208) What Have I Done to Deserve This? (1984) Dir: Pedro Almodovar Date Released: March 10, 1985 Date Seen: July 3, 2012 Rating: 3.75/5
210) Fair Game (1986) Dir: Mario Andreacchio Not Yet Released (?!) Date Seen: July 3, 2012 Rating: 3/5
I had to finish watching a documentary for work in-between these two films but these two films were basically my Fourth of July holiday viewing. The Almodovar film is actually pretty thoughtful, in its own self-consciously kitschy way. I especially like that the film's domestic comedy, which is a more daftly melo-dramatic and goofily comedic fore-runner to All About My Mother, boils down to one sentiment: you can't hold a family together if its individual members don't want to stay. For example, the fact that the perilously young rent-boy in training can leave when he wants and return when he chooses shows you the weirdly hard moral to this otherwise absurd comedy. In other words, no matter how silly the film may be superficially, it is ethically sound on a rather basic level. I like that.
Fair Game isn't nearly as thoughtful. The film that famously inspired the living-girl-as-hood-ornament stunt scenes in Deathproof is rather poorly paced and a mostly unremarkable, though infrequently tense, pot-boiler. Sometimes, I gotta admit: a film is a cult object because it's just not that great. Not that bad either, but eh, not for me.
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