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Reviews
Nutcrackers (2024)
This christmas movie reminded me why I don't like kids
I'd watch anything with Ben Stiller in it, at least for a little while, and the little while here was pretty short. To tell the truth, I thought that this was a sure shot for our aging beloved Ben: an aloof businessman learning to love and become a father, as his sister died leaving him four preteen children.
And the kid actors are spot-on on how children behave after such a loss, becoming belligerent, full of angst, and looking for relief by being wild and unruly.
So it has all ingredients to become a tearjerker Christmas drama, but it wants to be an 'uncomfortable' comedy like Meet the Parents, or at least want to be sold as such. And that doesn't fly. Too much mourning and death for such a light-headed comedy it wanted to be. It doesn't fit.
It is set in farm, so it is also a fish out of.water situation for businessman Ben, from where half the 'jokes' come from; all the lazy tropes you already saw a thousand times: Does businessman Ben step on poop as soon as he leaves the car? Yes. Does Ben wake up with animals in his bed? Yes. Is Ben provoked by the kids to kill a chicken for supper? Yes.
And by then I turned off the movie, so take this review with a grain of salt, but whatever happens later in the movie, is already tainted by the tired writing by the numbers and the financial choice to tone down real life drama to fit into a feelgood comedy:
'I guess it is true what mom said about you,' says the older angst sad kid out of the blue in their first interaction.
'What is that?' Clueless Ben asks.
'That you can't love...'
'That is... stupid'
Indeed. Stupid writing. And also so on the nose that bleeds.
It is 2024, when we have access to all sorts of libraries of entertainment, including classics that done these same themes over and over, and you may ask yourself why you are wasting your Christmas time with this movie instead of those. Perhaps because this movie can make you happy that you don't have to deal with four sad hyperactive kids who lost their parents that you would never be able to replace.
Good photography, though.
Jobs (2013)
It's a half of a biography and this half isn't any good.
As Mike would have said, Hollywood is full of half-measures. A Full-measure would be making 'Jobs' into a 10-episodes TV series, it is just impossible to fit Steve Jobs story and the story of Apple Computers into a customary 1h40min movie.
The result is an incoherent sequence of vignettes, with random Jobs quotes here and there in soup opera dialogues. In one scene he treats employees like worthless trash, then on the next one he is applauded by them. Why? He tells his new future daughter to **** off, then by the end he has a sitcom scene with her. What happened in the middle? Steve Jobs's death stare was more important for the producers.
There were seminal events that affected Jobs that the movie opted to fly by, it didn't show that Jobs treated Woz as an adversary once Woz left Apple. Or that Jobs had deep troubled issues of being adopted. Or that Jobs didn't know how to code. Or that Jobs stole the GUI from Xerox. Or that Microsoft was part of the Macintosh team. Or that after leaving Apple Jobs failed miserably with his next company.
Sometimes the movie is also dishonest, no one applauded the first ipod presentation, it was just awkward with the audience at odds of a computer company entering the music market with a $399 device.
The movie is incoherent with it itself and the real life, the material is rich and Jobs personality is controversial enough, but the producers didn't care for any of that, it just feels like that the best stories weren't told.
The X Files: I Want to Believe (2008)
The Most Depressed Kiss in history of TV... I mean... Movies?
One thing Chris Carter got right about his series: that Mulder expelled himself from social living because he is different. And Scully got also excluded because she supports him at heart but, ironically, none of his beliefs. This was more important than conspiracies and UFOs, it was the core of X-Files: She always had to believe, but wouldn't.
And now they are together as lovers, they can't live without the other one but at the same time Mulder's compulsions are unbearable, "write a book" she says. It's depressing, they will never be happy: Mulder will never decease to be Mulder and Scully can't live with or without him. And past all these years they still struggle with their relationship, not sure if it was the right path, that only a supernatural "don't give up" may change.
Another gloomy part was Mulder talking briefly about his sister, that in 2000's his UFO beliefs are ridiculous as Santa traveling the sky. Mulder changed. He doesn't argue back. Not even a wisecrack. He is not so convincing anymore because looks so defeated as a Unabomber cliché. Its the Mulder helpless and without a badge. So he is hesitant, fearing the failure, wanting to be back in FBI investigations but hating the prospect of it.
Meanwhile Scully fights back a real life "church vs stem cell research" that might terminate her medical career. Her maternal side urges to save a boy that she never had or will have. She even fights the parents for his life revealing her as True mother in Salomon's sense. And Mulder is just not there, almost as if he doesn't care.
This is the canvas of I Want to Believe, everything else are cumbersome devices trying to appease the X-Philes that don't play very well in a larger screen: Any given moment a skeptical FBI agent walks away saying "it won't work, let's leave" Mulder has an epiphany saving the entire unorthodox investigation. Every time Mulder is revealing something new, Scully cuts it out until she has an epiphany herself. The audience can anticipate every plot move like a series rerun.
The X-files tune playing at the portrait of W.Bush suggests that Mulder and Scully doesn't have a place in FBI; of coursely, surely, after all, all Conspiracy Theories are very practical under the W.Bush doctrine. But the conspiracy motif that anchored the series were only explored in this silly moment; instead of the bigger-than-life "oh, the humanity" moment, the movie goes for a CSI case that doesn't redeem Mulder nor Scully a bit. The movie ends with a reticent acceptance that is all there is and their kiss is almost a manifestation of that. Is terrible to see two close friends of mine unhappy for life in the middle of the cold nowhere; their love for each other is virtually a curse.
Blindness (2008)
Can we live with no authorities without turning up into savages?
This movie isn't really about a population that went blind, but about imprisonment and its corrupted micro-power structures that we see in every 'prison-break' flick. And it doesn't try to be subtle as A Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest imprisonment but goes into black/white good/bad no-shades of Stanford Prison experiment.
Strangely, Blindness has a condescending vision about blind people to be so powerless, they even don't care were the bathroom is; they accept the situation as victims passing through no madness and revolt that hunger and abuse creates in a collectivity. The only one who acts is the one who sees (Julianne) when is too late and for the wrongest reason: revenge.
Women must hate this movie, Julianne's husband cheats in front of her and she accepts it right away (sure, he has his male ego hurt by her nursing him around, but her acceptance of his cheating just doesn't make him feel even more pitiful?) They gone to voluntary rape and she accepts it even having the greatest tool in the land of the blind. Does it tries to portrait that a strong woman is the one above pride? (are we in medieval Japan?). Maybe in another context it would be reasonable, but the story never goes deep or clever enough for the audience to agree with her passivity.
And many things doesn't make sense: the guards shooting blind people in the head near the outside walls; no one helps them with masks protecting themselves from infection; that only Julianne finds food in the dark; that the blind people on the streets doesn't talk to each other and behave like mindless zombies. What the evil blind King will do with his stolen jewelry?
It happens because, like the book, everything are metaphors, symbolisms and archetypes. The real consequences aren't there and it was a conscious choice from the authors (Saramago, Fernando and McKlevar). Maybe they were too blind by Nobel prizes and Oscars to see that this tale doesn't bring nothing new to the table. But still it is their microcosmos of our society.
Another strange problem is the message: The good dog is the dog who chose to not eat dead flesh from humans for survival. It should be: good dogs bring dead human flesh to save you from hunger. That you must do the unthinkable and distort the rules and morals of society to protect who you care. Even if is wrong. But the authors of this story see it as a savagery, that we turn into animals doing that. But isn't that the Truth? Contradictorily, the story condemns the system, the civilization itself in a portrait where authorities are heartless bureaucrats that doesn't care about us. And it is just another generalization that doesn't represent the whole truth, like stating that all politicians are equally corrupted.
But that was the question that Blindness tried to bring: Can we live with no authorities without turning up into savages? After all, this is a story about the collapse of society and Saramago's sequel 'Seeing' is about the entire population casting blank ballots after the disastrous epidemic of Blindness.
This question fails profoundly as the movie states that people are inherently good or bad; even in an apocalyptic situation this statement made Blindness shallow as a Mad Max continuation. To be good or evil is not in our genes, it is a choice, and that sometimes we are blind enough to make the right choices.
The Office (2005)
The world is just too small for two The Offices
The Office lovers, listen: there is only one 'Pam & Jim', or only one 'Dawn & Tim'. There is only one Assistant to the regional manager that you care. If you watched the UK version, you'll hate the American version... and The Office is made in Germany, Canada, France, etc, you'll hate each one of them. Because there is only one, the one you watched.
Steve Carell work is fantastic, Rick Gervais work is genius. And the American version was brilliant in its third season.
David Brent: You just have to accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue.