The Flower of My Secret, Waydowntown, Winter Kills, & Lackawanna Blues

The Flower of My Secret is, I think, one of the few Almodovar's I haven't seen yet. Well, at least from Dark Habits on, I only have to see High Heels, and it will be complete. This one is actually reminiscent of a lot of his other films, but it's not like he doesn't really deal with the same type of characters or plots in his movies. It's clearly in his mid-period of some crazy things, but mostly a normal movie with some very strong female characters. In that sense, it's actually less strange than most of his earlier films, so I guess it really isn't all that strange, but there were some very strange things, like the whole scene at the beginning of the organ donation, and the boots, and the bizarre family, and the oedipal ballet at the end. I mean, it's fairly normal within the scheme of Almodovar, but it's not normal. And I haven't even mentioned the NATO peacekeeper husband. Just overall enough to make me call it strange, but still, a good Almodovarian film.

Waydowntown is a little Canadian film about going insane after not going outside for around a month. Disjointed editing, dope smoking, a French version of Downtown by Petula Clark, a klepto boss, a coworker who goes crazy by stapling inspirational phrases onto his chest, and a two-liter bottle of marbles. I would say it's good, but it's definitely not for a lot of people. The editing style distracted me a lot.

Winter Kills is probably the most paranoid of the paranoid 70s thrillers. It's a not-very-well disguised theory about who killed Kennedy, based on a book by Richard Condon, writer of The Manchurian Candidate and Prizzi's Honor. Too bad this wasn't nearly as good as those two. It's not bad, but it's a mess of a movie, going from one theory to another without enough time for the audience to figure out what was going on. And it wasn't like I figured out what the end of the movie was going to be (even with the "big twist" ending) very soon after the beginning. Not to say that some things didn't surprise me (like, why did the maid-assassin have to have her shirt ripped open? I mean, I know it's the 70s and all, but huh?), but none of the big reveals did much for me. Maybe I have seen too many paranoid thrillers to be surprised by one that is mainly notable for Sterling Hayden's facial hair, but it just was a mess.

Lackawanna Blues is an HBO movie about a small kid at a boarding house in upstate New York in the 50s and 60s. It's full of a lot of fairly well-known (at least to me) black actors in small parts, like Michael K. "Omar" Williams as a knife obsessed boarder, and Jeffrey Wright as a murderous scrap-booker. The movie is basically an excuse to have S. Epatha Merkerson get an Emmy. That isn't to say it isn't enjoyable, but there are a couple of scenes, especially towards the end that are Emmy bait.