Movies: The Skin I Live In and Mission Impossible 4: Ghost Protocol

Nobody does creepy classier than Pedro Almodóvar. The Spanish filmmaker may have come to global acclaim with art house chick flicks such as All About My Mother his latest film marks a different sensibility. Like Broken Embraces before it, The Skin I Live In is less about loving women than objectifying them. Gone are the neurotic lead females, such as Carmen Maura in Woman On The Verge of a Nervous Breakdown.

The films female protagonist, Vera (Elena Anaya) is doll-like in a very literal interpretation of the word. She plays mannequin to her doctor/captor Robert Ledgard, played by Antonio Banderas, in the first performance I’ve seen that doesn’t garner the semi-mocking description of smoldering. Which is to say, he’s good.

The Skin I Live In is deliberately shallow; its expensive surfaces so polished you almost forget the violent crimes being carried out underneath.  

Not so pretty is Mission Impossible 4: Ghost Protocol.

Why Tom Cruise would opt for topless scenes without the benefit of mood lighting, silk gauze curtains and Vaseline lenses is a question only Xenu can answer. Aside from that the film is exactly the same as every other Mission Impossible movie. Cruise and crew are betrayed and must restore their good names while ensuring the world can go on to produce more of this high-tech cheese. Although this one’s villain was notably crap. Couldn’t they afford another classy antagonist like Seymour Hoff in number 3? He didn’t even get a classic villain rant or a cool outfit, and was British despite the fact he was he was embedded deep into the Russian politburo. 

Also the ending scenes which apparently “tied up” Ethan’s (Cruise) romance with an ex-lover. The fact that I didn’t look up her name should be an indication of how much I, or anyone else in the audience cared.