Inglorious Embraces

I go through phases of going to the cinema - often never going at all during the summer blockbuster season and going every week during Oscar season - but on a recent week off from work I was pleased to see that there were two films that I wanted to see at the cinny. Two films that on the face of it seemed polar opposites but I believe to be made by very similar directors.

The two films were Inglourious Basterds by Quentin Tarantino and Broken Embraces by Spanish film-maker Pedro Almodovar. The first film is a bloody, violent war epic that results in Adolf Hitler being blown up and the second is a melodramatic film about making films and how pretty Penelope Cruz is.

What ties them together, for me, is the populist nature of the films. Both are wildly entertaining, full of set pieces and dialogue and neither really actually amounts to much in the aftermath of watching. They are pieces of great art, designed to be thrown away. With a vast number of their films, you can easily come away from the cinema not entirely remembering exactly what you witnessed but yet you know you enjoyed it; you know you thought that the movie was good.

I'm a big fan of both directors. Almodovar is a man who tells stories of such flamboyance that tease between the lines of a daytime TV soap opera and a primetime HBO drama series. His early work was often more about the funny than the dramatic but as he's got older, a series of films such as Talk To Her, All About My Mother, Live Flesh and Bad Education has established this unique cross of trash TV and high art drama.

Tarantino on the other hand has always been about the trash, although in his career so far he has tended to focus on cinema rather than television. His later films have become less about telling stories and more about sneaking in subtle in-jokes about his favourite B movies that only he tends to understand. This is probably why most of his recent films have been widely criticised by the press.

What this isn't taking into account is the fact that the movies he produces are still every bit as entertaining as his earlier ones. At times they can be frustrating, egotistical and very self-indulgent but perhaps that is the work of a director that understands himself and his strange peculiarities, which is often the main reason why his films are as watchable as they are.

Almodovar is every bit as egotistical and self indulgent; in Broken Embraces the film that the characters are making is the same Women On The Verge Of A Nervous Breakdown that made Almodovar an international success. Could it be that the Spaniard gets a better critical slice of the pie because of his nationality?

The main difference that I see between the directors is that Pedro isn't quite as frustrating as Quentin. They both tend to make art out of the trash; it's just that Almodovar clearly knows how to reign himself in a touch better. Whether that is a positive or a negative thing, I'm not entirely sure. Self indulgent as Tarantino may be, his flaws are probably the most entertaining thing about him.