Just came back from seeing Bad Education, the latest P. Almodóvar creation. I enjoyed it. While I don’t inhabit (or even care particularly about) Almodóvar’s world, his movies are colourful and interestingly paced. They are sufficiently narrative that I don’t feel left out of the moviegoing experience and sufficiently cartoonish that I don’t make too many demands on them. Their worst fault is usually overt and tiresome misogyny, the worst excesses of which were avoided in this particular film by the straightforward strategy of not using women.
So I liked Bad Education for the colour. It still falls far short of the dream I woke up to this morning: a church service, perhaps a funeral, which broke into an a capella, syncopated, hummed and sung and broken-into-rounds gospel arrangement of… In My Life. Now that was satisfying.
[originally transmitted by e-mail January 19, 2005]