A La Mala

This movie made me cringe so violently I almost called an ambulance. Here's why.

NYFF 2013: Club Sandwich

Fernando Eimbcke's third feature is a wry, sharp, sweetly funny coming of age story with a twist. Héctor (Lucio Giménez Cacho Goded) is a chubby, awkward teenager on vacation with his young mom, Paloma (the spectacular María Reneé Prudencio). They are staying in a deserted hotel in Puerto Escondido, Oaxaca, which seems suspended in time. In fact, time seems suspended in time, since nothing much happens. At the beginning, we are not even sure if they are mother and son or brother and sister, such is their rapport. They apply sunscreen, they lie like lizards by the empty pool, they play rock paper scissors to see who takes a shower first. Paloma has an eyebrow piercing, tattoos and an attitude. Héctor is mutating into adulthood, which means he is a sulking, monosyllabic teenager with secret desires. Their chummy relationship is clearly on the cusp of changing. They bicker over their choice of underwear, and there are times when Paloma can feel his awkwardness shutting her out, as he starts objecting to the status quo.
One day, a family arrives. A chubby teenage girl, an old man in a wheelchair and a nurse who looks like a cross between Nurse Ratched and Chloris Leachman in Young Frankenstein. The girl, Jasmín (Danae Reynaud), sees Héctor by the pool and avoids him at first. But then, as she sees him baking like a lobster under the sun, having clearly disregarded Paloma's sunscreen instructions, Jasmín wakes him up and invites him over to his room to slather Phillips Milk of Magnesia on his back. Love, or something like it, ensues.
By now, Eimbcke has established a sparse, still style. His camera never moves. It observes the characters up close or from afar and stays out of the way to allow us to see how they move, mostly internally. He is so skilled a writer/director that one doesn't miss the moving camera. His framing is never boring. One welcomes the beautiful compositions, the almost theatrical, yet fluid, organic staging. Nothing else calls attention to itself, but the characters and their moods and gestures.
The movie seems suspended in amniotic fluid, but Eimbcke has a mischievous spirit and he shatters the stillness of this family's cocoon with a couple of fantastically disruptive visual gags. And there is nothing superfluous in his writing. A seemingly tangential trip to grab a bag of chips from a vending machine at the beginning of the movie is used for a beautiful turning point towards the end.
Not much action, not much dialogue, and still, tectonic shifts are taking place. Héctor discovers sex, but most importantly, and here's the twist (because how many times have you seen a teenage coming of age story?), it is Paloma's coming of age as well. Hers is the ruder awakening, as she suddenly realizes that the exciting tiny new bristles over Hector's upper lip are the harbingers of his impending independence from her; that from now on, he will divide his love for her with someone else. It's the dawn of a new, scary era and her ambivalent, shocked, confused, and unprepared reaction to it is hilarious and deeply moving.
We learn that "there is no dad" for Hector, which explains his strong bond with Paloma. Jasmin knows every detail of her conception. But Paloma doesn't remember how Hector got made (she slept around). That is, she is as far from the stereotypical long-suffering Mexican mother as anyone has ever been in a Mexican film, a feat for which Eimbcke should be named national hero. Paloma is independent minded, a single mother, fiercely loving but not unduly smothering. She is bracingly unsentimental. She is jealous and suspicious of the angelic-faced yet sinuous Jasmin, and just as she exhibits behaviors unseemly for a mother in their wounded competitiveness, in the end she rises quietly to the ocassion with a simple, unobtrusive, selfless act of enormous grace.

NYFF 2012: The Ones That Got Away

Yesterday was my last day at the 50th New York Film Festival and I was invigorated and not at all tired after 22 movies, perhaps because I saw mostly extraordinary films.
But, as is to be expected, there were some clunkers, all of which my instincts had correctly warned me against. There were no truly offensive movies, but the three French movies I saw (not counting Amour) were very disappointing.
Camille Rewinds by Noemie Lvovsky is a French remake of Peggy Sue Got Married that does not improve on the original. It is rambling and not very disciplined, although it has some funny moments.
About my violent impatience with You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet, the latest outing by Alain Resnais, you can read here. It was the worst movie I saw in the festival.
Also disappointing was Olivier Assayas' Something In The Air, an autobiographical account of his radical high school days. Assayas is an energetic, exciting filmmaker, as he amply demonstrated with Carlos, but here he chooses to use sulking non-actors for the main roles and all the energy he puts into the staging, his untalented cast saps from the film, making it extremely tedious. They look the part of French students in the seventies but they are morose, and unintelligible young people without personalities. It's hard to care for their conundrums. Assayas has a great sense of atmosphere and has much to criticize of idiotic student politics, drug use and bad French taste in pop music. As in Carlos, a vastly superior film, he continues coldly skewering dogmatic ideologues with his refreshing lack of patience for antiquated leftist clichés. I'm glad I stayed until the end because the best scene in the film comes late in the movie and involves the shoot of a movie starring Nazis, a prehistoric bimbo and a dinosaur. But it takes Assayas way too long to get to the point; namely, that art and creativity and even working on the cheesiest film on Earth are a better, more genuine calling than being an aimless young French bourgeois toying with ideas of revolution.
Sally Potter, whose films I have never liked, did not disappoint with Ginger and Rosa, which is pretty bad. The only reason I bought tickets was the cast, which promised the great Timothy Spall, Annette Bening, and Oliver Platt, only to waste them in puny roles. The main roles are mostly miscast, with a truly awful Christina Hendricks playing Ginger's mom, Alessandro Nivola, misdirected, playing her dad and a good, lovely Elle Fanning playing Ginger. Why Potter couldn't find actual British actors to play these roles is beyond me, but you could feel the strain in the actors grappling with the accents (with Fanning faring best of all). The movie is an obvious and labored melodrama with artistic pretentions, whose beautiful cinematography reminds one of expensive TV commercials. Potter lets her actors flounder, can't direct her way out of a paper bag, can't stage a scene for the life of her, her scenes are mostly vignettes that end nowhere, and her thesis about a British teenager coming of age in the sixties while obsessed with nuclear annihilation is obvious and strained. The festival's organizers don't do Potter any favors by including such a mediocre, bumbling film amongst such quality company. There were first films by directors from Mexico, China and Israel that showed much more discipline and rigor than this half-baked exercise in melodrama. Ginger and Rosa is like a Mexican soap with fake British accents. Dreadful.
The Dead Man and Being Happy, an Argentinian film by Spanish filmmaker Javier Rebollo, is an interesting concept marred by way too much cleverness. It's a road movie starring an old hit man and a younger woman, who drive around Argentina as he waits to die from three inoperable tumors. There is fun observation of some of Argentina's most endearing quirks, like sheltering Nazis and being always on the verge of development or disaster, usually both at once, but it's all marred by a really annoying, mostly unfunny and unnecessary voiceover narration that aims for drollness but is redundant and pretentious. Still, there is something oddly appealing about the adventure, even if it is contrived. I guess it's the travelogue aspect of it. Nothing that Lucrecia Martel hasn't done a million times better.
Here are our favorite NYFF films top down:

Extraordinary
Amour Michael Haneke
Caesar Must Die!  Paolo and Vittorio Taviani
Like Someone in Love Abbas Kiarostami
Beyond The Hills Christian Mungiu
The Gatekeepers Dror Moreh

Excellent
Barbara Christian Petzold
Tabu Miguel Gomez
Fill The Void Rama Burshtein

Very Good
Frances Ha  Noah Baumbach
Our Children Joachim Lafosse
No Pablo Larrain

Good
Final Cut Gyorgy Palfi
Here and There Antonio Méndez Esparza
Memories, Look at Me Song Fang
Bwakaw Jun Robles Lana

Disappointing
Something in The Air Olivier Assayas
Camille Rewinds Noemi Lvovsky

Annoying, but Interesting
The Dead Man and Being Happy Javier Rebollo
Room 237 Rodney Ascher
Roman Polanski: Odd Man Out, Marina Zenovich

Dreadful
Ginger and Rosa Sally Potter
You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet  Alain Resnais

Stay tuned for more reviews of the Festival coming soon.

On DVD: Alamar

This is simply a beautiful movie. I'm not a huge fan of meditative cinematic tone poems, which I sometimes find boring and pretentious, with the filmmakers' heavy stamp of sensibility and opinion intruding upon the pristine circumstances that they set out to portray; but this beautifully thought out and realized film by Pablo González-Rubio is another story.
A hybrid between storytelling and documentary, Alamar (which is a poetic way of saying "to the sea"), follows the summer that Natan, a young boy who lives in Rome with his Italian mother, comes to spend time in Banco Chinchorro, the remote island where his Mexican dad lives with his own father, a crusty, lively old fisherman in Mexico. These people live literally in the sea, in a little house on stilts. They fish for lobster, red snapper and barracuda. They catch the lobster by diving into the sea with a snorkel and a harpoon, looking for them in their caves and spearing one by one. The fish they catch by throwing fishing line with bait. No sophisticated equipment; just goggles, a snorkel, fins, a spear, bait, line, and a pretty solid motor boat. The young father teaches Natan what his life is about. He is loving but firm, and Natan is a quick study.
González-Rubio, who wrote, directed, edited, produced and magnificently shot the film, has an artist's eye for composition, camera movement, and color. The images are absolutely stunning. He captures the cramped intimacy of the boat, of the little shack, as well as the majesty of the sea, the hard work of the fishermen. The underwater photography by Alexis Zabé and David Torres Castillo is also spectacular, yet inobtrusive: everything is in proportion to the simplicity of the story. The filmmaker achieves a wonderful trick: he makes it look like he's staying out of the story while crafting it with great skill, delicacy and insight. He knows better than to divert attention from the quiet power of the story and of the bond between three generations of men.
Alamar has the feel of a documentary, although González-Rubio wrote the story. There is no philosophizing, as in Le Quattro Volte, a similar film about life in a remote Italian town. There is no artistic self-indulgence either, no excruciatingly long takes that attempt to pummel the viewer into appreciating nature, and make you feel guilty for not having the superhuman attention span that such pretension requires. Every minute of Alamar is moving and mesmerizing, because it is so visually magnificent and because it concentrates on an intimate, but almost mythical story about a boy who comes from a world away to spend the summer with his dad, who lives with very little. From the comforts of Europe with all the trappings of what we call civilization, plush toys, TV, running showers, to a wooden shack with a hammock and a radio, in a place where no one ever wears shoes.
Natan turns out to be surprisingly adept at adapting. Not every urban little boy would take to the choppy seas with such esprit de corps, let alone being away from his mom and the life he knows, to an existence where there is nothing to do but fish, eat what you caught and look at the sea. Oh, but there is so much more to marvel at. An egret that comes to the house for breakfast, hermit crabs, fish gasping for breath: life on Earth.
We see Natan queasy from seasickness and perhaps jet lag on his first fishing expedition. The first time his dad teaches him to snorkel, it's not fun. But soon he becomes a child of nature. It seems that he has inherited some of his dad's ways. By the time he has to leave, he sheds quiet tears as his father comforts him with words that promise constant nearness.
Gonzalez Rubio lets things happen. He doesn't create contrast or conflict where the image and the action speak for themselves. If this was in less sensitive hands, it could easily be turned into a story of a fish out of water who learns to be in the water, a boy hero who learns from his hero father, but thankfully, the filmmaker doesn't impose the artifice of dramatic narrative on them; it is there, naturally in the sadness of the geographical distance between them. There are no false notes in Alamar. I regret missing this movie when it was shown in theaters. But it is gorgeous, even on a small screen.

NYFF 2011: 2 Small Films

Julia Loktev's The Loneliest Planet, a small film about romantic disillusionment, takes place in the wilderness of Georgia, Russia, and follows two young travelers, Nica, (Israeli actress Hani Furstenberg) and Alex (Gael García Bernal) as they go hiking in the mountains. There is very little incident. The opening scene shows her naked and shivering, waiting for him to bring her hot water for her bath. They are roughing it, and the camera takes an intimate look at what seems their budding relationship. There's lots of sex, silent walks in remote places, trying to figure out how to communicate with the locals. Some scenes suggest the possibility of peril (like dancing with drunk locals at a crummy little bar), but nothing ever happens. Alex is relaxed and good-natured and for a Mexican male, extremely confident in his woman. She has beautiful red hair and seems to be fit and a game traveler. We don't know anything about them except they seem to be having a nice time. Both actors are gorgeous to look at in a completely natural way. Loktev is great at capturing unspoken nuance, tiny shifts of emotion, which her actors handle beautifully. Furstenberg is a very charismatic presence, absolutely stunning in some scenes, and coarse looking in others; she has personality to fill the screen and then some. The camera adores García Bernal and he is particularly good at being inarticulate. He is a great silent actor. 
As they traverse the landscape with a local guide (Bidzina Guiabidze), nothing much happens until a small but loaded gesture, a threatening situation, provokes a reaction in Alex that completely alters Nica's understanding of him and changes their dynamic irrevocably. If before they weren't talking because they were happy in each others' company, now they are not talking because they can't bear to be near each other.
The movie aims to be naturalistic, but Loktev's stylistic choices seem pretentious. She cuts abruptly in scenes between them and the locals, but then the camera rambles endlessly in open shots of them walking through the spectacular landscape. She avoids the feeling of travelogue, but at the same time it is frustrating that we don't quite get to see what they are seeing. It feels deliberately claustrophobic. The sparse music score is one of those ugly abstract compositions that call attention to how arty the filmmakers are but add little to the images.

But even though the subtle psychological dynamics of the couple cast a certain spell, since the characters seem to be abstract figures rather than real people with past lives and present quirks, it is hard to be invested in their journey or their conflict.
The movie tries the viewers' patience with long aimless scenes and a disjointed rhythm. Once things get worse, the film gets better. The rift in the couple makes the guide, a man that is between benign and taciturn, potentially menacing, sense an opportunity. The ending is a wash out. Loktev goes for a very stripped-down world and, mostly through the excellent performances of her actors, who do a lot with very little, it does have a certain emotional power, but the self-conscious style gets in the way of raw emotion.

In my view, the same thing happens with Aki Kaurismaki's Le Havre, although this is a far more complex work, with a lot of cinematic references. The Finnish filmmaker is known for his stylized, quirky deadpan. Shot in beautiful compositions with harsh light and primary colors against flat backgrounds, Le Havre is quite remarkable to look at but at the same time its style is starting to feel a bit old. It is the kind of thing that directors in advertising try to imitate when they want to give ironic edge to their commercials, except they rarely know how to pull it off as beautifully. Le Havre is a sweet, subversive little fable about racism and immigration. It takes the opposite route of weepy, truculent movies like Biutiful or Stephen Frears' Dirty Pretty Things, which approach the topic with indignant moral outrage.
In Le Havre, a dreamlike world that pays homage to old French films with its deliberately fake sets of a quaint France, the old boulangerie, the old corner bar, the little cottage where the protagonists live, in contrast to the realistic, ugly modern port, some old folks band together to help a group of African illegal immigrants that are trapped in a ship container. The protagonists, an old couple that go by the names of Marcel and Arletty Marx, no doubt a nod to old French cinema stars but also to Groucho and Karl, are poor but happy. He is a debonair gent who shines shoes and can't pay the bills and she stays at home and cooks. His friends patiently allow him to freeload. They seem to stem from a distant age of dignity and courtesy, but in complete opposition to the world today, they have great empathy for the plight of the illegals and organize to save one of them, a young boy named Idrissa, who escapes from the clutch of the police. The actors are deliberately wooden and speak clunky, mildly funny dialogue. The characters seem to belong to the world of film, including a police inspector dressed at all times in a black trench coat and a black fedora, perhaps an homage to Jean Pierre Melville's tough resistance fighters. The gang of friends may have been resistance members themselves, with their instinctive antipathy to the police and an organic tendency to altruism. The meanie who blows the whistle on the kid's whereabouts is Jean Pierre Leaud, Truffaut's alter ego in many films, looking ghastly and mugging for the camera. Kaurismaki has composed a little love song to his favorite French films, the ones full of esprit de corps and humanity, the Marcel Carne's, Jean Renoir's, Truffaut's, rather than the brainy Godard, Bresson or Resnais.
The film is gently funny and offbeat and it convinces once we realize that Kaurismaki is not being naive, but quite the contrary, he is being a contrarian. He asks what if instead of rejection, racism and intolerance, Europe would be warm and welcoming to those seeking a better life. He has enough studied quirkiness to make the liberal pieties less preachy, but my problem with this film is that the high style creates distance, it screams look at me, instead of bringing the audience closer to the characters. Even though I really like the idea and appreciate the execution, I find it difficult to feel passion or enthusiasm for this film.
When you see deeply humane films like Miracle in Milan, which Le Havre resembles in spirit, those films are steeped in human warmth and they open your heart. Le Havre might bring a smile to your face, but it does not reach your soul. 

NYFF 2011: Miss Bala

Although it is described as an action thriller, what Miss Bala does best is make palpable the feelings of fear, revulsion and violation that Mexicans have been grappling with since the dawning of era of the war on drugs.
Laura Guerrero, (Stephanie Sigman), lives in Tijuana with her father and brother and dreams of entering the Miss Baja California beauty contest. In a flash, her world is upended when her best friend Suzu is caught in the crossfire of Lino, a drug lord (Noé Hernández) who storms a sleazy nightclub and sprays everybody with bullets. Laura hides in the bathroom, but he nabs her and spares her life in exchange for criminal favors. Suzu has made acquaintance with some shady guy and that's how it all starts: you come near someone with "connections" and next thing you know, either you are dead or there is no way out. Written by Gerardo Naranjo and Mauricio Katz as a nightmarish version of Alice in Wonderland, and directed with panache by a much improved Naranjo (I'm Gonna Explode), Miss Bala portrays a country that is completely defaced by crime and corruption. Things are beyond outrageous, but that's how things are. Lino has unchecked power: he and his gang roam the streets of Tijuana armed and unimpeded, they close streets, plant bombs, massacre people dancing in nightclubs, have gunfights in plain daylight, buy their arms from a gringo on the other side of the border, and can even fix state beauty contests. Nothing is outside their purview of terror and nobody can refuse or resist it. What unfolds, is in fact, something that looks like an actual war. You would think you are in Baghdad, but this is the new normal.
Mexico is a surrealistic country and its particular war on drugs has Mexican surrealism written all over it (the cult of the Santa Muerte, narcocorridos, the grotesque violence). In the movie, as in life, bodies are dumped in front of the US consulate, strung from bridges. This movie is far less violent than what goes on in reality (decapitated heads appear in Acapulco beaches, people are burned inside casinos). Even though the movie feels tremendously violent, there is little graphic violence, a great directorial choice. Miss Bala depicts the ascendancy of the drug cartels as de facto rulers of Mexico through the point of view of Laura, showing it as the rape of the country that it is; for Laura Guerrero, in my view, symbolizes Mexico. One good day she finds herself in a gruesome nightmare and she has no idea how the hell she got there or how will she ever get out.
Everything outrageous that happens in Miss Bala is credible, and Mexicans will recognize this tragic state of affairs almost with a shrug. It is the realism of the surreal. There are a couple of plot points that strain credulity, chief among them the fact that no one in Mexico, unless they are five years old or just flew in from Mars, voluntarily goes inside a patrol car with a policeman. I could suspend disbelief because the movie establishes that Laura, who does this, is desperately looking for her friend Suzu, and she makes the grave mistake of asking the police for help. This particular cop works for Lino (who doesn't?), and soon she is spirited down the rabbit hole of the drug business.
The organizational skills of Lino's gang are amazing; I wondered if they ever actually had time to run the profitable side of their business, busy as they were killing other gangs, exacting petty but bloody revenges and orchestrating symbolic gestures of terror.
The movie works like a charm until the end of the second act, which takes place at the state beauty contest, with a scene of marvelous, piercing irony. Laura gets what she always wanted, though not the way she wanted it. The movie could have ended there but there is a final chain of escalating humiliations. Suddenly, we understand Lino's contest-fixing motivations (although the deals he makes are not entirely clear to me), and the war on drugs is uncovered to be an enormous farce, staged with the bottomless cynicism of those with power, for the duping of Mexican society and of our neighbor to the north, whose gargantuan appetite for illegal drugs is largely the cause of all this misery. I understand the filmmakers' decision to take the story to its natural and extreme consequences, which is to say that the war on drugs is a losing proposition because many of those who are supposed to be fighting it are actually abetting it. In terms of storytelling, however, it feels redundant, even as the bitter ironies of Laura's brush with the drug cartel keep piling on. In the end, although the story could benefit from more clarity, what boggles the mind and is very effective, are the endless layers and implications of moral rot of everything we just witnessed. Mexico is literally being raped and betrayed, and sinister forces are in cohoots to strangle it.
Miss Bala is being marketed as an action thriller, but a movie with a heroine who is forced to commit crimes in order to survive is not your typical action flick. Usually, films with passive protagonists are hard to watch because if the heroes are not the agents of change, it's hard for the audience to care. But Miss Bala works as a fable, because Laura is put in a situation in which she has do what Lino orders; otherwise she's toast and so is her family. Her dilemmas become existential. No matter how she slices it, she is drowning in rot. The suspense comes from wondering if Laura is going to summon some sort of integrity and stop being a slave to Lino, and whether this is even feasible. To the movie's credit, it steers clear from cliched heroics and wishful thinking. There is nothing that Laura or anyone can do to stop the putrefaction. When she does try, her motives are less decency or integrity than revenge, revulsion, and reaching the limits of human tolerance of humiliation and depravity. What happens to her embodies the sense of shock, revulsion and mainly of impotence that is gripping the country. Similarly, the drug lord's character summarizes the ambiguity that some Mexicans feel for the societal cancers that are the narcos. He seems to have protective feelings for Laura, but they are just his way of playing God. He can grant her life, riches, miracles, just as easily as he can send her to the lowest depths of hell, or kill her and her entire family. In the end, he is a user and an abuser, and there is nothing in him remotely approaching redemption, which is as it should be. Some Mexicans' admiration for the moxie of these barbarians is not only puerile, but tragic. Miss Bala makes clear that there is no sense of honor in these gangs, just unspeakable, depraved cowardice.
This movie poses an interesting conundrum: it aims to thrill and entertain, while at the same time it argues a sober message about the reality of the Mexican war on drugs. This is not in and of itself contradictory; a movie like The Hurt Locker is a perfect example of a great action movie that is also a serious anti-war movie. Yet in the case of Miss Bala, something feels amiss. Perhaps the titles at the end stating the number of victims and the billions of dollars reaped by the cartels are unnecessarily preachy. I enjoyed it very much as an acute and accurate metaphor of Mexico today, but I never felt I was watching a crime caper or an action thriller. It is way too tragic for that.

Biutiful

To quote Anthony Lane: "...the film should be endured for the sake of its leading man".
Endured is the operative word.

Javier Bardem's controlled, intelligent, beautiful performance is the only thing of integrity in this overblown, pretentious, tiresome movie. Except for the fact that everything happens in Barcelona and mainly to one character, instead of the customary multiple threads in Alejandro González Iñárritu's work, I don't see that he has curbed his melodramatic tendencies at all. Quite the contrary, at this point it is evident that Iñárritu has a hyper-sentimental, super-melodramatic sensibility that he wields with the finesse of a wrecking ball, and it is useless to expect from him any kind of restraint in the emotional department. Or in any department. He hits every note, of acting, cinematography, editing, sound design, art direction so hard and so bluntly, that you leave the film absolutely exhausted, as if you had ran a long and joyless marathon. Which is a pity, because he certainly works with extremely talented people and he is capable of orchestrating great scenes once in a while. Unfortunately, his intense energy, which has always been his strong suit, has given way to a sanctimonious moralizing streak I find endlessly boring. 

Biutiful keeps falling back on familiar tropes, and Iñárritu's style has now become a formula, which is to say, a cliché. Cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto is a master of color and composition, and he shoots the human face beautifully. The richness of detail in every frame is almost overwhelming. However, the cinematography would have had a much more powerful effect if they had held back a little on the wow factor. It's as if they want to show off their prowess in every single scene. There is a chase scene that tries to do, much less effectively, what the amazing and much imitated opening sequence of Amores Perros did much better; there is a too long sequence at a disco that tries to overdo the sequence at the Japanese disco in Babel. As much as I like Gustavo Santaolalla, a lot of the music is a rehash of all the scores he's done for the director, except for a lovely piano piece that mercifully cuts through those weepy guitars. And the writing is ponderously poetic, self-conscious and stilted. Plus, I'm tired of the globalization thing. 

Javier Bardem is the miraculous center of stillness in this humorless hurricane of pathos. He is a great enough actor that he shrugs off every excess around him and applies himself to the task with such dignity and grace, that if it weren't for him I probably would have abandoned ship halfway through. He counters the director's broadness with a magnificent, restrained, deeply empathetic performance. Not so his cohort Maricel Álvarez, who, because she is supposed to be bipolar, is instructed to tear up in every scene as if she was in the receiving end of tear gas canisters. She tries too hard to be manic, in a failed Almodovarian way. But Almodovar is a master at calibrating the bipolar tendencies of women with spunk, charm, and loving humor, whereas here what should be a sympathetic character quickly becomes someone you want to silence with a fist to the face. One cannot understand how a superior human specimen like Javier Bardem could fall for such a floozy. 

Many are the flaws of this movie, but to see a great actor rise quantum leaps above his material, check out Javier Bardem. 

Nomination Nation

Here we go again. This time it's 10 best picture nominations so presumably there will be more suspense until we confirm that indeed The King's Speech won.
Here are my agreements and disagreements. The lists are in order of personal preference. The color type -- the inexplicable snubs. Asterisk connotes actual prediction.
For the first time in years, the Best Picture category is a toss off and there are at least 5 good movies in it. Most probably it will be The King's Speech, today's Chariots of Fire, and a huge crowd pleaser. But it would be way cool if it was a bona fide American Western. Or an American movie. We finally got some great contenders. Fuck the Brits! I'm also rooting for Black Swan, for sheer cojones.

Best Picture
True Grit GO ROOSTER!
Black Swan
The Social Network
*The King's Speech
The Fighter 
Blue Valentine: I find it a travesty that this movie was ignored in most important categories. It is one of the best American movies of the year.
Inception 
The Kids Are All Right 
127 Hours 
Winter's Bone Overrated. Indy has become a formula and they are always freezing their asses off. 
Toy Story 3 Haven't seen it yet...

Best Actor
James Franco, 127 Hours  As much as I love Firth, I'm rooting for Franco. Also since I believe that everything is already preordained, he may win only because he is the emcee.  
*Colin Firth, The King's Speech
Jeff Bridges, True Grit
Jesse Eisenberg, The Social Network
Javier Bardem, Biutiful  Haven't seen him but he is always amazing. Or is he the token ethnic?

Ryan Gosling, Blue Valentine

 
Best Actress
*Natalie Portman, Black Swan I usually hate her, but she went to bat for this one. Annette Bening, The Kids Are All Right
Michelle Williams, Blue Valentine
Jennifer Lawrence, Winter's Bone
Nicole Kidman, Rabbit Hole I have not seen her. But contrary to what many of you think, she is a good actress.

Best Supporting Actor
*Christian Bale, The Fighter
Geoffrey Rush, The King's Speech
John Hawkes, Winter's Bone

Frank Langella Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps. 

Tommy Lee Jones The Company Men 
Ewan McGregor I Love you, Phillip Morris

Jeremy Renner, The Town
Mark Ruffalo, The Kids Are All Right  Charming, but no great shakes.

Best Supporting Actress
Jacki Weaver, Animal Kingdom 
*Amy Adams, The Fighter 

Melissa Leo, The Fighter 
Hailee Steinfeld, True Grit. I'm the only person in the world who didn't love this girl. She's impressive but not great. 
Helena Bonham Carter, The King's Speech She's great but she can do this in her sleep.

Best Director
This one is tough to predict. I'm really bad at predictions because I predict with my heart, and not with algorithmic calculation. 
Joel and Ethan Coen, True Grit GO COENS! 
Darren Aronofsky, Black Swan GO DARREN!
*David Fincher, The Social Network
Tom Hooper, The King's Speech
David O. Russell, The Fighter

Derek Cianfrance Blue Valentine

Best Original Screenplay

Blue Valentine This script will be studied for generations to come. Egregious mistake not to nominate it. 

Black Swan Why is it not here?

*The King's Speech
The Fighter 
Another Year 
Inception You've got to be kidding me.
The Kids Are All Right  This movie worked my last nerve.

Best Adapted Screenplay
True Grit
*The Social Network
127 Hours
Toy Story 3
Winter's Bone

Best Cinematography
True Grit GO ROGER DEAKINS!
Black Swan
*Inception (Consolation prize)
The King’s Speech
The Social Network Everything is yellow, as in every David Fincher movie.

Best Foreign Film 
*Biutiful (Mexico) They tend to pick tearjerkers.
Dogtooth (Greece)  I'm rooting for this one. I'm amazed it made the cut. A very original, disturbing film.
Hors la Loi (Outside the Law) (Algeria)
Incendies (Canada)
In a Better World (Denmark)

Documentary (Feature)

Exit through the Gift Shop YAY! Banksy sells out!
Gasland
* Inside Job
Restrepo
Waste Land  I found this doc irritatingly self-serving. 

Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work  An honest look at a hardworking, desperate, hilarious woman.

Best Animated Film
How to Train Your Dragon
The Illusionist
*Toy Story 3

Art Direction
The King's Speech
True Grit
*Inception Consolation prize 
Alice in Wonderland
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1
 

Costume Design
The Tempest GO SANDY POWELL!
Alice in Wonderland
I Am Love
*The King's Speech
True Grit

Music (Original Score)

*The Social Network GO TRENT REZNOR!

True Grit Carter Burwell

How to Train Your Dragon (?)
Inception
The King's Speech I love Desplat but who gets the Oscar, Beethoven?
127 Hours I hate the A.H Rahman disco adventure. All that was missing was a mirror ball.


Film Editing
*Black Swan
The Fighter
The King's Speech
127 Hours
The Social Network

Sound Editing
Inception
Toy Story 3
Tron: Legacy
True Grit
*Unstoppable 


Sound Mixing
Inception
*The King's Speech
Salt
The Social Network
True Grit


Makeup
Barney's Version
The Way Back
The Wolfman


Music (Original Song) WHO CARES?

*“Coming Home” from Country Strong
“I See the Light” from Tangled
“If I Rise” from 127 Hours
“We Belong Together” from Toy Story 3


Documentary (Short Subject)
Killing in the Name
Poster Girl
Strangers No More
Sun Come Up
The Warriors of Qiugang


Short Film (Animated)
Day & Night
The Gruffalo
Let's Pollute
The Lost Thing
Madagascar, carnet de voyage (Madagascar, a Journey Diary)


Short Film (Live Action)
The Confession
The Crush
God of Love
Na Wewe
Wish 143

NYFF: Revolución

 
To commemorate 100 years of the Mexican Revolution, young Mexican filmmakers were given a budget and total artistic freedom and asked to deliver ten 10 minute short films on the topic. The results are a mixed bag, and the collection is interesting, as much for its failings as for its successes. I'm reviewing them here in order of personal preference.
My favorite short was the first one, La Bienvenida, by Fernando Eimbcke. To me, this beautiful black and white movie is like Mexico in a nutshell, with a nod to Juan Rulfo. A combination of progress and stasis, of modernity and tradition, and more than anything, of enormous promise that fails to materialize (which is what happens in general with this collection of shorts). I knew the short was by Eimbcke a minute into it: a restrained camera, beautiful shots, and a sweet, evenhanded and refreshing lack of histrionics, which is what I most hope for when watching Mexican movies. Someone who doesn't smother everything with sentimentality. My only nitpick is that it relies too much on fades to black. A municipal band in a small town in the boonies is rehearsing for a concert. The young tuba player is out of it. He is chastised and asked to get his act together before the concert tomorrow.  This man has a tuba but no running water. His life is hard, but he rehearses.  Big day comes, tuba player is ready, so is the orchestra, made of poor people that nevertheless attack the Don Giovanni overture with heart. The conductor gives a typically overly flowery speech and the band waits for whatever important dignitaries to pass through that dusty, unpaved, forgotten corner of Mexico. The orchestra is ready, but they never come.
My second favorite short was Rodrigo Plá's 30-30, a spot-on short about the grandson of Pancho Villa, who is asked by the municipal president of a small town to be the guest of honor in the Revolution Day celebrations. The man has prepared a small speech that he wants to run through the mayor, but the functionary doesn't want to hear it. He tells him that in Mexico of today he can speak his mind. The festivities are garish, complete with cardboard cutouts of Villa and Zapata, and a Miss Soldadera contest, but Pancho Villa's grandson's speech is never allowed to happen. Plá uses stills to convey all the devalued acts of commemoration this dignified man is dragged to by government officials because there is not enough time in the world, let alone the span of a short film, to represent the tsunami of demagoguery that the Mexican government (regardless of which party is in power) is capable of. 30-30 (the name comes from a carbine used in the revolution, but I venture to interpret that it may also be a play on hindsight, like 20-20 vision) is a dispiriting short, with mordant political humor, and it speaks the truth sharp and crisp.
Mariana Chenillo's La Tienda de Raya was one of the most promising shorts, mostly well written, well directed and well acted, but the end is disappointing. The protagonist, a woman with a mellifluous voice who works at a big supermarket, is invited on a date by her besotted store manager and she wants to fix her front false teeth for the occasion. But she doesn't have enough money for the treatment. The store pays part of her salary with food vouchers (this is reminiscent of pre-revolution days, in which peasants were swindled out of their impoverished earnings by having to buy their food at the estate stores of the landowners, an abusive practice that died with the revolution). The woman wants to be paid in cash and the store says no. A fellow employee gives her the number of a lawyer who then files a lawsuit against the store. I was surprised that Chenillo makes the woman into a passive victim, instead of someone a la Norma Rae, who takes a stand -- a little personal revolution. Instead, the woman acts surprised when she sees the lawsuit document, as if she had nothing to do with it, is fired and end of story. This kind of futile ending is one of many instances in Revolución that show acute disillusionment with the way things are. But a passive, clueless protagonist is not as interesting as someone who acts, or at least learns something from her experience.
The last short in the film, Alvarado and 7th, by Rodrigo García, is a gorgeous piece of filmmaking, a vignette of life unfolding today in slow motion at that very Mexican corner of Los Angeles, as some Mexican revolutionaries on horseback pass by, while people continue their comings and goings without noticing. It is beautiful and poetic, (what good was the revolution if 11 million Mexicans are living north of the border?) but I was a little underwhelmed. I wished to see the horses at least run into a gallop. 
I am not a fan of Gerardo Naranjo's films, and his short was more stylish than substantive, yet it was bold, sparse and arresting, although he could have told the same story in 5 minutes. A man is carrying a wounded man on his shoulders. They are both bloody; we don't know why. They come to a road. Nobody stops. The man who isn't wounded goes to a bridge and throws a rock down at a car, smashing the windshield, but the car just gets the hell out of there. Then he finds some metal things to throw, aims at a motorcycle, kills the guy and then takes his friend on the motorcycle. Lawlessness. A cycle of violence. End of short.
We know we can count on Carlos Reygadas to lay it on thick with his insistence on epater-ing le bourgeois come hell or high water. I thought his entry was interesting the first five minutes. Beats me if I'm getting this right, but it looks like he assembled a bunch of Mexicans of different social classes for a picnic of sorts in Tepoztlán, a small colonial hippie town near Mexico City, and he had 5 cameras recording bits of conversation. Bad sound, shaky camera work, and people talking mostly bullshit. The rich Mexicans look as appalling as they are in real life, the poor ones as ignored as they are in real life and neither the twain shall meet, which is as it is in real life. This being Reygadas, there has to be a shot with an unkempt indigent man touching himself -- we are lucky that Reygadas didn't bring in a morbidly obese woman to perform fellatio on a midget. I liked the audacity of the approach at the beginning, but when a formless 10 minute short feels like 10 hours, interest quickly becomes annoyance. Kids destroy an abandoned car, people get wasted, they start destroying stuff, but it is not entirely clear what the point is of this exercise. I assume it is to represent, in sort of a hellish tableau vivant, what Mexico is like: chaos neatly separated by race and class. But as is usual with Reygadas, I always smell a whiff of exploitation of the non-actors in his work and a big puff of self-important auterism. I find him hard to take.
Also rather pretentious, but less oblique, is Amat Escalante's El Cura Colgado, also Rulfian and stark in its aesthetic, like the Eimbcke short. A priest is hanging from a tree, his horse and altar boy burned. If you are Mexican, you know this must be taking place at the time of the Cristero war, a bloody episode tied to the revolution in which scores of Catholics were massacred. A boy and a girl appear on a donkey and untie the priest. The donkey gives out and the 3 souls walk in the desert, fleeing from violence. They walk and they walk until suddenly they come to a modern road, pockmarked with Costco and McDonald's. They cross a barbed wire fence and walk among the cars, asking for charity. To judge from the pixelated faces of some of the drivers, this was shot cinema verité like, without obtaining releases, which is unnecessarily distracting and confusing. The end scene takes place at a McDonald's counter, with the three hungry and thirsty protagonists staring at the menu board in incomprehension. I get the very obvious point, but this scene made me think that even though we despair at the proliferation of food chains in Mexico, we are still poor enough that wherever you find a McDonald's, you are bound to find a perfectly decent taco stand around the corner.  The next Mexican revolution may very well happen the day there is no more street food left to eat.
Lucio, directed by Gael García Bernal, is charming but underwritten. Too much vague symbolism without a coherent end. I extrapolate that it is some sort of parable about the tension between worship of government or worship of Catholicism, as symbolized by a group of young schoolchildren who are grappling with the demands of honoring those two powerful traditional forces in Mexico that are meant to be respected without questioning. Lucio, the young boy of the title, decides to stay away from both.
To be honest, I got the Cliff notes from Bernal, who explained his short at the Q&A. Without the explanation I'd be more at a loss. As many of the shorts in this collection, Lucio is a bit vague and doesn't have a compelling end, which makes the story feel weak. 
Lindo y Querido, by Patricia Riggen, exasperated me. This is a matter of sensibility. The short was of the few that is actually more fleshed out, but I have little patience for heavy handed cuteness and even less for sentimentality. A sick Mexican man in the US and asks to be buried in Mexico when he dies. His very Americanized daughter thinks this is a pain in the butt, which it is, but there are funeral agencies that repatriate dead Mexicans to be buried in the soil they miss and love but that never gave them much.
So she brings the dead man across the border (we've seen this before in Guillermo Arriaga's script of The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada). This cutesy stuff with dead people a la Weekend at Bernie's is not my cup of tea. It turns out that her grandfather had been a revolutionary and she learns the lesson of loving the land that you fight for even though it has treated you harshly. It seems petty to find issue with a short that has such good intentions and is a total crowd pleaser but I wish that Riggen could have kept her sentimental impulses in check.
Pacífico, by Diego Luna, to me was one of the weakest stories, which is disappointing, since Luna directed a very good documentary about boxer Julio César Chávez. This short is a muddled personal story of a young man who buys land in a corner of an undeveloped Mexican beach paradise (there must be exactly one beach left untouched) and he has to deal with his estrangement from his wife and child, a sleazy developer, and the locals. By the end, he misses his family and goes back to have dinner with his little boy. Not much rhyme nor reason to this one.
Absolutely none of the filmmakers felt they had anything to celebrate. The sense of disenchantment with the vastly unfulfilled promise of the revolution is the unifying thread of the film. All and all, most of the shorts could have been stronger, tighter and more effective.

NYFF: Somos Lo Que Hay/We are what we are

Romania, Israel, Korea, Chile, Argentina, are countries that have few resources to allot to filmmaking, yet they have produced a generation of immensely talented filmmakers and a host of extraordinary movies in recent years. They all seem to have encouraged a cottage industry of quality films despite their limited resources. After the great promise that was shown by Mexican films like Amores Perros and Y Tu Mamá También, which happened a more than a decade ago, Mexico seemed poised to burst out with a cinema of consistent quality. Alas, except for a few dignified exceptions (Carlos Reygadas, not my cup of tea but a darling of the cineastes, or Fernando Eimbcke), it really has not come to pass the way it should have. I don't begrudge the Three Amigos (Cuarón, González Iñárritu and Del Toro) their having decamped to the greener pastures of Hollywood. But it is worth noting that the great movies coming out of small countries are made by filmmakers who are working there and creating films about life at home. Mexico needs to nurture its homegrown talent and encourage it to stay there. Also, someone needs to start writing better movies. Staying home is not enough.
I think that the programmers of the NY Film Festival have this wishful thinking that there is something of value to show coming from Mexico, but except for Reygadas' Silent Light, so far the Mexican films I have seen in the festival in the last couple of years, suck.
This year, I have watched at least a dozen films and except for this Mexican turd, they all have very high standards. If I can surmise any reason why this film made the official selection in this and other reputable festivals, I venture it's because its cannibalistic twist is a novelty for the horror genre. However, this should not be reason enough to foist it upon the audience. Somos Lo Que Hay is half baked and amateurish and a wasted opportunity. The idea is original enough, and with more artistic discipline and a more sensitive filmmaker, it could have amounted to something better. After all, a family of cannibals in Mexico City is ripe material for a horrific and terrific commentary about the disintegration of the social fabric in Mexico, or about horriifying Mexican social mores. But the execution is sloppy and mediocre. The movie is disgusting but not disturbing, and the worst sin for a horror film: it's not scary or entertaining. It has no suspense, no tension and nothing truly horrifies, except how bad it is. The acting is abysmal, coming as it does from the Mexican school of hamming, where no one ever speaks normally and every line is grounds for extreme overreaction. Everybody cries bitterly and with great gusto at all times, and when they don't cry, they mope, and when they don't mope, they scream at each other. The only bright spot is a little cameo by Daniel Giménez Cacho who plays a morgue employee who beautifies the corpses and considers himself an artist. He's fun to watch and I kept hoping he'd come back. No such luck.  It would have been fun if you ended up rooting for the cannibals; instead, you pray someone takes them out as soon as possible.
As usual, the weakest link is the script. The dialogues are beneath basic. I wonder if the writer/director, Jorge Michel Grau, who is a graduate from the Centro de Capacitación Cinematográfica, has not been taught that it is entirely amateurish to answer every statement uttered by a character with the retort "what!?".
Grau didn't take the trouble to think through the characters or the story. It sounds and works like a first draft by a film student. This is a family who eats people because of a ritual that the director thinks it smart not to explain to the audience. There is a difference between mystery and confusion, but I'm afraid he thinks they are one and the same. I think the ritual thing is a cop out; "lazy" is the word that comes to mind. Doesn't make any sense. With all the great junk food we have in Mexico, why are these people eating their neighbors? A taco de carnitas in any corner stand would hit the spot.
The little dark humor there is, gets lost in the weakness of the story. The movie is mercifully short (although it feels much longer), but it is underdeveloped. The tone bothered me the most: sordid, morbid, overwrought, heavy handed, inconsistent. It's a clichéd, tired Mexican sensibility that some of our better filmmakers have dispensed with, and that is about time we got rid of (after all, we've been making movies for about 100 years). Why do we have good actors that are forced to ham it up, great cinematographers and excellent crews that work on utter duds? Because you could probably count with the fingers of one hand the people who know how to write a screenplay.

Apichatpong!

The man with the most wonderful name in cinema, Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul, won the Palme D'Or at Cannes.
I like his movies. I'm looking forward to seeing this one.
Love of my life, Javier Bardem shared the prize for best actor (¡Felicidades, guapo!) for his work in Biutiful, an Alejandro G. Iñárritu film we are hoping is not as over the top melodramatic as is his custom. Best thing Iñárritu has done lately is an amazing Nike spot for the World Cup.
A Mexican movie, Año Bisiesto, won the Camera D'Or for best first feature. Nice
!

NY Film Festival: I'm Going to Explode

We had a pretty good run with the first three movies we saw: The Class, Hunger and 24 City. These were films made by solid, talented, mature filmmakers. These are films that open your eyes to the world, that expand your horizons. Then came this appalling mediocrity from Mexico.
I guess that the selection committee was somehow charmed by the gall of a young filmmaker trying to do his own little version of Godard (Pierrot Le Fou, to be exact). There is nothing wrong with paying homage to your house gods of cinema, but if you are, you better have the decency to rise to the occasion. Unfortunately, I'm Going to Explode is a puerile, intellectually lazy, badly written, horribly cast, utter waste of time.
L'amour fou capers with two rebellious lovers have been done with far more panache, by Godard himself (Breathless), or in movies like Bonnie and Clyde. It is a small genre in itself. The irrational plays a big part in it. However, in this iteration, the irrational is also accompanied by the ludicrous and the stupid, to a point of insulting the intelligence of the audience with lazy, manipulative choices. For instance, one night the kids are found out in their hideout but the woman who finds them says nothing. Why? Who knows. There is no reason, except to keep the silly story going. In another awful scene, a bystander asks a horribly hemorrhaging character "what is wrong with you?" over and over. Does the filmmaker think that Mexicans are that stupid or does he not know how to write dialog? Or both?
One of the main problems of the film is that the two teenagers that play the lovers are utterly insufferable and vapid. So instead of rooting for them you want them to die; the quicker, the better. They are not given any intelligent or witty dialog nor are they resourceful enough actors to make any kind of mark. They not only have zero chemistry together. I actually think they have anti-chemistry. The more you see them, the more you loathe them. Their escapade, the most original part of which is that they are literally too close to home, seems more like an idiotic spoiled brat tantrum than something grounded on psychological reality. The kid is the son of a, guess what, corrupt right wing politico, and he is a little snotty sociopath. To our endless misfortune, Jean Paul Belmondo he ain't. He is a cipher, and totally incapable of charm. His consort is a girl with a grating tone of voice (she speaks like an entitled Mexico City rich girl, even though she is supposed to be from the colonial town of Guanajuato). They are both totally underwritten characters. There is no arc, there is no subtext, there is no motive, no nuance. The movie is at the level of a sketch. It plays like a first draft. It is all a pointless exercise in style.
I wonder what is happening in Mexico that consistently prevents Mexican cinema from maturing and breaking out. There have been several good movies (Amores perros, Y tu mamá también, which already happened a while ago, Temporada de patos, La zona), but unlike the push that quality cinema is having in other similarly economically challenged countries (Argentina, Korea, Israel), Mexican cinema cannot get out of its rut.
I think its a bigger problem than lack of funds or a total drought of good screenwriters. It's the nature of the place itself, where the upper middle class are so spoiled and sheltered from reality that they never grow up, and for the most part, these are the movies they make.

NY Film Festival: Silent Light

Or, I beg to differ. 

I see that Manohla Dargis and Anthony Lane, two critics I respect and admire, are both very taken by Silent Light, the movie by Mexican filmmaker Carlos Reygadas. Reygadas is our auteur, our artiste, which means his movies are heavily pretentious. I was not a fan of Japón, and because of that, I didn't see Battle in Heaven, but Silent Light did very well at Cannes so I saw it at the 2007 New York Film Festival.
For a while, Reygadas earned his reputation by staging sex scenes with very ugly, old or fat people. He must have understood that this kind of novelty quickly wears off, even for masochistic cineastes.
Silent Light is the story of a love triangle among members of the Mennonite community in the northern state of Chihuahua, Mexico. Reygadas used all non professional members of the Mennonite community (some of whom he had to cast in Canada and Germany) and the actors are mostly wooden, as most non-actors are. I have never understood the predilection of certain filmmakers for non professional actors. In my book, when dealing with fictional dramatic narrative, actors are always better than real people. In this case, it makes sense to use real Mennonites, because otherwise you'd have a pretentious version of Witness, and that is something nobody needs.
The movie starts with a sunrise in almost real time, so you know that you are in for excruciating slowness and you adjust your expectations accordingly.
Watching a sunrise in real time in real life is a miraculous experience. Watching it on a screen is a bore, regardless of how beautiful the sky and how chirpy the crickets. This is an important difference between cinema and real life. In cinema we cut to the chase and we can still get to experience the wonder. Call me a philistine, but I fail to see the point of a sunrise in real time in a movie. Nowadays I get less upset at these kinds of artistic overindulgence. After sitting through the 8-hour Bela Tarr extravaganza Satantango, I am almost inured to slow films.
Yet, even with its pretentiousness, I actually found Silent Light very absorbing and quite moving. It was interesting to observe the Mennonites, who are deeply religious, but apparently not as prudish as one would think, in their secluded life in Mexico, where nobody seems to bother them. Reygadas chose beautiful people for his film and he coaxed some authentic emotion here and there from his actors. Some of his austere staging reminded me of the films of Carl Theodor Dreyer. It is obvious that this film does not pretend to be something realistic, because paradoxically, the authenticity of the people makes the story seem very artificial, imposed on them. My question is, does the director get off on manipulating people who are not trained for the physical and emotional rigors of acting? This is an aspect of his movies that disturbs me. Am I the only one who smells the faint whiff of exploitation? Abbas Kiarostami also prefers non professional actors but I think he is careful not to cross certain boundaries, and somehow, because of his far superior writing, he gets something much more interestingly human in return (but also very slow).
I liked the movie better before I saw the director in the Q&A session. I objected to two things.
1. He was dressed as if he had just woken up and went to the corner for a bagel. There is nothing more studied than such willful, seemingly careless disregard for the appropriate attire, and I find that obnoxious.
2. He mentioned the word "Bressonian". Pre-ten-tious.

Pan's Labrynth

I'm not a huge fan of fantasy. In fact, I pretty much hate fantasy, a reason why extravaganzas like Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter simply do not interest me. I like my stories firmly rooted in reality, which tends to be messier and more complex than parables and fables and clean fights between good and evil. Sometimes, in the hands of a master like the great Japanese animator Miyazaki, fantasy transcends its limitations and is emotionally and dramatically real. But this doesn't happen in most fantasy movies and it certainly doesn't happen, much to my chagrin, in Guillermo del Toro's Pan's Labrynth.
I have been trying to understand why I disconnected from the film pretty soon after it started. I think the main reason is that, as is true in many works of this genre, none of the characters are multidimensional. They all represent something, but they are really no one. It is a credit to some of the talented actors in this film, particularly Maribel Verdú (from Y tu mamá también), that they try with all their might to infuse human verisimilitude to characters that are woefully underwritten.
The premise of the movie is potentially interesting. At the time of the Spanish Civil War, a little girl is brought to the house of a fascist captain in the woods who is still fighting the defeated Republican forces. Her mother has married this awful man and the girl, who is an avid reader of fairy tales, escapes into fantastic stories to deal with her increasingly deteriorating reality. She finds the courage to deal with the situation by inventing a fantastical quest that will have consequences in reality. So far, so good. The problem is that the Spanish Civil War was a very real bloodbath in which the Spaniards went against each other with terrible ferocity, and to this day it has left a national wound that has not really closed. If it becomes the stuff of legend, it loses its place in historical reality, which is where it should remain, in my opinion. It brought to mind that unspeakably offensive movie by Roberto Benigni, Life is Beautiful (give me a break), where in order to escape reality some guy clowns around in a concentration camp. Pan's Labrynth is not at all as revolting and tasteless as that, but for me, there is no room for fantasy when it comes to the history of human terror.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions. The intentions of Pan's Labrynth are certainly immaculate: it is supposed to be a powerful message against fascism, against those who obey without questioning, against those who hate books and imagination, against the precision and heartlessness of perfect order. But somehow, it failed to move me. Somehow it managed to make me not care about this child, and I think it was because it was too busy sending AN IMPORTANT MESSAGE. It was thoroughly devoid of wit or a sense of humor. It is a huge problem when filmmakers take themselves and their material so seriously. If they can't crack a joke, if they don't know the wonderful empathetic powers of comic relief, or at least of irony, they lose me at hello.
The fantastical creatures were not particularly engaging, and in fact, the main faun was so utterly cheesy and hammy that I resented every time he made an appearance. I disliked him intensely. This was no Puck or Ariel or any of those bona fide fairies that have a sense of mischief and a sense of humor. This was ponderous fantasy, with a solemn and important theme, and solemnity is utterly boring. Which is puzzling, because I saw Mr. Del Toro in an interview and he struck me as a smart, witty, engaging, articulate man. Sadly, little of that was in evidence in his movie.

La Zona

A very interesting, gripping Mexican film by Rodrigo Plá, La Zona is a good metaphor, very grounded in reality, of the corruption and social inequality that plague Mexico. What makes it very provocative is that even though some may mistake it for science fiction, it basically takes reality only one notch further, and even then the exaggeration is totally feasible.
A bunch of wealthy neighbors live in a closed compound in Mexico City, where they have created their own little world in which the only contact they have with the rest of society is through their servants. They have their own security force, their own chapel, even their own school. The rich kids are sheltered from the poverty that surrounds them in the slums that proliferate right outside their walls. They are sheltered not only from the poor, but from reality. They live in a bubble in their own country. In Mexico City there are many such residential developments and neighborhoods where people just close off their streets and hire private guards, so nothing sci-fi there.
(By the way, I'm dying to know how the privileged audiences reacted to the film.)
Except for the detail of the school, which is a slight exaggeration, all this is already happening in Mexico City (as it is in Sao Paulo or Caracas, or you name it).
Three young punks from the neighboring slums come into the gated community to steal and things go awry. People are killed. Because of the wealthy Mexicans' not unfounded fear of the police, and because of their rampant paranoia about crime, these rich people decide to take matters into their own hands rather than calling the law, which is so blemished by corruption that everybody thinks they are above it, particularly the rich, who buy it on occasion.
This is the part of the movie that stretches credibility for me. I think that what the rich would actually do would be to call their friend of a friend who has a friend in high places and pay the police off to do the dirty work. They'd be too lazy and squeamish to do it themselves. However, I can understand that there are fictional, dramatic requirements that need this kind of poetic license, and the film, to its credit, makes it work.
The film takes the crux of life in Mexico and extrapolates it to a microcosm that reflects it pretty accurately. There are insufferably arrogant rich people (who are not an exaggeration) and there are people with some sort of conscience but with too many private interests or just too much comfort to really bother.
And then there is the police. When they come to investigate reports of gunshots, the rich immediately try to buy them off (an instant reflex, perhaps). The commanding officer doesn't take the bribe, not because he's beyond reproach (no one is) but because he feels insulted, and with reason. As he decides to investigate, at first just to spite them, then with some principle, he of course runs into venal corruption from above, not only rendering all his efforts useless, but creating even more appalling injustice, which victimizes the truly innocent.
The film is clear eyed and does not leave people off the hook; there are no unimpeachable heroes (no one would believe that, since Mexico is a country of cynics), just people struggling with their notions of right and wrong and how they can be applied to such unfairness. Yet everybody's choices are marred by corruption so deep, nasty and pervasive that they are up to their necks in it. Some of the images are strong and effective metaphors: a golf course surrounded by hills rife with slums, the rich disposing of the bodies of the poor in garbage bags, a chase scene inside a sewer (echoes of The Third Man) that ends still inside the fortress of the compound. There is no way out.
In the end, justice is not served, (this would truly be a fantasy); there is only the awakening of conscience in each individual, which should be taken as a triumph. The final image of the film is of a rich teenager finally escaping his enclave, right into the midst of what his parents were trying to shelter him from all along. He eats some street tacos in the dark in the middle of the slums. When I saw the taco stand, with its two hardworking taqueros bathed in golden light, I knew he was safe. I saw redemption.
This is what you are missing, rich people, the movie seems to say, and this is who you are insulting with your contempt and your racism: the country that feeds you, literally and symbolically.

Un Mundo Maravilloso

I almost resent giving space to this failed Mexican movie, but I saw it yesterday at Lincoln Center as part of the Film Comment Selects series. I had really liked director's Luis Estrada dark political satire La Ley de Herodes and I was looking forward to this one, what with the recommendation of such august film buffs as the Film Comment guys. But A Wonderful World disappoints. It is a political satire/fable, and the premise is interesting. In a not too distant future, the Mexican Minister of Economy declares there is no more poverty in Mexico and plans to run for the leadership of the World Bank. However, a homeless drunk gets in his way. On paper, the movie should work like a charm. It's a very dark satire of the Mexican elite's indifference to the poor. But the execution is very flawed, even if the film boasts a veritable roster of some of the best Mexican acting talent around.
This is what really bugged me:
The rhythm is glacial. The plot meanders. And every scene is way too long. Every scene could have been cut in half and it would have still expressed its point, but Estrada loves the sound of characters cursing colorfully yet endlessly. He and his co-screenwriter, and the editor haven't apparently gotten yet William Shakespeare's memo that brevity is the soul of wit, and so it is with this film -- long and increasingly witless. Satire requires precise, surgical timing, economy of words and feelings and a coldish heart. None of this is in evidence here.
There is a virulent strain of sentimentality coursing through this film's veins that really is unbearable.
It's so bad that in scenes where the bum cries you can actually hear they added sniffles in postproduction. So cheesy! There is a ridiculous, rather offensive love story, between the bum, played with great panache, and quite some hambone by Damián Alcázar, and a poor woman called Rosita, played by the unfathomably ubiquitous Cecilia Suárez. Now why is this offensive?
1. Because Cecilia Suarez is not believable as an impoverished inhabitant of a slum. She is tall and pretty and white as snow and and her attempts at sounding low class are absurd. I wonder if there are no other Mexican actresses available that don't look like they were born with a silver spoon in their mouths. She seems like she's trying to channel a silent film actress and the comic character of La Chilindrina, and she is not only insufferable but silly. Why could a poor woman not be anything other than a blathering, innocent imbecile? It is a disgraceful performance and no friend of anybody who is poor.
2. Because the Mexican rich and or middle class (and this includes the filmmakers) still think that the poor speak and behave like comic characters out of a 1940's movie. This may have been the intention, but it backfires, because instead of portraying them with some modicum of dignity, they are just corny stereotypes. Good hearted and innocent, to boot. This is patronizing. And patronizing is what the Mexican elites are and have always been to the poor. This is actually one of the points of the movie so it is rather maddening that this awareness didn't seep through to the way the poor are portrayed.
The bum has a collection of bum friends (all great Mexican actors: Jose Carlos Ruiz, the great Jesús Ochoa and the great Silverio Palacios) and they are cool, but the direction as usual is as if they were playing to the rafters in Azteca Stadium.
3. There is a sequence in a hospital which is a completely unnecessary, cheap, pathetic dig at Mexican Jews (which by the way, are like less than 1% of the general population). It's supposed to be a very fancy private hospital, called Sinai, and it seems like all the patients wear yarmulkes just so you don't miss the point, that Jews are the only people in Mexico who can afford fancy hospitals, which of course is not true. An attempt at wit is to see signs for the spa and the golf course and the pool in the hospital's lush grounds. My heart froze when I saw this. It is amazing to me that screenwriters Estrada and Sampietro would write something so objectionable, so stereotypical, so inane and so uncalled for.
4. I can imagine what they were trying to achieve with the production design, which oscillates between the shiny modern Mexico and the slums, which are given a sepia, Fellinesque treatment, but even this seems pretentious and half baked.
In short, a good idea terribly executed. Lazy and mediocre, written with more stupidity than wit.

Review of A Movie I Haven't Seen III

The New York Times reports that Luis Mandoki's documentary on Andrés Manuel López Obrador, "Fraude, Mexico 2006", has been a huge box office success in Mexico and that people are screaming at the screens in frustration for what the documentary clearly, to judge from the title, considers the fraudulent win of the current President, Felipe Calderón.
I have not seen the movie but I understand it is a deeply one sided affair that portrays AMLO as a victim of corporate and government manipulation. Perhaps it is true, but how can you believe a documentary that is financed in part by one of AMLO's friends and that has clear subjective leanings towards its hero?

In the period before the election, Mr. Mandoki made a glowing biographical film about Mr. López Obrador, a populist who promised to end tax breaks for the rich and break up monopolies.The new film, “Fraud, Mexico 2006,” lays out in detail the arguments of leftists who say the combination of a smear campaign and fraud at polling places swung the election to President Calderón. Mr. Mandoki got financial backing for the movie from Federico Arreola, a journalist, entrepreneur and close campaign adviser to Mr. López Obrador.

It would not have killed Mr. Mandoki to balance it out a bit. AMLO is not a little innocent political dove. He gives as good as he gets. It would have been far more interesting if the documentary was more nuanced and showed the disgraceful circus on both sides that is Mexican politics.
What is troubling is that Warner Brothers had enthusiastically decided to support the film, and according to Mandoki, it bowed out due to pressure from Televisa, the long time Mexican media conglomerate. They claimed it was because they decided that a documentary in Mexico would not be profitable. This would be laughable if it weren't so repulsively cynical. After the mass demonstrations AMLO commandeered in Mexico City, where hundreds of thousands of people disrupted life for months on end, how could anyone think that nobody'd be interested in such a film? Mexicans are always starved for the actual truth. They love reading, talking and making jokes about their own reality, and finally a film comes out about it, and the pretext is that it's not profitable.
It is insulting, to say the least.
In what must feel like a delicious dose of schadenfreude to the producers, the film has grossed about a million dollars to date, a huge amount for a documentary in Mexico. Maybe the media conglomerates will learn a little lesson that strongarming and trying to silence a film is not good for business.
As a first successful political documentary in Mexico, it's a good thing, but I'm not surprised that this is what we get: we are still not there yet when it comes to true plurality of opinions.

The Stuffed Enchilada Awards

Every time the Film Critics Society of Tejeringo el Chico, or The Golden Chicken Awards, or the National Bores of Review or the Morons' Choice Awards announce their nominations, I writhe in frustration because I don't get it. With any luck, the obviously great performances that cannot possibly be overlooked make it to the list, but the rest is random bullshit. Like for instance, nominating Daniel Craig for best British actor (BAFTAS) but ignoring Clive Owen's much superior performance in Children of Men. Or giving Babel 758 nominations and ignoring Children of Men. Why?
I know this is a frivolous, banal and moronic subject, but I don't care. Here are my nominations and the people who are winning my awards:

And the Stuffed Enchilada goes to:
Best Film not in English
Volver and Indigenes (In my awards there are plenty of ties and nobody complains)

Best Supporting Actress
Abigail Breslin -- Little Miss Sunshine
and
Carmen Maura -- Volver

Best Supporting Actor
Alan Arkin -- Little Miss Sunshine
and
James McAvoy -- Last King of Scotland
and
Michael Sheen -- The Queen

Best Actress
Helen Mirren -- The Queen
and
Judi Dench -- Notes on a Scandal
and
Meryl Streep -- The Devil Wears Prada

Best Actor
Clive Owen -- Children of Men
and
Toby Jones -- Infamous

Best Cinematography
Emmanuel Lubezki -- Children of Men
and
Rodrigo Prieto -- Babel

Best Art Direction
Geoffrey Kirkland -- Children of Menand
Brigitte Broch -- Babel

Best Original Screenplay
Paul Greengrass -- United 93
and
Peter Morgan -- The Queen

Best Adapted Screenplay
Patrick Marber -- Notes on a Scandal
and
Douglas McGrath -- Infamous
and
the 83 people who adapted Children of Men

Best Director
Paul Greengrass -- United 93
and Stephen Frears -- The Queen
and Alfonso Cuarón -- Children of Men
and Martin Scorsese -- The Departed

Best Movie
United 93 and The Queen

The Sour Enchilada for Unfairly Praised Movies Award goes to:
Pan's Labyrinth
Little Children 
Babel

To Make A Long Story Long

This is my year of sloooooooooooooooooooow movies.
Silent Light, by Mexican filmmaker Carlos Reygadas. Reygadas is our auteur, our artiste, which means his movies are heavily pretentious. I was not a fan of Japon, and because of that, I didn't see Battle in Heaven, but Silent Light did very well at Cannes so I ventured out to the New York Film Festival.
For a while, Reygadas got his reputation by staging sex scenes with very ugly, old or fat people. He must have understood that this kind of novelty quickly wears off, even for masochistic cineastes.
The movie is the story of a love triangle among members of the Mennonite community in the northern state of Chihuahua, Mexico. Reygadas used all non professional members of the Mennonite community (some of whom he had to cast in Canada and Germany) and the actors are mostly wooden, as most unprofessional non-actors are. I have never understood the predilection of certain filmmakers for non professional actors. In my book, when dealing with dramatic narrative, actors are always better than real people. In this case it makes sense to use real Mennonites, because otherwise you'd have a pretentious version of Witness, and that is something nobody needs.
The movie starts with a sunrise in almost real time, so you know that you are in for excruciating slowness and you adjust your expectations accordingly.
Watching a sunrise in real time in real life is a miraculous experience. Watching it on a screen is a bore, regardless of how beautiful the sky and how chirpy the crickets. This is an important difference between cinema and real life. In cinema we cut to the chase and we can still get to experience the wonder. Call me a philistine, but I fail to see the point of a sunrise in real time in a movie. Nowadays I get less upset at these kinds of artistic overindulgence. After sitting through the 8-hour Bela Tarr extravaganza Satantango, I am almost inured to slow films.
Yet, even with its pretentiousness, I actually found Silent Light very absorbing and quite moving. It was interesting to observe the Mennonites, who are deeply religious, but apparently not as prudish as one would think, in their secluded life in Mexico, where nobody seems to bother them. Reygadas chose beautiful people for his film and he coaxed some authentic emotion here and there from his actors. It is obvious that this film does not pretend to be something realistic, because the authenticity of the peole makles the story seem very artificial, imposed on them. My question is, does the director get off on manipulating people who are not trained for the physical and emotional rigors of acting? This is an aspect of his movies that disturbs me. Am I the only one who smells the faint whiff of exploitation? Abbas Kiarostami also prefers non professional actors but I think he is careful not to cross certain boundaries, and somehow, because of his far superior writing, he gets something much more interestingly human in return (but also very slow).
I liked the movie better before I saw the director in the Q&A session. I objected to two things. 1. He was dressed as if he had just woken up and went to the corner for a bagel. There is nothing more studied than such willful, seemingly careless disregard for the appropriate attire, and I find that obnoxious. 2. He mentioned the word "Bressonian". Pre-ten-tious.
The Man from London, from Hungarian Bela Tarr, the granddaddy of slowness.
This movie is based on a story by Georges Simenon. Again, a relatively conventional, deeply ironic story about a man who steals a briefcase with stolen money, told in the stately sytle of Bela Tarr, in gray and gray, with endless travelling shots; every shot a composition like a painting and almost as motionless, strange locales and quirky characters. Except that this film is entirely humorless, except for the typical little dancing session at the bar between drunks, and kind of pointless. It's hard to feel any kind of emotion for the main characters because the staging is so artificial, the acting so exaggerated. Bela Tarr has a fondness for shooting some of his actors from behind so you only see the nape of the neck for like two hours. Then he stays on a distraught face for more hours. Satantango at 8 hours was less boring and less plodding than this film and it had far more life. You will excuse the sacrilege but Bela Tarr makes me want to take his movies and chop them off to humanly bearable rhythms. I'd bet they'd be even better if they were shorter and faster.
I appreciate the filmmakers that insist in bringing the moving image to a standstill, but for the love of God, I don't quite see why.