welshnew50
While with some memorable scenes of punishment, and better than average (these neo-Blair-witch-hand-held days) Photography/scene effort certainly added stars, it has a limited or simplified range of dynamics and realisms between the main characters , and some silly or unexplained plot-devices , in order to bring the drama back to the main characters.Could've easily been a on-stage drama before going to film, and as a person who's comfy on the couch movies-first ... i think it should STAY there.too many unrealistic acceptances of others'-change , and personally, i find those in movies that sometimes quite IRRESPONSIBLE.toughened fashion and beauty industry artists / employees/ers ... could also recognize quite easily the absurdities for the sake of the drama. while that CAN be OK for the purposes of the portrayal of the dynamics of the relationships, it does not work well when one has not understood the plot BEFORE going and seeing it...which is WHEN ... many/most actually decides to go physically see, a drama, instead of only HEARING about it , in your city, going around your country, wherever.MOVIES... by comparison ... are things now view-able and downloadable, and whatnot , in a much more... STANDALONE... way - sometimes one does not, as i had not, before deciding to watch it, based on the synopsis. I'd understood it would be some kind of creepy doctor sci-fi thing.Instead, it was yet another , 'how' , one should change one's feelings about another reinforcement, against always accepting another's abuse, kind of exploitation.now while i DO VALUE and advocate that in some film, using sci-fi ... or a sci-fi theme, for yet another tear-jerking melodrama for those affected deeply by it, is something i cannot respect.Themes and realities of skin (especially relative to reptilian ) are a interesting theme not unfamiliar to me, but things like the 'stimulating' / clearly-only-TEMPORARILY-purposed 'son' in tiger costume, were laughingly pointless, and i do truly pity the poor sucker kids in schools - while other actors on stage, are getting the substantive roles... the poor suckers, possibly the street-kids 'anyway'... etc... get the guy-in-the-tiger-costume-on-ecstasy&tequila .... *sigh*While the overall movie has some values in shock and whatnot ... its simplifications, and who-to-go-tos , are AGAIN belligerently going back to wise-old-mum ... most if not all men in the movie are conspirators or guilty parties directly , and the mixed-bag one gets in the obsessive/inequitable doctor ... are both sickening and disappointingly simplified/from-one's-daddy-unnecessary/obsessive too.what COULD'VE been a better-introduced sci-fi plot, with implications of depth possibly going all the way back to having tails...(which of course makes for more excuses to war costumes :) )... turned out to be some daytime-TV confusing jumble of identity/ambiguities of change , that UNlike the intentions to stimulate breadths of identity & trying to make people thing about others' identity, will make those content with their own do nothing but , maintain what they have already decided upon/accepted - an acceptance, of something non-hetero, can be a mistake just as much as making a mistake in thinking oneself hetero when not - it is not ONLY one-way traffic.It's perhaps well intended, but it's far too simplification-ally done... it gets points for the maintained motivations of the characters actions and there's some good acting, too, but as for the overall script, length (could've been a 2-part movie - 1st part is the sci-fi , 2nd part is its failure/the mess/resolution ), and believability , so that one can apply reasons/dynamic of, to things in one's own life ... i've got to give it the thumbs down.while some in closer-to , Hollywood/Broadway , perspectives , so-to speak, see directly, what inequity in valUE, not values...causes ; in too many a failed state in Sth America , as well as corporate exploitation of the USA's PEOPLE...... many also see the difference between art for art's sake, or in this case, fashion for societal-fashion-sales sake,.. in CONTRAST , with when emotions around it or parallel TO it, which can easily be exploited.While those committed to value in art BEYOND the personal, and of possession , etc ... do not even CARE, if their art, is valuable , and sells, etc.this film is another neo-CannF.F.-personal-belogings-RE-sale CRAMMING of mostly in the background, expensive-living.I'm not missing the point about ethics ... in saying that what happens to a extreme minority of gender identity ... NOT fashion... in PARALLEL , to other things a part of the characters... is NOT something, that MOST can say they relate to.Most cannot - most do NOT live, in-between a castle, and a clinic , where live & death are being taken away ; one for medical, one for defense... ...then 5 minutes later, a wise old woman by the fireside, wears a crucifix , but one is to somehow accept that she has NOT been a part of the out of proportion value, behind the no-doubt ALL PRIVATE PRACTISE ... of the doctor, and one-of-us ... not a unable-to-understand man...etcthe " silver-she-wears " ... is combed over, by the sexisit unity, in other words.private, compared to public ... as a separate theme, as is often present MORE, in true sci-fi... was absent.MUST give it negative-points that bring it down because of that, sorry.
MisterWhiplash
The Skin I Live In would possibly be even more cold and disturbingly off-the-charts as far as where it goes to if not for a news story this past week involving a convicted rapist on the Stanford University campus, Brock Turner. I couldn't help but think about him while watching this movie, and it had to do with how we view victims and predators. There's not much, if any, sympathy or perhaps empathy for Turner (outside of, on the opposite side, perhaps, Turner's father who brought a lot of ire through his own comments, look them up if you're reading this long after the fact), and this is in large part thanks to the fact that the man was tried and convicted and that the victim (still leaving herself unnamed) had a heartfelt and harrowing description in court about her ordeal. And yet at the end of the day the conversation turned to how unfair it was that Turner only got 6 months in jail (out in 3). Some might say prison is still prison. But is it? How do we judge punishment? Or, for that matter, revenge, or justice? Tough questions all around, and asking how you feel is different depending on the person.This movie deep down deals with questions like this in a way that is about as honest as Almodovar can get, and yet it's all in the framing of a full-boned genre picture. This isn't expected from a director who in the 21st century has made mostly dramas involving women in melodramatic and often (deliriously/ravishingly) high-volume situations as far as where it goes to. Sometimes this can lead to camp. This is a case where Almodovar is out to be serious as he can be, and in its way it lends itself to body science fiction and horror (one might want to reach out to Cronenberg, but the one that I, as many other critics, go back to is Franju's Eyes Without a Face, also about recreating a loved one through the power of the outside).It's a story that, in the best compliment I can pay the film, does tell a full *story*, not simply a situation. How it tells it may be questionable in that it doubles back in time for a large portion of it when, one wonders, if it was told in a straightforward manner if it would show more of the logical gaps. Clearly it's meant to build up the mystery and intrigue of the first act: a woman is in a room that she can't get out of, being held by a doctor running experiments on her skin (Elena Anaya and Antonio Banderas respectively), as he's on the cusp of a great-new-big discovery involving a new form of skin that can block mosquitoes and whatnot. But who *is* she? There's one piece of (odd) almost comedy that is actually rather dark and terrifying thriller-drama territory near the end-of-act-1 mark involving a character in (no joke) a tiger costume. Other than that, this is the most serious I've seen Almodovar, where he treats all of this with the somber tone that Hitchcock brought to something like Vertigo, only there's a coldness to much of the film (at least the first and third parts) that it almost becomes kind of suffocating.This isn't to decry the performances though as the two leads are astounding. Really, they dig in to these characters and of course any woman worth her salt as an actress in an Almodovar film comes off better than in 10 other movies. What it comes down to is... well, what there is dramatically, I don't mean philosophically or morally one can read from the themes, aside from the surface shocks: when we flash back we find out that the doctor's daughter was sexually assaulted by a young man (there's actually two sexual assaults in the film, fairly graphic, and perhaps in Almodovar's mind one shouldn't shy away from showing it sometimes, fair enough), and the doctor got his form of revenge by kidnapping the guy as his daughter went insane and killed herself (this is following the death of her mother, the doctor's wife, this told in a clunky bit of exposition made to be 'deep' as it's over a fire)... but it goes from one thing to another until... well, you ever see Oldboy? It's that kind of f***ed-up reveal, if you can catch my drift by now.So I do think that there are things to think about, real legitimate real-world effects, of what Almodovar brings up here, even extending into, arguably, what it means to be transgender - what if it happens to be not some joyous occasion but a horrific nightmare without escape? I think all of the ideas are in place and how everything is shot and designed is spot on. But the emotion feels drained somehow, like it should be less dark and depressing and a little more, well, crazy tiger-costume-man. It IS a full-on Almodovar film, and a misfire by him is still a helluva lot more intriguing and aesthetically satisfying (and of course truly sexy) than many other films in the past several years, but a misfire nonetheless.
