Taste is an uncertain gift. It can be educated, cultivated, as long as you have curiosity, a true need to provoke and appease it. Forty years later, or almost, at the moment when these words have become a record for history, or for a chat between coffees, it can be said that what most viewers enjoy watching is an enigma: we have six comments on IMDB and only five hundred votes. Among many explanations and reasons, there is one that explains a lot: 'A king and his movie' ( La película del rey) was ahead of its time. We see in it how its director worships poetry, which is manifested not only in the words but in the silence of the landscape and also perfectly in it's characters' misery. It is certainly not a perfect neither an excellent film. It is, on the other hand, a powerful and sufficient film, somehow magical, and when it ends leaves you with candor in your chest, perhaps in that corner that inhabits our soul. If it gives you a bad taste, don't worry, come back later, but come back, because taste is something that you earn, sometimes later rather than sooner.
Reviews
7 Reviews
Martín Fierro, La Película
(2007)
Fontanarrosa' best contribution saves it all
20 May 2023
Fontanarrosa's drawing style is a true legacy and more than adequate to commemorate José Hernández's character, the gaucho Martín Fierro. In this film, which has a certain failed epic tone, that style is the most important thing. Because I believe that the great flaw was its multiple direction (more than three directors), which has clearly affected the result, hasty decisions, with a story that hardly recovers the verses of Hernández's poem. Technically, the animation looks unnatural and choppy, and figure and background often blend poorly. Sometimes the drawings are excellent, other times they look like scribbles. And the night scenes are indecipherable, so bad is the decision to light them. Another thing is the chosen music. When it's not folk music, an orchestration sounds that has almost nothing transcendent and seems like a Hollywood pastiche of no importance: canned compositions, without vitality, absurd clichés. In spite of everything, lost the potential and the great contribution of Fontanarrosa, a recommendable film even though it could have been a huge universal and eternal classic. Pity.
Rome 11:00
(1952)
Master of Italian Neorealism, limited by its theme.
13 May 2022
Giuseppe De Santis (Riso amaro, 1949) achieves an excellent narrative work based on a real event, an accident that occurred in January 1951, on Savoia Street in Rome. In what I have mentioned, I am limiting myself to not advancing any more details about that misfortune, since its outcome is more shocking when it happens at the least expected moment. I highlight three important aspects. The first is about the initial music that accompanies the credits of the film. Its composition is, without a doubt, the incentive that Alfred Hitchcock will have for his own films. Although it has little or nothing to do with the story that De Santis tells, Hitchcock will attend better and will know how to use it greatly in his own works. Likewise, the second aspect is the quality of the photography, its plans, its settings, its excellent proportions. In all the images you can appreciate the elegance and refinement of a critical and poetic eye. The third and most important aspect is the construction of the characters, their development and their growth in the conflicts they go through, before the tragedy and after it. It should be said that, once again, it is in the feminine features where the director manages, as in other of his films, to sustain the drama, with a beautiful combination of fragility and strength, beauty, poetry. Roma 11:00 is, clearly, a great film of Italian neorealism, simple but forceful, whose gaze crosses various historical problems that are reiterated: love, poverty, pain, empathy. A masterpiece that is seen, however, somewhat conditioned by the specific limits of the subject it deals with and can remain rather anecdotal, in a memorial, in the local of a specific event, almost journalistic.
Diamond Flash
(2011)
Average effort in the way of Pulp Fiction
27 February 2022
A film with potential, that recovers something of Tarantino's style, especially in his way of developing the story in the sum of short stories, in the manner of Pulp Fiction, and that converge on a supposed common axis. That axis would be the overcoming of a childhood trauma and now as a young adult suffered by Elena, who has been raised as an indirect victim of domestic violence suffered by her mother and later by herself. The music is suggestive at the beginning of the credits but then it is practically absent throughout the film. The performances are acceptable but they cannot sustain that common axis, since the fragmentation of the short stories, which are also edited with cuts, weaken and disjoin a story that is dispersed. Perhaps the problem is that the film pretends to be serious, in the manner of a thriller, showing personal dramas that are not moving because they are not sufficiently developed and then embraces that ridiculous absurdity of Tarantino that unfortunately does not reach the level of the director . At the end of the day, a film that seems a crude project, almost enjoyable but certainly, afterwards, will not be engraved in your memory.
The Wheel
(1923)
A masterpiece that crashes masterfully.
19 December 2021
Once a Spanish poet wisely said: "The good, if brief, twice as good." At the time I write these words I have been watching this film for a little over four hours. I still have three long hours (of a total of seven hours, the version that have been restored by the year 2019) that seem to repeat themselves in an eternal absurd return. It is precisely the condemnation of Sisyphus, the hero of the Greek tragedy, who is cursed to repeat a senseless and fruitless task of pushing a rock upwards the top of the mountain. However, this absurdity of an agonizing task is justified by the act of creation itself: La roue (The wheel) exists, for our good luck, when it might as well not do so. As I have already read here, in other comments, the length might be its main weakness. In other great works, such as Les Vampires (1916, 7 hours, Louis Feuillade) or Dr. Mabuse (1922, 4 hours, Fritz Lang), the extension is its main repellent and disintegrating trait. These attempts are like preparing a cup of coffee with two liters of water: it can be something refreshing but also tasteless. And I am afraid that its photography and montage are not enough to understand such excess, but rather the craving for the craving itself. It cannot even be explained as a trend of its time, because there were already good rules of composition about conciseness and precision. Anyway, I'll finish seeing what remains, painfully and reluctantly... For those who are curious, I suggest finding excerpts from a movie fan on the web, crazy and wandering enough to edit the good scenes for us, the foolish and brave ones.
Mutant Action
(1993)
Next stop: Oblivion
18 September 2021
With the due respect that its director, Álex de la Iglesia deserves, this film contributes absolutely nothing to the History of Cinema; even as an almost independent film (doubtful since it is seen that it has production costs) it does not seem to have anything new under the sunlight. Comedy without humor, sexist. Unattractive sci-fi, with a retro style that ages it even more. I wanted it to be a great first-time work, but it's true what they say, no artist is a born genius.
El azote
(2017)
Like The room, in a good way
5 May 2021
The film had been advertised in CINEMA. AR within a cycle dedicated to its director, José Celestino Campusano, every wednesday night. Meeting The scourge was a pleasant surprise, perhaps for the wrong reasons.
The first thing I noticed was that the actors were not entirely experienced and this caused their performances to be lame and almost read from the script. The lines were not bad but when they were acted they lost credibility. This made dramatic moments more ludicrous than poignant. Also that serious or funny situations had the opposite effect. In this sense, it is, however, an attractive counterweight because if it had not been those actors I would not have been interested in seeing it on television (because a friend turned it on and coincidence of zapping).
The photography is captivating, allowing the closed and urban spaces of the humble neighborhoods to be accompanied by the open and natural spaces of the Cordillera. There is poetry in many takes and you can feel its beauty, its mystery. In others, the decisions are not the best and the close-ups seem to collide head-on with the noses of the characters. From time to time, too, handheld camera filming is noticeable and distracts from the scene, it runs us away from the development of the plot.
The music reinforces the directive decisions, supporting the succession of the story but the possibilities it has to unfold are rather timid since the dialogues abound and do not give respite to the film. And perhaps it is one of his great faults, not being able to have a balanced rhythm, calling moments that happen in a forced and not very credible way.
As I said, the film was promoted on cable and its cycle was called "Gross Cinema." That name does it justice because with this movie one finds raw material although valuable, and as I read around, worthy of worship, hidden under the scab of its apparent imperfections.
The first thing I noticed was that the actors were not entirely experienced and this caused their performances to be lame and almost read from the script. The lines were not bad but when they were acted they lost credibility. This made dramatic moments more ludicrous than poignant. Also that serious or funny situations had the opposite effect. In this sense, it is, however, an attractive counterweight because if it had not been those actors I would not have been interested in seeing it on television (because a friend turned it on and coincidence of zapping).
The photography is captivating, allowing the closed and urban spaces of the humble neighborhoods to be accompanied by the open and natural spaces of the Cordillera. There is poetry in many takes and you can feel its beauty, its mystery. In others, the decisions are not the best and the close-ups seem to collide head-on with the noses of the characters. From time to time, too, handheld camera filming is noticeable and distracts from the scene, it runs us away from the development of the plot.
The music reinforces the directive decisions, supporting the succession of the story but the possibilities it has to unfold are rather timid since the dialogues abound and do not give respite to the film. And perhaps it is one of his great faults, not being able to have a balanced rhythm, calling moments that happen in a forced and not very credible way.
As I said, the film was promoted on cable and its cycle was called "Gross Cinema." That name does it justice because with this movie one finds raw material although valuable, and as I read around, worthy of worship, hidden under the scab of its apparent imperfections.
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