THE REVIEW GOES HERE -- or would if I had the time to write it. It's holiday movie madness season. AAARRRGGGHHH!!!
All About My Mother is Spanish director Aldomovár's SUPERB story of a teenaged boy, Esteban, who decides to learn about the father he never knew, and how his quest becomes a journey of discovery and re-discovery for his mother, instead.
This movie could well earn Aldomovar a Best Director Oscar® nomination (the film is already nominated for a Golden Globe® as best Foreign Language Motion Picture), and any of several of the actresses who star in All About My Mother would be well-deserving of an Academy Award for Best Actres or Best Supporting Actress.
If ever there was "a chick flick for guys," this is it. Strong, powerful, macha women are common in Aldomovar's films, but in All About My Mother, they are such commanding presences that all but the most doltish chauvinist must sit up and take notice of their performances in this. (As a small example: in many parts of Latin America, the Castillian dialect is often considered "high class;" Aldomovar puts some of the purest Castillian into the mouths of some of the trashiest prostitutes and junkies ever to grace the silver screen, but their self-pride is manifest in the absolute purity of their language -- even when they are uttering some of the vilest obscenities which the Spanish language has to offer! These are powerful characters.)
Go see it!
With the rise in theater ticket prices and the growing international audience of our page, our old NW2: Not Worth $2 to W8: Worth $8 rating scale has become less useful than previously, so, in line with the scale used by the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) we have adopted a scale of 1 star to 10 stars, with "1 Star" being a VERY bad movie, and "10 Stars" being a movie classic. Our On-Line Reviewer, however, has gone where IMDb has never gone before: he has added a score of Zero for those movies which are so bad that they are not even good "camp" -- movies so bad that not even "Mystery Science Theater 3000" could could make them worth watching.
On this scale, anything rated "7 Stars" or above is worth the cost of a theater ticket, "8 Stars" is worth standing in line to buy a ticket, "9 Stars" is worth standing in line in a driving rain rainstorm or killer heatwave to buy a ticket, and "10 Stars" is a movie worth driving hundreds of miles to go see -- at least in Dr. Shea's own opinion. Accordingly,
