O Filme do Bruno Aleixo

After Diamantino, contemporary Portuguese cinema brings us one more nonsense comedy, in what may be a quite innovative and audacious wave. This movie is about a film that the main character, Bruno Aleixo, needs to create for a producer. Them, he talks with his closest friends aiming to reach a nice idea. The surrealist issue is that those core characters are animals, statues or other antropomorphic non-humans. Why? How do I know? Just surrealist nonsense humor! The film was mixes a little animation with live action, in an intentionally weird way. The greatest merit, however, is probably exploring different cinema and TV genres in a very funny way. I have previously seen this in a hilarious 2008 Brazilian short film, 'Os Filmes que não Fiz', but not in a feature-length movie. This 'O Filme do Bruno Aleixo' is very skilful in changing colours, lettering, edition, cinematography, and so for, in its parodies of different genres. Quite clever. All the film design is nice too.

It's not a movie for everyone. Bruno Aleixo humor is a satire to the Portuguese popular knowledge and way of being. The characters are stereotypes of different ages and behaviors like the "macho" Bussaco to the millennial Renato. The movie itself is more like a long episode, it has some great parts and others less interesting but it manages to entertain in a way which is not common at all in a comedy movie. Give it a try

The actors save the movie. Great interpretations. It has really really good moments, some new and funny, the gore and horror added something new. BUT it also has excess of old references, supposedly nostalgic comic moments (aka boring) and much of the time i felt more like it was a merchandise move to put aleixo in a new bigger, unknown and very normative brasilian audience, more than the movie we actually deserved (older fans, brasilian and portuguese). the authors used to be called unaligned and it felt... Aligned. There were repeated jokes, and really easy going jokes for new viewers, and with big audiences in mind. It felt comercial, and i understand that the authors or the producer wanted to make this step, people don't just make movies for fun (or do they) it's understandable, but it simply wasn't as pure and as funny as the inicial series, and neither as clever as some (some) more recent jokes on the radio. It also felt like it was a little rushed idea, but well, that's what the movie is all about, i guess. I have to add, it fails desperately the bechdel test, and all the female characters are props. And that annoys me a bit (a lot, but i am used to it from the 90's). Still, it has excellent actors and really funny moments. I did not cry laughing, but almost all of the time i was giggling. It was ok.

I love Bruno Aleixo's character and João Moreira's craziness. Recently, I devoured Aleixo PSI and I think it fits perfectly as an example of something in between from the movie and the other short series by the way it successfully "goes out" from the natural habitat. The thing is... Aleixo PSI is shorter! 4 times shorter?

Although I don't think this movie shouldn't suffer from his length, it happens that it did and that "suffering" had been honestly revealed in every promotional interview I saw with João, as he tries to explain (or excuse himself?) this attempt of fitting this character in a 90 minutes movie. Maybe his not-too-proud-grinding-presence shown a backstage struggle to pull this off.

This shouldn't have been the kind of a aching struggle that I paid to watch on a theater. It was a shame to watch the total lack of creativity that fell upon this characters... and let's not confuse this with that good ol' nonsense! Definitely, João and Pedro Santo's "marriage" need some marital counseling... or the problem was just the pressure from the demanding opening doors to Brazilian audience? Or was it just the result of two guys not used to get out from their natural habitual? The thing is: no matter how fancy the birthday box is wrapped, it doesn't mean I should eat all its content. Basically, the only thing that I "ate" was what the trailer shown: the ADR work and acting (mainly) from Rogério Samora (cheers to Adriano Luz too). And they even failed to give it's best use to these actors! Would it make it to expensive, little "Johnny" boy? So you should get rid of ALL of the other actors because, other than that, are many meaningless acting parts... and many obvious attempts to gain some extra time just to fill the movie with some extra minutes. 90 minutes? They could even made it to 91! Bah! Laughable! Even more laughable is to hear a renowned Portuguese film critic, Rui Pedro Tendinha, praising this movie. The world is blind and doomed!

Normally, I see that this could have been interpreted as good nonsense humour but, let's get real: why the hell there is so many meaningless silences and so many meaningless scenes that end up going nowhere? Just miserable! So, with this lousy, poorly-laughable creativity exercise, I felt deceived in almost every scene because, no matter how many times João Moreira tried to excuse himself about this being low budget... instead of this typical Portuguese weeping argument he - more than everybody - should know that there's no need for a huge budget to do an amazing comedy short show. His job should have been to stick together several parts of great comedy shows as he is more than used to do. This was lazy and had nothing to do with it... not even with nonsense.

I saw this movie today in São Paulo, where it is being shown in only one cinema once a day.

For the 'happy few' who already know Aleixo from the internet, TV and radio, it is great to see him at the movies, although of course the picture suffers a bit from being longer than the usual 30 minutes series format.

Also, being Portuguese, it is quite interesting to read the subtitles :)

So, all in all, I think it was worth the ride of half an hour to each side in order to watch Bruno and his friends at the big screen.

And please remember "never slip all nude, the house might burn and then you will be outside, naked, while the firemen fight the fire"...