The Ages Of Lulu (1990)/Golden Balls (1993)/The Tit & The Moon (1994/Bigas Luna)/Pedro Almodovar’s Matador (1986/Umbrella Entertainment PAL Region 4 DVD Imports)

 

Picture: C+ (Matador: C)     Sound: C+     Extras: D/C/C/D     Films: C+/C/C/C+

 

 

PLEASE NOTE: These DVDs can only be operated on machines capable of playing back DVDs that can handle Region Four/4 PAL format software and can be ordered from our friends at Umbrella Entertainment at the website address provided at the end of the review.

 

 

Films made overseas have a few ways to distinguish themselves from Hollywood and other U.S. product besides simply being from somewhere else.  One way is to get into human sexuality and other such issues that the dominant commercial cinema abandoned and rolled back in the 1980s, but that does not mean you necessarily get better films.  Two filmmakers of such films are Bigas Luna and Pedro Almodovar.

 

Luna is the lesser-known of the two despite helping put the great actor Javier Bardem on the map internationally, though a preoccupation with sexuality in childhood might be part of the problem for many censors along with generally open sexuality of all kinds overall.  This did not stop his film Jamon Jamon from being a hit, but may have gotten in the way of his other releases here.

 

 

The Ages Of Lulu (1990) for instance starts with a long slow-motion shot on a naked baby infant being powdered with the cameras looking between her legs (so we know her gender?) and we follow the story of how she (Francesca Neri, later of Almodovar’s Live Flesh) gets into her later teens is used, manipulated and awkwardly seduced by an older “friend” of her brother named Pablo (Oscar Ladoire) in a very lopsided sexual relationship where she is a virgin, but she gets sick of him and lands up having wild sexual encounters in Madrid that become risky and border on insane.  The film is almost a male sexual power fantasy up until its disturbing ending, but this would be more shocking if we had not seen this kind of ending in endlessly directed-by-men sex films.  That the young lady is a constant target is an issue and the result is a mixed film.  Wait until you see Bardem’s role.  There are no extras.

 

Golden Balls (1993) and The Tit & The Moon (1994) are the conclusion of a trilogy of sorts that began with Jamon Jamon as in Golden, Bardem stars as a worker who thinks he should build the tallest skyscraper in the city and eventually becomes a big success, but it makes his life a spoof of itself, thinking he is leaving his one-time co-worker and friend (Benicio Del Toro) behind, but the excesses and his lack of experience make his trip up as humorous as Al Pacino in Scarface (1983) and though this has some interesting moments, it is not more than we have seen in other films before.  Liked the acting and locations, though.  Extras include a trailer and on-camera Luna interview.

 

Moon is a comedy about a young boy and his extremely precocious relationship with women and their breasts, becoming as fantastical as a Fellini film, but much more self-indulgent and once again, children are sexually commoditized (maybe more so here than Lulu in some respects) and this lands up becoming a one-joke comedy to the point that the boy obsessed with ‘tits’ is named Tete!  Yea.  Extras include a trailer and on-camera Luna interview; both different than the other DVD.

 

 

Pedro Almodovar’s Matador (1986) is one of the rare films to get an NC-17 in the U.S. and actually make money, but it also put him on the map in the dark comedy about a older matador who is turned on by Italian Giallo murder films (all the women are killed brutally, but stylistically and colorfully) and his student (Antonio Banderas, in a role that helped put him on the map) is out to score in the bedroom and in the killing ring, but a woman (Assumpta Serna) is a feminist lawyer who enjoys stabbing men in the back as she has wild intercourse with them, even killing them!

 

Liked the use of color and some of the performances are good, but like all Almodovar films, he is so entangled in the look and being easily impressed with sex and even violence that it is never shocking and all too overrated.  Still, this is one of his better films.  There are no extras.

 

The anamorphically enhanced 1.78 X 1 image on all the DVDs save the 2.35 anamorphically enhanced image (on Golden and Moon, shot in real anamorphic Panavision and 35mm film) are lacking in their own ways, but Matador is especially soft and all have some staircasing, aliasing errors, some video noise and PAL cross color, all also not likely from HD masters.  The lossy Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo on the Luna films are good and have some surrounds, but they also have obvious post-production sound issues.  Lulu was in the distorted analog Ultra Stereo format, while the follow-ups are in Dolby’s more advanced analog SR (Spectral Recording) format, but they show new flaws.  Matador is Dolby 2.0 Mono, but is not bad for its age.

 

 

As noted above, you can order these PAL DVD imports exclusively from Umbrella at:

 

http://www.umbrellaent.com.au/

 

 

-   Nicholas Sheffo