Top of the list this week is Pedro Almodovar’s melodramatic thriller
The Skin I Live In. With a truck load of awards and accolades to its name, this sexy, twisted tale was one of the must see films of 2012, and screens this Saturday, 2
nd February, at 8.30pm.
Top of the list this week is Pedro Almodovar’s melodramatic thriller The Skin I Live In. With a truck load of awards and accolades to its name, this sexy, twisted tale was one of the must see films of 2012, and screens this Saturday, 2nd February, at 8.30pm.
This is the first film Almodovar and Banderas have made together in 21 years (Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!) and they’re both on fire. The plot is, as you’d expect form Almodovar, a rather extreme proposition. An eminent plastic surgeon (Banderas) deals with the grief of losing his wife in a fire by creating a new skin, which would have been able to save her. His experiments prove successful in animals, and you’ll never guess where he finds his human guinea pig.
The Skin I Live in takes on various genres; it’s a mystery thriller, a medical horror and a revengeful drama, filled with characters who are madmen, and their accomplices, mentally disturbed or morally corrupt. It’s an ambitious, exhilarating film filled with twists and turns, and delivered with the precision of a surgeon’s knife.
Its screening launches Almodovar as this month’s featured director in the Sunday evening Director’s Series; get ready for Women on the Verge of A Nervous Breakdown, The Flower of My Secret, All About My Mother, and Bad Education.
It’s also apt because during February we’re playing a Spanish horror film every Friday night. Launching the series this week is REC 3 Genesis, which is perfect for those of us in the thick of the Summer wedding season and a bit over it. This is round 3 of the REC series and it brings together zombies, romance and comedy as a zombie plague is spread amongst guests at Clara (Leticia Dolera) and Koldo’s (Diego Martín) wedding. The film focuses on the bride and groom, who are prepared to do anything and everything to survive. It is, after all, their day.
The REC series embraces the “found footage” visual style, where it’s as if you’re watching a recording from someone’s home video camera. Although this time director Paco Plaza smashes the camcorder about 20 minutes in, and reverts to a more conventional shooting style. If blood and guts with a touch of comedy is your style, REC 3 Genesis plays Friday 1st February, 8.30pm.
OK, so if Spanish madmen and zombies aren’t your thing, then maybe a rational discussion about the environment will do.
Danish author, scholar and researcher Bjorn Lomborg is a man both feverishly loved and loathed, depending on which side of the environmental debate you support. Author of The Skeptical Environmentalist, Lomborg accepts global warming exists, but also believes the situation isn’t as bad as alarmists, which for Lomborg include Al Gore, lead us to believe. In the documentary Cool It (Thursday 31st January, 8.30pm) he disputes several of the claims made by Gore in An Inconvenient Truth, and examines what international conferences and treaties such as the Kyoto Protocol have really achieved. Lomborg isn’t just interested in climate change; he asks some of the world’s most renowned economists to work out the most cost effective way of solving other problems, such as global poverty, clean drinking water, education and disease.
A charismatic chap, Lomborg is an ideas man, and thinks differently about our planet and it’s problems. Whether you agree or not, it’s interesting to hear another perspective on the often black and white topic of climate change.
Enjoy.