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1/10
A truck is crossing the street!!!!!!! Oh my God, watch it before you die !!!!!
26 December 2013
A circus attraction and a mysterious prince arrive very very (but very very!) slowly to a village where it is cold and the inhabitants are afraid of something. That's what you notice while you see how a very common sad guy commonly and sadly walks, commonly and sadly wanders, commonly and sadly eats, commonly and sadly works. He commonly and sadly looks after an old guy who is obsessed with the musical tempered systems that try to imitate the celestial harmonies: so hopefully, he says, all the tunings should be just, otherwise the Bach preludes sound badly, and blah, blah, blah....

That's the cultural stuff Bela Tarr found some day so he could use it in a new movie and look profound and exquisite. Because, if he finds that subject truly amazing, why does he use such an stupid piano new-age music for the first scene, that repulsive description of an eclipse with fake drunkards, so pedantic? Beeeeeeghhhhrpl.

Apart from that evident evidence, Tarr shows you everything very slowly (unbereable the scene when the truck crosses a big street, at 5km/h). But that slowness has no justification: it is the exact mirror of the stupid American action movies ("Gladiator", "Transporter"...) that show you everything very very fast so you can have the feeling of "frenetic action", which is what it's "really cool", oh yeah! These slow movies are also done to make the director and the believers feel that same feeling: "we are slow, we are really cool!, oh yeah!, amen!". Because in this movie there is no reason for slowness: there are no details, the story doesn't change, the characters are uninteresting and are never seen in a different way during the film, there is no sense of humour... "I'm slow, so I'm special", that's all.

It's in b/w and some people say it has a dream-like atmosphere. I think that in dreams the events don't happen so slowly, we don't need to dream every second that we are eating in the dream, or walking, and there is a kind of brutal presence of the unexpected, of elements that break the "artistic direction" of the dream, something that Mr.Tarr will surely not find "cool" enough.

I didn't like it very much.
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1/10
Stupid and unfortunate exploitation of Lorca's tragedy
11 May 2010
This stupid mixture of thriller and biopic is extremely ridiculous, dramatically cloying, from Andy Garcia playing a kind of Super-Lorca, to the costumes or the cheap touristic Spanish setting. The music is horribly cheesy, Franco's fascists appear as the bad guys of a bad thriller (they were actually more rude than that, and more dangerous). And there was nothing about homosexuality, SuperLorca should be a hero for all the audiences and Andy García has a Latin lover image to be protected. Don't play Lorca then! I don't know if it was less the time spent in investigating Lorca's real background during the civil war or the shame of the crew making such a horrible movie, in which I'm sure nobody believed. And what an ending...!

If you are interested in Lorca and know nothing previously about him, stay away from this thing. It deserves truly a 1, because no movie can be worse than this one. I don't know how his biographer (Ian Gibson) took some part, I suppose he regrets doing it, or maybe he needed some money.
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1/10
More than love, freneshi...t
2 March 2010
This movie is terribly bad. I don't know how this ¿script? passed any kind of selection. I must say that it is under the level of the actors in the movie, and, believe me, that's not easy. It's really sad to see that not one, but ¡three! directors, with all their talent together, are unable to overcome the level of shame.

In the beginning, Nancho Novo's faces, remembering some sexual-criminal scene, already promises the absurd and bad-done development of the rest of the movie. The mixture of Madrid's "movida" and the deep feelings and the thriller atmosphere is really pathetic. The personal stories of the characters have been seen thousand times before, although the directors show them as very interesting and full of deep passion. The violent ending adds more absurd stupidity to the plot.

Anyway, it's not a surprise to see how bad this film is. It is part of a sort of genre of Spanish bad movies, trying to imitate Almodovar's model, believing that filming sex, gay ambient, drugs and frenetic passions makes a movie a good movie. Unfortunately for these three directors, if you have a stupid story nothing works. And I guess that's what they will always have in their (I hope short) careers.
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The Good Life (1996)
2/10
The good life: a bad movie.
13 October 2009
Warning: Spoilers
I confess that I'm not very keen on movies of teenagers in their awakening to life. I hate their pretended poetry, and the usual pretension of showing what EVERY normal human being should have felt in that moment of life. Even though I identify with much of the situation or the feelings of the young protagonist, there is always something that takes me out. It's all so beautiful, even when it's not! Why these characters are always such good and interesting people?

Anyway, "La buena vida" is not even a good movie of this genre. It starts quite classically, although with no much interest, but it develops really bad, with more amount of drama than a cheap TV movie about cancer. The teenager's whole family dies, so there is a moment in which we see his drama of loneliness and afterwards how he struggles to lose virginity. This mixture works really bad, because nothing really works. And the ending is completely stupid.

Some people, in 1996, enjoyed the movie because of Luis Cuenca's interpretation as the protagonist's grandfather. OK, he is really good, but it's not enough. And we have Joel Joan to compensate for bad.
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1/10
The beauty of the small things.... again.
23 May 2009
Warning: Spoilers
An executive, very successful in his professional life but very unable in his familiar life, meets a boy with down syndrome, escaped from a residence . Both characters feel very alone, and the apparently less intelligent one will show to the executive the beauty of the small things in life... With this argument, the somehow Amelie-like atmosphere and the sentimental music, I didn't expect but a moralistic disgusting movie. Anyway, as there were some interesting scenes (the boy is sometimes quite a violent guy), and the interpretation of both actors, Daniel Auteil and Pasqal Duquenne, was very good, I decided to go on watching the movie. The French cinema, in general, has the ability of showing something that seems quite much to life, opposed to the more stereotyped American cinema. But, because of that, it is much more disappointing to see after the absurd ending, with the impossible death of the boy, the charming tone, the happiness of the executive's family, the cheap moral, the unbearable laughter of the daughters, the guy waving from heaven as Michael Landon... Really nasty, in my humble opinion.
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2/10
SURPRISE! Blood! Surprise! Killings! Surprise! Surprising guns! Yawn, Blood, Killing, Yawn, Yawn, Hermaphrodites, Yawn, More Blood, Zzzz
10 October 2008
If this movie has to be called the Miike's masterpiece, I wonder how bad will be the others. Miike desperately tries to find elements of surprise, in the way the killers act or in the exaggeration of the blood. Really funny the killing of the second old man, with all that blood impossibly flooding a car. It was actually a quite "tromic" image but, unfortunately, I think that Miike takes himself at least as seriously as his stupid characters do: it was merely an impact, with no sense of humor. That's why the ongoing surprises of the movie (strange killers, killings, blood, that's all; well, it has also a couple of unnecessary sex scenes among human beings!! Genius!!) are less and less surprising every time, and the movie gets more and more boring. The ending is the peak of the boringness and lack of surprise.

And please, bad Japanese directors, don't use those cheap "haiku" phrases with such stupid characters. It's unbearable to see a "chic" emo-killer acting as if he were a zen-poet: this is nothing more than the movie of the vagina-gun, man!!!!

In spite of reading some of the enthusiastic critics on this movie, with the analysis of its symbolism, the nonsense of the violence, the difficult relationship between fathers and sons, "the important questions the director asks to the world", etcetera, etcetera..., I still consider that Shakespeare is better than Miike.
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1/10
Unbearable chic movie, unbearable chic characters
23 July 2008
Some people wrote enthusiastic comments on this movie:

"In all its subtlety and sincerity it is something that could happen to all of us" "What has impressed me about this movie is the realistic way the characters are portrayed" "The dialogues are extremely lifelike" "I sometimes forget that they are only characters and not people I call as personal friends"

I don't think a Rohmer's movie is "just like life". But, in a few occasions, I have met some people who believe that life is something like a Rohmer's movie and act so!

Anyway, this is my humble opinion: if you enjoy long dialogues, long and significant silences, solipsist attitudes, and tons of deep-but-subtle-charming-interesting-mega-wonderful-but-common French human beings, "Conte d'ètè" is YOUR movie.

P.D. Rohmer is celebrated as a director who never uses music in his movies. He neither uses humor.
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Familia (1996)
2/10
Artificial movie about an artificial family
23 July 2008
Warning: Spoilers
The best thing of the movie is the basics of the plot: a lonely man hires a group of actors who will "play" his family on his 55th. birthday. That allows Fernando Leon to show some topics of the familiar conversations: sometimes we can feel that those pretended memories or feelings in the family are too similar to the real ones we live in our own families. Those are the best moments of the movie.

Unfortunately, I think that the development of the idea is rather poor. The problem is, in my opinion, the lack of credibility of the movie. I can't believe the human beings behind the actors (while they are not with the protagonist). It "smells" so much to script, to a writer trying to build situations that "make us think, mmmmmmm"!. I suppose it's Leon's style, but I am not fond of it. And actors (except a brilliant -in this role- Juan Luis Galiardo) don't help with their poor acting.
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5/10
The Day of The Warrios: a SIDARIS'Action Movie
19 April 2008
Some people (not Robert Bresson) proclaim a basic law of cinema: "whatever the movie is about, it will be better with breasts and zombies". Well, in "The day of the warrior" there are no zombies.

There is little to add to Sickcritik's brilliant dissertation on this movie. If you enjoy watching "apparently" bad movies, this is a good option. You will enjoy with Andy Sidaris' master subtlety to include scenes with naked breasts. The special effects (those explosions, those weapons...) will fascinate you, the thrilling acting will carry you away (the comic couple, the hispano, the Shakespearian actresses...), you will fear the extraordinary evilness of the villains, as the owl-killer blonde or the Warrior, a psychopath who loves to kill his victims with wrestling techniques, you will be surprised by a soundtrack that it's maybe the worst thing of the movie (and that's a merit!) and finally you will meet the mythical Elvis Fu: I think everybody should meet Elvis Fu before death.

So enjoy it!, but remember, don't expose to this movie's quality more than ten minutes every time: more is dangerous for your health.
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The Bait (1995)
8/10
When an American "thriller" turns into realistic "film noir".
16 March 2008
Great movie by Bertrand Tavernier. He is playing with the idea of a classical American thriller, which the male protagonists admire so much, as well as they look for the "American dream" in a Paris in crisis behind its "charmant" appearance.

Tavernier's intention is more realistic and, as life, less perfect than a classical script (curiously, the film is based in real facts). That's why we don't know many times where the film is going. But Tavernier employs that time to show us details of the life of very well-built characters. Specially good is the acting of the young woman.

Sad (but interesting!) impression in the end of the characters' "career". As a result of that, we have the impression of a not very healthy society, and without any need to insist by Tavernier during the movie. I recommend it, I feel it is even a bit underrated here.
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