Change Your Image
pedrototoro
Reviews
High Life (2018)
A big waste of time
There are bad movies, there are terrible movies, and then there are movies like these! These are traps... they give you a hope that everything will make sense in the end... well, it never does...
The plot is implausible to the extreme, only someone who hasn't accompanied the space program from every nation on this planet and hasn't seen the requirements and screening that goes into the processing of selecting astronauts, especially to long term missions, could have imagined this script.
But the worse part of this movie is that you cannot see how bad it is until it's too late, until you have given it more that 1 hour and a half of your precious time. It's only near the end that you'll realize that no good explanations are forthcoming, that no depth will be added to any of the characters... that the only excuse for this movie is a message that society doesn't take care of some of its members and so they will inevitably (and perhaps justifiably) go berserk. If they rape, murder or commit suicide, it's all explained by society's fault. It's an attempt to crucify a society that looks at people as an end to achieve some goal...
I'm sympathetic to the message, but what we needed was a plausible plot, characters with depth, and all the rest that usually makes a good movie. If that was the message the context could be of a prison, not a years-long space mission, likely crucial to humanity, where even the best prepared could fail.
Why can't we see how bad the movie is at the start? Because there is no plot at the start, no story, only images that slowly start to make sense. Then we go backwards in time, so we kind of hope that everything will make sense, as the plot unravels... But no! By the contrary! In fact the only thing that made some sense is contradicted near the end - the idea that they had gravity because they were accelerating, is then denied near the end by an image where the spaceship is at constant speed near another non-accelerating body, and the person inside still has weight!
The only thing that starts to make sense as I went along is that this movie is utterly boring, pointless, shallow, incoherent, uninteresting and, basically, a waste of time. The only thing I got from it was the reassurance that I really don't have to care about what "expert" critics say about movies, the covariance to my taste is, as far as I can tell, 0.
Salir del ropero (2019)
A caricature of insincerity vs true acceptance
I watched this movie yesterday and I really liked it. I don't think it was made to be realistic, instead I saw it like a caricature of us, humans. We crave for safety and order, but we also crave for love and acceptance. These things are often at odds, because each of us is a well of creativity and unpredictability. When we try to have a very orderly, predictable life we often need to lie, to others and ourselves.
I don't think this movie is a about sexual chemistry and things like that. I think it's about love and acceptance. It's about true stability, not about being able to predict how the future will be like, but the ability to know that some people will not abandon us, even when we make terrible mistakes. Instead, they'll try to understand. That's true security. I think this movie is about the most important topic of all: to be true to oneself. And it treats the subject in a light manner. Not a perfect movie, but I liked watching it!
My Octopus Teacher (2020)
You should be a part of it, but you weren't...
Craig Foster, you may be a great filmmaker but you are a lousy friend. And whoever sees this will understand perfectly what I mean. Signed, the Octopus.