A smart work of cinema studies for fans and serious scholars.
An academic offers a close reading of films by one of cinema’s greatest provocateurs.
During lockdown, Miller watched the Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar’s later films, from The Flower of My Secret (1995) to Pain and Glory (2019), and realized “this was a filmmaker who was deliberately inviting viewers like us to think, and think hard, about a variety of traditional philosophical questions.” That insight led to this engaging book, a work that presents “a close analysis of seven more or less autobiographical movies” by Almodóvar and “aims to present an unusual sort of ‘self-portrait’ of the artist as he continues to grapple with the moral implications of the counterculture that he was a central part of in Madrid.” Miller offers cogent analyses of these works and notes their parallels to the director’s life. Films include Volver (2006), shot in Almodóvar’s hometown of La Mancha, which, in its depiction of “the resurrection of a mother presumed dead” and the other women in the pueblo, “enabled him to restore some memories of his childhood up to the age of eight”; Bad Education (2004), in which a transsexual returns to the Catholic school where a priest had abused him, a school “closely modeled on the one Almodóvar had attended for a decade”; and Broken Embraces (2009), about a director in his 60s, an “aging auteur, still trying blindly to find just what he is looking for in his films,” made as Almodóvar turned 60. The book will be best enjoyed by those who have already seen these films, as Miller gives away a lot of plot points. But he also offers many astute observations, such as Almodóvar’s frequent use of nested stories, and he cites the influence on Almodóvar of Patricia Highsmith, Alfred Hitchcock, Roberto Rossellini, and, most notably, American melodramas of the 1950s.
A smart work of cinema studies for fans and serious scholars.Pub Date: April 29, 2025
ISBN: 9780231220040
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Columbia Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
Some of Avant’s mantras are overstated, but her book is magnanimous, inspiring, and relentlessly optimistic.
Memories and life lessons inspired by the author’s mother, who was murdered in 2021.
“Neither my mother nor I knew that her last text to me would be the words ‘Think you’ll be happy,’ ” Avant writes, "but it is fitting that she left me with a mantra for resiliency.” The author, a filmmaker and former U.S. Ambassador to the Bahamas, begins her first book on the night she learned her mother, Jacqueline Avant, had been fatally shot during a home invasion. “One of my first thoughts,” she writes, “was, ‘Oh God, please don’t let me hate this man. Give me the strength not to hate him.’ ” Daughter of Clarence Avant, known as the “Black Godfather” due to his work as a pioneering music executive, the author describes growing up “in a house that had a revolving door of famous people,” from Ella Fitzgerald to Muhammad Ali. “I don’t take for granted anything I have achieved in my life as a Black American woman,” writes Avant. “And I recognize my unique upbringing…..I was taught to honor our past and pay forward our fruits.” The book, which is occasionally repetitive, includes tributes to her mother from figures like Oprah Winfrey and Bill Clinton, but the narrative core is the author’s direct, faith-based, unwaveringly positive messages to readers—e.g., “I don’t want to carry the sadness and anger I have toward the man who did this to my mother…so I’m worshiping God amid the worst storm imaginable”; "Success and feeling good are contagious. I’m all about positive contagious vibrations!” Avant frequently quotes Bible verses, and the bulk of the text reflects the spirit of her daily prayer “that everything is in divine order.” Imploring readers to practice proactive behavior, she writes, “We have to always find the blessing, to be the blessing.”
Some of Avant’s mantras are overstated, but her book is magnanimous, inspiring, and relentlessly optimistic.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2023
ISBN: 9780063304413
Page Count: 288
Publisher: HarperOne
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2023
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