David
14 September 2021
71%
Pedro Almodóvar's Pain and Glory is often viewed as autobiographical (for Simon's benefit that is where the writer is writing about themselves). However I am not sure that this is the case in this film. The film is about an aging director who is looking back at his life and work - that much sounds like it is autobiographical. It shows him growing up with Penelope Cruz as a mother, snorting heroin, and being a catholic priest favourite choir boy. He also has various ailments including sciatica and a calcitic lump in his throat for which he takes numerous pills. I think he finds the heroin more affective that the pills. It turns out he is also gay (that is true) and his last relationship was with someone that looks exactly like him! Very odd. Beautifully filmed but lacking somehow.
Dave provided food and french wine from france! He had just arrived back from Paris where a local wine merchant had sold him some excellent wine. Wine merchant was said to have described one of the bottles as "le chien bollocks" - which Dave understood to mean that it was good. One was very good - unfortunately the other was a rather odd. There were suggestions that it had not travelled very well on the back of the motorbike.
There were various issues with the scoring of this film. Mike was in charge of the mark collection this time round - I don't think the other members of the film club appreciated the sudden change in roles! JT was deemed to have actually seen only 50% of the film due to being asleep. Simon liked the film but only gave 8 marks because he thought there was not enough diversity in the marks with everyone else marking in a narrow range between 13-16. I didn't like the film but gave it 18 in order to counteract Simon's biased score! I think the marking process will be a hot topic in the upcoming AGM.