a little while …

i was at the friendly thai last night before going to watch Volver, and the best remix ever made started playing over the speakers.
so here it is, kid loco’s remix of talvin singh’s traveler:

Talvin Singh – Traveler (Kid Loco “once upon a time” remix)

(also, my other favourite track off the same album:
Kat Onoma – La Chambre (Kid Loco “where were you?” remix))

this film premiered locally last night to a somewhat limited release, and i went to see it. i’m glad i held out as i had it downloaded almost a month ago, being fed up that 2 or 3 weeks prior it had premiered in bigger cities to even more limited release.

watching an almodovar movie for me is a safe bet. i know, going in, that no matter how catering his filmmaking becomes to a hollywood audience, i will appreciate the narrative. i can’t figure out whether this is because i’m a sucker for movies about women, or whether i’m a sucker for movies about almodovar’s women. what i do know for sure is that he managed to employ penelope cruz in a way that completely hypnotized me. her face became an extension of almodovar’s hyper-active use of warm bright colours. she was extremely stylized; at one point, her mother casually asks her whether she’d had work done on her breasts, pushing to the forefront the intent with which almodovar exaggerated her features (she wore a fake ass in the movie). aside from her breasts, which in one occassion are presented beautifully from a bird’s eye view as she washes dishes, and her lips, which were never short of being bright bright red, and her voluminous hair, i fell in love with her eyes.
with cruz’ eyes, it’s as if almodovar managed to place two smaller symmetrical frames within the larger frame the film played out in – like a narrative within a narrative. her heavily black-liner lined eyes served as 2-dimensional almond shaped barriers to the stuff going on outside of them. you can kind of see it in that picture, the way the whites of her eyes glisten and the pupils are like giant glass marbles. but what i can’t really portray in still pictures is how dynamic the commotion in her eyes was throughout the movie, you just gotta see it. her eyes would well up with tears exactly when she needed to be the strongest. and she was by far the strongest.
i’ve never loved penelope cruz more than when i’ve seen her in almodovar’s movies and i’m sure she’ll be nominated for a whole bunch of awards for this role.