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Reviews
Imaginary Witness: Hollywood and the Holocaust (2004)
a piece for school, a film study that open eyes
A great review of what Hollywood needed to do -and whatnot- to expose Nazi Germany's intentions... It is a well-documented film with great interviews and original footage to prove that cinema can be used for either wrong or right purposes... This one, it is for the right mission: illustrate how coward was US witnessing what Hitler was doing against the Judaism... Nevermore, please! And even though some raw footage is missing when US troops discovered the death camps, the narration accomplished the feelings of those who watched back then... Hopefully Michael Moore sees this documentary to make him to shift their style of film documenting, where serious stuff can be covered straight forward, without all the comic gimmicks he used to abuse them on his films...
Temporada de patos (2004)
street funny -as urban kids are
Not only Fernando Eimbcke challenged himself to shoot a movie inside of an apartment but he casted three kids without any experience in acting. The result is an original realistic movie with truly funny young characters. And yes: there are guns, drugs, flirting and bare buttocks but in a unworried way -enough to be fun and not scary. It is Eimbcke's opera prima for a long movie and he proved that his experience directing music videoclips and comedic short movies is a good foundation for this movie. He already got seven "mayahueles" at the Guadalajara Film Festival, a MTV Movie Award and he got his chance of showing Duck Season at the International Critics Week in Cannes 2004.
21 Grams (2003)
personal tragedy and car crashing obsession
This movie is a way for Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu of doing catharsis for their own sorrow lived years ago when he suffered the lost of a family member. He explored the grieving and lightness means of life through not only the three principal characters but the people surrounding them. But besides the the plot that has a strong moral message, the thing that rescues the movie is the way it was edited to unwrap and to tease simultaneously three stories. Sadly again, the director used the devise of a car crash to tie the lives of three characters as he did it in Amores Perros. Time to try something else, please. The stories were strong enough to be told somehow differently. But truly, God Bless Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu: finally he can get redemption.
Ken Park (2002)
Perversion
"Perversion" is the title of Ken Park here in Mexico. It is pretty clear that the distributor (Arthaus) wanted to get attention and sell tickets. The movie has a minor distribution here but when I went to see it, the theater was packed with people of different ages. Nobody left the theater. If anybody got sick -I doubted since people was laughing and not awing-, just bear the 96 minutes calmly. Personally, I didn't care about the explicit sex sequences -that's the kind of reality you watch every day in porn movies- but the lack of a plot and the worst of all, the cartoonish characters. The dialogue is real but the kids and the parents are just too phony. The stories may be based in real life but putting all together in a Californian neighborhood was a long shot for reality. Ken Park -or well-titled Perversion- was just a bold portray of five kids directed for a guy who likes to shock the life-in-a-pink-bubble people... for those who have the eyes open, it was just another teen movie.
Esther Kahn (2000)
inside the head of an actress
Summer Phoenix did a great performance where you really feel what she's not able to feel and you just cannot understand what she has on her mind. Besides, she portrays a jewish girl who behaves really confronting the status quo of that century.
Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead (1990)
Playing with Time, Space and Shakespeare
Tom Stoppard shows with his opera prima that he can film what he writes... His famous play has reached the film level, showing that cinematography techniques could help to tell a story that complex, at all levels...
Time, Space and all the Shakespearean pieces playing to demonstrate how fun is to play with our lives...