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Reviews
Zand (2008)
Visions of a kingdom built on sand
Coming from watching it at the Worldwide Short Film Fest in Toronto. Beautifully shot, this is a melancholic short film that manages to engage and leave a mark difficult to forget.
The two main roles are played with sparse dialogs and a touch of quirkiness that however, remains true to the spirit of the characters. But this movie is as much about a dad/daughter story as it is about hopes, intimacy, and impotence. And what really sets the tone of the story is the stage: a scenery that alternates the dreams of childhood and the omnipresent threat of those dreams brutally sand-buried by reality. A threat that, as the synopsis suggests and the movie gradually reveals, is more real where it is more hidden.
Great casting, great camera, touching short story.
Un minuto de silencio (2005)
Dignity and happiness are not for sale - even if you have nothing else to sell
Saw this movie as part of the official selection of the Bogota Film Festival, Oct 2005 - a deep, thoughtful tragic-comedy showing how a middle-class laid-off worker and his wife struggle with the Argentinean economic crisis while still trying to raise their kids in circumstances they never imagined. As in most of the newly 'globalized' Latin America, here there are no welfare programs, no social benefits, not even lay-off compensations: Ernesto and his family are literally thrown to the street, on their own: losing your job never meant losing your life more than here. The more time passes, the poorer they get, and yet even throughout this ambiance, they can still laugh, help people in church, worry about their children's education, and plan a vacation.
Don't be fooled by the film's poster: this is not a romantic, cry-a-lot, glorious-ending Hollywood movie; even by Argentinean movie standards, there are real issues being raised throughout all the film and yet, it manages to make its point with laughs and very good performances.
Magnolia (1999)
To be enjoyed with kid eyes and an open mind
I'm hardly a film expert, but you get to develop some instincts on movies from what you learn watching them. So when a Blockbuster clerk told me 'not to rent' this one "cause it's 3 hours long and everything is so complicated and unfolds so slowly.." he only made my mind about renting it. Boy, were my instincts right.
Don't be fooled by the flower-like name: this is not a weepy delicate movie. Nor is it an adrenaline-packed movie. It's like a well orchestrated band - or like a carefully crafted car: everything works so in sync that the final result is visually, mentally and spiritually enjoyable. The trick is to watch it with kid eyes: don't try to guess, watch CLOSELY - and allow yourself to be surprised. As I watched the story unfold, I liked it more and more: amazing characters, a well crafted plot, dark-comedy moments, some surprising twists and a lot of provoking visual metaphors. No moral lessons here, just a fantastic portrait of our world on the stories of these persons and the (casual?) convergence of their obsessive quests- making them so similar in the end - all united under the fantastic music of Aimee Mann.
Two images for posterity: Tom Cruise teaching his magistral class on being a man.. and the rain, the rain that pours..
Train de vie (1998)
Absurdly funny yet provoking
Different people see different things on movies. This, which may be an obvious statement, is specially true about Train de vie. So let me explain what I found, IMHO, marvelous about this movie, and why I would recommend it.
First of all, Train de Vie doesn't try to make a point about the Holocaust - is is just the perceived driver from which this community tries to escape. How this peculiar escape plan (with all odds against success) develops is just an excuse for portraying how war, religion, prejudice, ideologies, etc, end up affecting the life of simple people. Only that, instead of watching an emotionally-filled movie (which is Ok to me, but its not the only way to tell a sensitive story), we are presented with this in a more subtle way: as a townspeople tale where each of these real-world factors is reflected - in a mocked, twisted, funny way- inside the train environment. Communist dogma, nazi's 'ethnic order', social privileges, military commands, everything from which this community was isolated is suddenly 'infecting' people on the train, of course, with absurd consequences that go against the very goal of the community, life - just the same effect the outside-train world is suffering.
I'm not trying to say this is the one and only intention of the movie, yet, it is what I value the most. As for the rest of it, being a tale of townspeople, its characters are stereotyped yet intimate and natural in their motivations; from the music to the dialogs and comic situations, nothing is forced here. And you can end up laughing at the oddity of all this world, while thinking of just how tragically resembling of our own real world it is - something the ending just reinforces.
Whether you choose to see all this as a marvelous tale or as an offense to common sense is up to you; but certainly, there is a lot more to be watched throughout this story than its ending or its historical correctness. And I can hardly see any antisemitism on this.
The Matrix (1999)
Or when special effects DO have a reason
Matrix may not be a critic's classic, but surely it does differentiates it clearly from the typical action movie. If you think otherwise, I'd like to challenge you to watch more closely.
Two things I'd highlight in Matrix: 1) it's script, which is one of the few in movies to get the myth of the machine takeover and the possibilities of 'cyberworld' close to a real and clear plot (being a systems engineer, I can tell very few movies ever got near), 2) it is visually fantastic, and not because of the now widely copied slow-motion kicks, but because it aids in explaining the story and telling a lot of the double world you are experiencing. Just like the 'half floor' in Being John Malkovich helps the viewer accept the idea of the strange world the movie depicts, the high contrast - highly iluminated scenery when entering the matrix reminds of a 3d simulation; the excess of gunfiring could easily be taken out of DOOM games, and the slow-motion, multiple angle camera in action scenes reminds that, at last this matrix is a virtual world, where one can really control the evolution of the game.
In summary, I'd say it is very worth watching over and over and discovering new things about it. As someone said here, after watching it, one cannot help but think how much better all those expensive-budget Hollywood action movies could have been.