Bad Education

Started by MacGuffin, March 22, 2004, 10:26:49 AM

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modage

whether he's comdemning it or condoning it, i think we can all agree: the film still sucks.  :yabbse-thumbup:
Christopher Nolan's directive was clear to everyone in the cast and crew: Use CGI only as a last resort.

Mr. Merrill Lehrl

I would disagree and argue that it is indulgent and mildly flaccid but still delivers a good story.  We should encourage story tellers and not pick them apart based on individual tastes.  His story might have been out of our element but fuck, I'm just glad he had a story to tell and told it.
"If I had to hold up the most heavily fortified bank in America," Bolaño says, "I'd take a gang of poets. The attempt would probably end in disaster, but it would be beautiful."

Alexandro

the movie rocks....but i don't expect everyone to agree with me here...i like it because of the reasons a lot of people hate it. it's over the top and self indulgent, but it is too entertaining...

pete

Quote from: sundown all overI would disagree and argue that it is indulgent and mildly flaccid but still delivers a good story.  We should encourage story tellers and not pick them apart based on individual tastes.  His story might have been out of our element but fuck, I'm just glad he had a story to tell and told it.

that's a generic comment if I've ever heard one.
"Tragedy is a close-up; comedy, a long shot."
- Buster Keaton

Mr. Merrill Lehrl

Quote from: pete
Quote from: sundown all overI would disagree and argue that it is indulgent and mildly flaccid but still delivers a good story.  We should encourage story tellers and not pick them apart based on individual tastes.  His story might have been out of our element but fuck, I'm just glad he had a story to tell and told it.

that's a generic comment if I've ever heard one.

I took it from a Support Storytellers 2005 phamplet.

Almodóvar has always been raunchy.  It is easy for forget that given the relative calmness of All About My Mother and Talk to Her, but think even one back, to Live Flesh.  Think about how much more vision and technique is in Bad Education.  I think it is perfectly reasonable to ask for a bit of blind optimsm in this scenario, perfectly reasonable to look beyond the specific elements of the story and speculate from a safe distance.  Almodóvar has my trust, is what it comes down to, I guess.
"If I had to hold up the most heavily fortified bank in America," Bolaño says, "I'd take a gang of poets. The attempt would probably end in disaster, but it would be beautiful."

Gold Trumpet

This film was a mixed baggage for me. I know why modernage just can't get into the films of Almodóvar. I held his position for Talk to Her when I saw it in theaters. The film does sympathize with moral positions he does not agree with. It doesn't distance the action the way Pulp Fiction did. You follow Almodóvar's characters like the traits of the characters are really some of your own. For whatever reason, I wasn't sidelined by that for this one. I think I grew out of it so I wonder what my responce to Talk to Her would be now.

I came into the film expecting what the headlines said, "Almodovar pays homage to Hitchcock and Film Noir". In a way he does, but in a way he doesn't. As modernage correctly summed up, the line of moral justice never is drawn in this film the way it is with those earlier genre films. I didn't mind it. I saw the film as an Almodóvar "re-imagination" of that genre. Because if any genre is as stuck to the past, it is the film noir. It was a genre that was a comment on the time of America involved with and coming out of World War II and experiencing its own effect of Neo-Realism. Timely then, out of date now. But yet films ever since then have loved to pay homage to film noir without ever really getting the genre to speak for their own time. At least  Almodóvar does that. (Also, I hope no argument comes out this whether Noir is even a genre. I really am not sure myself. What I said before could have been said without the context of "genre")

The film is magnificently made. Almodovar has tapped a spirit of artistry reminiscient with what Fellini was able to do at his highest point. Thing is, the film never had the clarity of what it really wanted to be for me. In the delicacy of death and lost love, I saw reminders of All About My Mother. In the twists and turns and dangerous exploitation, I saw film noir. Film noir though never really popped its head til the very end and not carried through with as much energy as I expected. Also, I saw nostalgia tapped reminiscient of Fellini's 8 1/2  and Amarcord. Both films bring the past alive and so did this one. Thing is, Bad Education seemed unsure on what strand it really wanted to follow. I kept thinking Almodovar was happy enough to keep the film at almost a seeming stand still sometimes because he was so confident with his photography. My interest kept lagging when I had just seen All About My Mother recently before and its power was still fresh in my mind.

As I said earlier, it feels like I'm growing with Almodóvar all the time. I'm going to really look into his early works more. In the future, I'm not sure what position Bad Education will hold for me. I even feel obligated to write a second review of Talk to Her when I get to it.

Alexandro

I've been thinking back, and maybe i'm wrong but I don't remember any review in mexico that mentioned the pedophilia thing. Almodovar was very clear on interviews that the film wasn't trying to be an indictment on anything, catholic church included. I just think is weird that american reviewers make an emphasis on pedophilia and mexicans don't give a shit about it...i certainly didn't gave it that much thought until now...i just didn't think that was the theme of the movie, cause it seems kind of incidental...i mean is it a rule that if you have pedophilia on your film it has to be the main theme?? the big problem for gael's character wasn't pedophilia as much as the fact that he was separated from the kid he loved...well, i think...

grand theft sparrow

MINOR SPOILERS

Watched this over the weekend.  Needed a little bit of time to digest it and I need a second viewing to really solidify things.  

I definitely liked the film, I would consider it another great Almodovar film.  But it's the first film of his that I've seen that left me kind of cold, not necessarily in a bad way, just different.  I was expecting an abrupt ending, because that's his thing (when I saw Live Flesh the first time, I had to go back to make sure that the DVD wasn't skipping chapters).

And not to rekindle an argument from 7 months ago, but I don't agree with mod's stance that the priest was made to be a hero or that the pedophilia was justified.  I think that it was left up to the viewer to make that judgment, which everyone will (or should) find revolting.  I can totally understand mod being put off by Almodovar not taking a firm stance on saying that pedophilia is bad but it's just such a deplorable thing that it doesn't really need saying.  I don't think Bad Education was like L.I.E., which I thought was awful because it justified pedophilia.

One thing didn't quite settle with me, though.  The real Fr. Manolo, was he supposed to have AIDS?  Because the coughing was never mentioned, as far as I can remember.  Or was that Almodovar doing that to make us think that?

godardian

Just to add my two cents:

I loved this film. I think it's my favorite Almodovar, and his masterpiece.

I find the discussion of the priest and Bernal's character interesting...true to any film noir, we're meant to see how amoral most of the world is and not be too shocked. I thought the priest and the Bernal character were both equally "wrong," i.e. exploitative and purely selfish, by the film's lights, which were hardly moralistic (how terrible a film would that have been?)

Honestly, I thought the hero(ine?) of the film was the transvestite heroin addict/brilliant writer. She is the one betrayed by everyone except the Fele Martinez (sp?) character. On one significant level, it's a Brian DePalma Dressed to Kill/Blow Out kind of vibe, Hitchockian in the impotence-horror/Vertigo way, where the "hero" is too distracted or powerless (impotent) to help the vulnerable/exploited person he really needs to save--and he fails (but, also like DePalma, finds consolation and maybe even vindication in creating cinema).

I do think it's ingenious, as Ghostboy astutely pointed out, that Almodovar made an excellent, morally despondent film noir with complete nonchalance toward the sexual orientations of its characters. In film noir and in Hitchcock's sexually charged modernist masterpieces, the view of human nature, sex, and love is almost always cynical and even depressive; Almodovar simply believes that same-sexers are just as human as that--no more, no less.

To top it all off (so to speak), whereas the sex in Brokeback Mountain was touching and realistic (awkward and fumbly), the sex in Bad Education was hot (in the eroticized Mulholland Dr. way).
""Money doesn't come into it. It never has. I do what I do because it's all that I am." - Morrissey

"Lacan stressed more and more in his work the power and organizing principle of the symbolic, understood as the networks, social, cultural, and linguistic, into which a child is born. These precede the birth of a child, which is why Lacan can say that language is there from before the actual moment of birth. It is there in the social structures which are at play in the family and, of course, in the ideals, goals, and histories of the parents. This world of language can hardly be grasped by the newborn and yet it will act on the whole of the child's existence."

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