood, or, generally, being disturbed by the material.

I'll eventually get around to watching it. I've gotta see Sideways, The Aviator, and Hotel Rwanda first.

I'll have to wait for DVD anyways. My theaters rarely play limited release movies. Even if I were able to see it in the theater, it'd be unlikely. I'm allowed to watch R-rated movies, but my parents would never go, and if they knew it was NC-17, they probably wouldn't let me go either.

Lol. But you're 16. It's not like any of us are going to automatically turn mature enough in a year to legally see NC-17 movies. If you're mature enough then, you're probably mature enough now. Plus, we've all seen worse. Our lives are all NC-17-rated, lol.

Frankly, ratings are stupid. I get the citizenship, smoking, alcohol laws, but the rating restrictions allow people who aren't yet "adults" to see certain movies, which basically implies that they're mature enough, yet, the audience that is one year younger isn't.

Well, its good that your parents let you at least watch R movies Zingy. I used to work at two different video stores over the span of three years, and the amount of really neurotic parents that wouldn't let their teen kids see anything above pg-13 made me cry. Those kids always ended up being less mature than the kids whose parents didn't try to micromanage them. Seriously, I look at people like you and torri and publicenemy (there's a young one) and see guys that are more mature than half the adults I know. Kiddie gloves leave to pertuating kiddie attitudes. Anyways,

to answer your question Torri, there is ALOT of sex. The thing is its not extraneous to the circumstances of the movie, which is exactly why it is NC17. It not like they drving along, and decide to randomly have some sex and move on. One might say the the sexual interactions (the many different ones) are the main focus of the mystery. Including the Father and young boy, the two boys, the later adult men, the scenes with the quasi-fictional Zahara, etc. Yeah, its in there. More so than Talk to Her and Women on the Verge, which were pretty sedate by comparison. This "deserves" NC17 if you're going to go by the ratings decisions on content. I don't like the rating system at all, and think its hiearchy is pretty weak. I also think they should be "suggestions" and that parents can use them as a form of information, but if the parents say their kid can see it, the kid can.

This is a mixture of sex and violence where one cannot be seperated from the other, so year, its pretty dark.


edit* Oh and Zingy, Almodovar is big enough that he very well may reach you. He's the biggest name ever out of spain, and he did win an Oscar for Talk to Her's screen play if I'm not mistaken. He had a very gracious yet political speach that really put him on the lips of many more Americans than would have otherwise known him. He very well mught be playing in your area.

I agree. The rating system is incredibly stupid. Especially these days. Hell, my little sister (who is 8, by the way) slipped the F-word not too long ago. I didn't even say it for the first time until I was like 11 or 12! I mean, jesus. We hear a million F words a day at school, we learned about sex in our school (we watched The Miracle of Birth today, actually.. hehe), and it's just stupid that the ratings restrict some.

I'll check it out when it hits DVD.

And as for ratings and censorship... I mean, okay, to be frank, if it's stuff like child porn or whatever, I am all for censorship, but showing casual sex? :?

A funny fact...Bad Education is Cert. 12 in Germany (which means that you can see it when you're 12).

See it and let me know what you think. but, btw, the sex here is definately not casual. still, I think the ratings system should be informative, not control. Its a way of evaluating content, but after that its up to the parents.

Bad education is noir double crossing taken to the next sexual level. Sexual crimes, etc. This makes the R rated Body Heat and Last Seduction look a bit like childsplay. Moreso because the sexual identity of several of the characters remains very ambiguous. Its hard to codify anyone.

BTW, people that liked Talk to Her, the nurse returns for a pretty big role as Zahara's drag friend here. I almost didn't recognize him for a minute.

I heard different things about Hable con Ella (Talk to her). Some say it's amazing, others say it's utterly bad.

Oh and is Bad Education more explicit than Y Tu Mama También?

Yes. Y Tu Mama still had a sense of naivette to it. Young boys coming of age, older woman helping them, things we understand. This has so many acts by so many people on so many other people in so many modes of ambiguous emotions that I would say it was much more explicit than Y Tu Mama. I don't want to say too much more unless people don't mind spoilers.

Talk to Her was very good as well. i didn;t like it intitially but it grew on me, and now I think its one of his better ones. But I liked Bad Education even better. I went with my father and he said it was excellent as well. We spoke about it for a bit afterwards, which is good, since usually a movie doesn't demand your attention after the closing credits the way this one did.

Not bad, Dolce. If there is one thing I can't is to watch movies with sex scenes together with my parents. It's not like they would mind it (they always let me watch anything), it's just that I'd feel uncomfortable watching it...

Have you seen All about my Mother? If so, what did you think of it?

Mixed response from me. I think it was He was making the leap from the ensemble comedies and sort of raw-er spaces he used to work in and he fell just shy of reaching the end of the chasm. It was a valient attemp at becoming more subtle while still using extravagant characters and situations, but his later movies did it even better. especially Bad Education. he's got the same cross dressing transvestite eccentric characters running around, but they are more convining since they are woven into the plot as "ficticious" characters in the screenplay. They warm you up for any "real" gender benders in the movie. The interplay between those two groups, the fictitious and the real, make it less glaring that the characters are ridiculous, and allow for the actual content of the story to be less about that eccentricity and more about how they interact with eachother. Am I making any sense? I don't want to give too much of the movie away. It is a mysetery, so I'd hate to give away all the twists.

Well, I don't want to be too spoiled either. Just like you I am not a huge fan of All about My Mother. From what I saw in that movie and what I read about other Almodovar films, it seems to me like they all are a bit...too...similar? All directors need to try out something completely new, in my opinion and to me it seems like Almodovar's biggest concern is to cause controversy with his films That was achieved by All about my Mother, by Talk to Her and apparenlty by Bad Education as well.

Well, I have been wanting to see Bad Education ever since I heard about it almost a year ago.

I still haven't seen it and have lost a slight interest in it. This is moreso because it's hard for me to see many movies now that vacation is over.

I have a bunch of foreign films left to see (Daggers, Engagement, Sea Inside, Choir) and Bad Education was in the mix. But now that I go through this thread I'm making it the top choice on my list.