From Almodóvar to Sandler: cinema as a cultural battleground

From rejecting Almodóvar to pavor films: an anatomy of one cinephile's taste

A viewer admits that Pedro Almodóvar's films trigger an instant rejection in him, and not because of the films themselves, but because of what they represent: the Spanish director as an emblem of the 'champagne socialist' who lives off subsidies while believing himself to be transgressive. Far from being an exception, the confession opens a journey of nearly two hundred entries through cinema as a cultural battleground, where the Goya Awards and the Oscars are 'a gala where the same old people pat themselves on the back.'

The disdain for Almodóvar's masterpiece, All About My Mother, boils down to a phrase worth a whole treatise: 'a first-rate soap opera with an art filter.' European critics bless it, the Ministry of Culture subsidizes it, and audiences applaud it without realizing that Spanish cinema has spent decades living off institutional posturing. The conversation, however, doesn't stop at subsidy politics: it drifts toward American comedy, eighties pavor and the limits of on-screen modesty.

Adam Sandler and the moment comedy stopped being profitable

The analysis of nineties American comedy serves to draw a clear line between two comedians who shared the bill in Happy Gilmore (1996): Adam Sandler and Ben Stiller. The former defined his style in the mid-nineties, but it was in Jack and Jill that he hit rock bottom, with an Al Pacino cameo he describes as '100% cringe.' That's My Boy, with Vanilla Ice playing himself, seals the deal: 'his style is no longer profitable for theaters.'

Stiller, by contrast, is the 'serious' cousin who rubs shoulders with the critics. Zoolander, Meet the Parents and Tropic Thunder allowed him to play his cards better, though the verdict hides a certain disdain: comedy that seems smart without fully being so. The Scary Movie saga appears as an example of an original idea turned into a corpse squeezed for every last euro, with the Wayans brothers at the helm of a first installment that was actually funny and a David Zucker who turned it into 'a fart-joke machine.'

Modesty as a border: Germany shows, America hides

One of the juiciest threads of the journey is the comparison between German and American cinema when it comes to nudity. The German version of Das Experiment shows Moritz Bleibtreu naked and handcuffed; the remake with Adrien Brody keeps him in his underwear. The conclusion is sharp: 'the remake is a pair of boxer shorts: it's there, but it shows nothing.' In Germany the body is no crime; in the United States you can film serial decapitations, but a dramatic nude causes a scandal.

The mooning gesture closes the anthropological circle: baring one's backside as a universal language of contempt, documented from the Romans and Greeks to medieval battles. The scene in Le fils du requin (1993), with two brothers baring their behinds from the classroom window, reads as a declaration of total war against school and social expectations.

Pavor learned through the back door

The final block dives into genre cinema with the same mix of erudition and snark. The ranking of A Nightmare on Elm Street makes clear that Wes Craven washed his hands of the franchise as soon as he signed, and that Wes Craven's New Nightmare (1994) is the only installment that treats the icon as a problem rather than a selling point. The detail that Scream turned Ghostface into a Halloween costume and a candy-store ad is dismissed as 'the most profitable hypocrisy in the genre.'

Cinephilia was learned on the side, with The Simpsons as teachers: the episode 'Wild Barts Can't Be Broken' and its parody of Village of the Damned help explain how kids appropriated the whole invention. The Thing (1982) appears as a great film mistreated at its release, and Darabont's The Mist (2007) is crowned with 'the only truly balls-out ending in recent cinema.' Stand by Me closes the journey as the least King-like King, the one read by people who boast about not reading King.

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What remains of all this? A map of tastes that rejects the political correctness of auteur cinema, distrusts award galas and claims genre film as the terrain of truth. The paradox is that this same visceral rejection of the institutional coexists with a voracious cinephilia, capable of dissecting a 1996 cameo or correcting a detail of Stand by Me with forensic precision. Taste, in the end, is also a trench.