Volver

[MacGuffin]

Volver DVD Due
Almodovar's latest arrives in SD and Blu-ray formats in April.

On April 3, 2007, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment will release Volver on DVD and Blu-ray. The movie revolves around a struggling mom who finds herself haunted by the ghost of her late mother, and will feature tons of bonus materials and extra features. It will be available for the MSRP of $28.95, while the Blu-ray version will run for the MSRP of $38.96.

The Volver DVD will feature the following bonus materials:

AFI Tribute to Penélope Cruz
Director and Cast Interviews
"Making Of" Volver
Audio Commentary with Pedro Almodóvar and Penélope Cruz
Photo Gallery

[Gold Trumpet]

First and foremost, I have to say I appreciated what Penelope Cruz was able to do. She transformed herself from a beauty to an actress able to play a character. It was the first time I believed in the role she was playing and felt no doubt in her confidence to do so. It was definitely a character to fall for.

As for the movie, I'm beginning to mourn for Pedro Almodovar. Everything about all of his films are pleasant, but lately it has become obvious that he is on a streak to limit his ambitions. He has fallen in love with his filmmaking and his sensibilities above all else.

Beginning with All About My Mother, his aim was to write a touching story that involved a scenario of extremes. The idea wasn't to make the story extreme, but just the characters. To be able to get the audience to extend their sensibilities further than they expect to. It is what Sydney Lumet did in Dog Day Afternoon by revealing the sexual operation late in the film - when the filmmakers were confident they had the audience's interest and concern.

I thought All About My Mother was a marvel. To this day I still get a kick out of describing the scenario to people who don't know the movie and ask them if it sounds ridiculous and they always yes. Because to anyone who does watch the movie, it isn't ridiculous at all. The film grabs you in the first five minutes and the lovability of the characters is too much not to accept every new weird situation at the sincerity that Almovodar wants you to accept it at.

After that movie, I felt Almovodar wanted to break new barriers of extremes with scenarios that challenged the norms of society. He kept his story to the melodrama format of All About My Mother and stepped up his cinematography. The enhanced visuals worked for the story. It heightened the mood and spoke for the nuance in the scene.

The problem for me is that by Bad Education (I had general problems with Talk to Her) I was starting to wain on the sensibilities that I felt were just being repeated. More scenarios began to remind me of his other films more and more. The characters in Bad Education are male, but the voice of Almovodar is still in the voice of everyone.

Finally, with Volver, I feel the film has such a close relationship to All About My Mother that I found myself comparing how much better I thought that film was. It takes Volver the entire story to reveal the true nature of the characters. It asks you to weep with the characters in scenes with them before you even know their true motivations. In All About My Mother, the scenario was at the beginning. You could accept the characters for who they were and be able to grow with their situations as they developed through out the movie.

Almovodar makes no secret for his love of genre structure. This film has similar ideas and structure to Polanski's Chinatown. That was a mystery film. You didn't need to identify with Faye Dunaway's turmoil. You just had to be interested and believe in the sincerity of Nicholson. In this film you have to believe in every character before you know who they really are and what all the situations believe. The film wants you to love them.

An Almovodar film is as pleasant as a Fellini film, but it seems Almovodar is in the midst of his version of a Fellini-esque stage. He makes films that have little differences with his other films structurally, emotionally and even aesthetically and are suppose to work on basic intrinsic feelings. Like Fellini, Almovodar seems to be making films based on general feelings as he goes along. He is tapping into his emotions with the same free fall that Fellini did and was never able to let go of.

The positive is that Fellini made his best films during this period, but he also made many of his absolute worst. The films started to become repititive and I'm worried that Almovodar will start to become this. I say this for a filmmaker, as I've read, started his filmmaking career on a very different route with comedies that focused on witty and excellent writing. I've not seen those films, but I'd love to go back to look at the differences between Almovodar then and now. I'm not sure which one I'd prefer.