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Buy This Item Matador by Cinevista Inc.  Available from Amazon  $39.95  on 11-14-2008     I am a long time fan of Almodóvar and of his films of the 80s and early to mid 90s, however I can not say that about this film. MATADOR along w/ LIVE FLESH have to his two worst films. This one in particular is utterly boring and just uninspiring. I saw this for the first time when I was in high school in the early 90s and hadn't seen it since. I tried watching it again thinking maybe I didn't understand it as well and thought maybe it will be more appealing to me as an adult. Well I was wrong. This movie lacks the charm & charisma that is usually pulsating through his films. Reader Reviews This is a brilliant, if unsettling movie. On its surface, it revels in various sorts of violence, including attempted rape, bullfights gone bloody, and serial killings, real or imagined. Beneath the flashy surface, though, Almodovar has a serious aim. He's examining the effects on his contemporary Spanish characters of a religion that was frequently rigidified into pharisaism and a code of manly behavior often reduced to mere "machismo" during the immediately preceding reign of Franco. What he presents us with in the film is a set of characters malignly influenced by such cultural baggage. Though seriously disturbed, they are at the same time both moving and unwittingly comic. Diego, the gored bullfighter and Maria, the lawyer, both buy heavily into the "machismo" code and wind up confounding a delight in eros with a monstrous one involving death. At the center of the action, and perhaps the most disturbed by his culture's warped expectations is Angel (Antonio Banderas), who oscillates between a mother whose religion is stiflingly conceived and his own, hidden reverence for bullfighting. He is himself just an inexperienced youth furiously seeking possible paths to manhood. Like a child, he endearingly faints at the mere sight of blood. For this reason, he has to constantly reassure the curious around him, who themselves are suffering from a "machismo" cultural lag, that he is not in fact gay. No other explanation, after all, would fit their too narrow conception of manhood.

Matador Available from Amazon Price: $39.95 Updated on 11-14-2008.

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