Spanish – Page 6 – The Movie Gourmet

Cinequest: THE MEMORY OF WATER

March 2, 2016March 1, 2016 by movie gourmet

The most masterful filmmaking achievement at Cinequest 2016 might just be the Chilean drama The Memory of Water by Matias Bize. The Memory of Water is an exploration of grief, its process and its impact. After all, the individuals who make up couples grieve in different ways and at different paces.

We meet a couple (Benjamin Vicuña and Elena Anaya) who has recently experienced a tragedy. He is undertaking an everyday task. She is (literally) revisiting the tragedy. Director Bize brilliantly takes us to the wall in the home where parents record the height of their growing kid – the camera scans up the marks for 2, 2/12, 3, 3 1/2 and then stops after 4. We understand.

The husband is extremely sensitive and tries his best to comfort her. It’s not enough. She tells him that he needs to cry just once. The movie is his journey to being able to cry that one time.

We see him at work, faced with something that reminds him of the tragedy, She is a medical translator and, in the most heartrending scene, must maintain her poise to get through a task that no one should be asked to perform. There’s an explosive sex scene, beautifully shot in red light, that’s all about the release of passion in an encounter that is itself passionless and meaningless.

And we see water. Water that evokes tragic memory. And water in a different form that brings joyful memory. And, finally, water in a scene of closure.

The Memory of Water explores the same ground as Rabbit Hole, the excellent Nicole Kidman/Aaron Eckhardt film based on David Lindsay-Abaire’s Pulitzer- and Tony-winning play. But The Memory of Water is better cinema.

The 35-year-old Bize (The Life of Fish) is a major filmmaking talent. The Memory of Water is a Must See at this year’s Cinequest and screens on March 2, 10 and 12.

Cinequest: PARABELLUM

February 29, 2016 by movie gourmet

The Argentine drama Parabellum is a trippy movie unlike anything that you’ve seen. Set in a pre-apocalyptic near future, cities are crumbling into disorder and meteors are plunging into the Earth with alarmingly increased frequency. Clearly everyone should be panicking, but no one is.

Instead, the characters in Parabellum don blindfolds and are motored up a jungle river to a secret adventure resort where they learn survivalist skills – kind of Camp Heart of Darkness. The most life-and-death exercises are addressed matter-of-factly, with an absurdly calm determination that makes Parabellum seem like something out of Buñuel.

Parabellum’s measured pace seems so at odds with the impending disaster (whatever it will be), that it’s part of the joke. What the hell is going on and what are these people thinking? Beautifully shot, engrossing and witty – Parabellum is a wacky treat.

DVD/Stream of the Week: THE SECRET IN THEIR EYES – see the real Oscar winner before the Hollywood version

November 17, 2015November 17, 2015 by movie gourmet

Ricardo Darin in THE SECRET IN THEIR EYES

The superb The Secret in Their Eyes (El Secreto de Sus Ojos) won the 2010 Oscar for Best Foreign Language Picture. The Hollywood remake is coming out this weekend, but you should first see the original. The Secret in Their Eyes is a police procedural set in Argentina with two breathtaking plot twists, original characters, a mature romance and one forehead-slapping, “how did they do it?” shot. The story centers on a murder in Argentina’s politically turbulent 1970s, but most of the story takes place twenty years later when a retired cop revisits the murder.

Veteran Argentine actor Ricardo Darin shines once again in a Joe Mantegna-type role. Darin leads an excellent cast, including Guillermo Francella, who brings alive the character of Darin’s drunk assistant. Darin’s detective is a solitary guy who retracts into his lair to bang away at a novel. He has feelings for his boss, a tough judge played by Soledad Villamil. Her career and her personal life can’t wait for the detective to get his own stuff together. All three characters throw themselves into solving the murder and, when stymied, are all scarred by the lack of resolution.

The movie is titled after one element that I hadn’t seen before in a crime movie. And then there are the major plot twists. The final one is a jaw-dropper.

Director Juan Jose Campanella received justifiable praise for the amazing shot of a police search in a filled and frenzied soccer stadium. It ranks as one of the great single shots of extremely long duration, right up there with the opening sequence of Touch of Evil, the kitchen entrance in Goodfellas and the battle scene in Children of Men. This shot alone makes watching the movie worthwhile.

Filmmaker Billy Ray has remade the Argentine film as Secret in Their Eyes, to be released October 23 starring Nicole Kidman, Julia Roberts and Chiwetelu Ejiofor. Ray is no hack – he’s adapted the screenplays for Shattered Glass (which he also directed), Captain Phillips and the first The Hunger Games. The plot has been turned into a story about thee US federal law enforcement officials and the murder of one of their children; unfortunately, the trailer looks more like a plot-driven Law & Order, with none of the characters as singular or as memorable as in the Argentine original. We shall see.

The Secret in Their Eyes is high on my Best Movies of 2010. It’s available on DVD from Netflix and streaming from Amazon Instant Video, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play, Xbox Video and Flixster.

Scare Week: WITCHING AND BITCHING

October 28, 2015 by movie gourmet

The rockin’ Witching and Bitching (Las brujas de Zugarramurdi), by Spanish cult director Alex de la Iglesia, features a gang of robbers – one is dressed as a silver Jesus on the cross and another as a Green Army Guy – on the lam rocketing into an occult nightmare. They run smack dab into a coven of witches – the full-out Macbeth-stir-the-cauldron kind of witches. This film has the feel of an early Almodovar madcap comedy – if Almodovar were into goth horror. It’s all rapid-pulsed fun – and surprisingly smart.

The underlying theme is misogyny. The male characters grouse about the stereotypical complaints about women – all while themselves exemplifying the worst of the stereotypical male flaws. For example, one guy complains that his ex won’t consent to joint custody on the grounds of his irresponsibility – yet he brings their seven-year-old along on an armed robbery. One underlying joke is that the men see women as bitches, but it’s the men who spend the whole movie bitching. Another is that the men become trapped by REAL witches whose ball busting far exceeds the men’s most negative misogynistic fantasies.

These Spanish actors are wonderful, including the great Carmen Maura (Almodovar’s Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown and Volver) and appropriately named hottie Carolina Bang. They’re very adept at the deadpan delivery of lines like this:

Driver: This village is damned. They hold witches sabbaths.
Boy: What’s that?
Robber: Like a kegger but medieval.

De la Iglesia maintains a deliciously frantic pace throughout. The final orgiastic ritual goes on a long time but maintains audience engagement.

This was the first de la Iglesia movie that I’d seen, but I’m definitely going to check out more of his work. Speaking of which, he nicely sets up a sequel. But go ahead and watch Witching and Bitching now – streaming in Amazon Instant, iTunes and Xbox Video.

DVD/Stream of the Week: WILD TALES

September 23, 2015September 22, 2015 by movie gourmet

Okay, here’s the first Must See of 2015 – the hilariously dark Argentine comedy Wild Tales. Writer-director Damián Szifron presents a series of individual stories about revenge. It’s still high my list of Best Movies of 2015 – So Far.

We all feel aggrieved, and Wild Tales explores what happens when rage overcomes the restraints of social order. Think about how instantly angry you can become when some driver cuts you off on the highway – and then how you might fantasize avenging the slight. Indeed, there is a story in Wild Tales that has the most severe case road rage since Spielberg’s Duel in 1971. Now Wild Tales is dark, and you gotta go with it. The humor comes from the EXTREMES that someone’s resentment can lead to.

One key to the success of Wild Tales is that it is an anthology. In a very wise move, Szifron resisted any impulse to stretch one of the stories into a feature-length movie. Each of the stories is just the right length to extract every laugh and pack a punch. The funniest stories are the opening one set on an airplane and the final one about a wedding.

The acting is uniformly superb. In one story, Oscar Martínez plays a wealthy man in a desperate jam, who buys the help of his shady lawyer fixer (Osmar Núñez) and his longtime household retainer (Germán de Silva) – until their prices get just a little too high. The three actors take what looks like it’s going to a thriller and morph into a (very funny) psychological comedy with a very cynical view of human nature.

One of the middle episodes stars one of my favorite film actors, Ricardo Darín, who I see as the Argentine Joe Mantegna. I suggest that you watch Darín in the brilliant police procedural The Secrets in Their Eyes (on my top ten for 2010), the steamy and seamy Carancho and the wonderful con artist movie Nine Queens.

Wild Tales has been a festival hit (Cannes, Telluride, Toronto and Sundance) around the world and was nominated for the Best Foreign Language Picture Oscar. I saw Wild Tales at Cinequest 2015. It’s now available on DVD from Netflix and streaming from Amazon Instant Video, iTunes, Vudu and Xbox Video.

DVD/Stream of the Week: THE SECRET IN THEIR EYES – see the real Oscar winner before the Hollywood version

August 4, 2015 by movie gourmet

The superb The Secret in Their Eyes (El Secreto de Sus Ojos) won the 2010 Oscar for Best Foreign Language Picture. The Hollywood remake is coming out this fall, but you should first see the original. The Secret in Their Eyes is a police procedural set in Argentina with two breathtaking plot twists, original characters, a mature romance and one breathtaking, “how did they do it?” shot. The story centers on a murder in Argentina’s politically turbulent 1970s, but most of the story takes place twenty years later when a retired cop revisits the murder.

The movie is titled after one element that I hadn’t seen before in a crime movie. And then there are the major plot twists. The final one is a jaw-dropper.

DVD/Stream of the Week: WILD TALES

June 23, 2015 by movie gourmet

Okay, here’s the first Must See of 2015 – the hilariously dark Argentine comedy Wild Tales. Writer-director Damián Szifron presents a series of individual stories about revenge. It’s now topping my list of Best Movies of 2015 – So Far.

We all feel aggrieved, and Wild Tales explores what happens when rage overcomes the restraints of social order. Think about how instantly angry you can become when some driver cuts you off on the highway – and then how you might fantasize avenging the slight. Indeed, there is story that has the most severe case road rage since Spielberg’s Duel in 1971. Now Wild Tales is dark, and you gotta go with it. The humor comes from the EXTREMES that someone’s resentment can lead to.

THE FILM CRITIC: when a cynic’s life becomes corny

May 27, 2015 by movie gourmet

Rafael Spregelburd (center, with glasses) in THE FILM CRITIC

In the enjoyable Argentine comedy The Film Critic (El Critico), we meet a glum and judgmental movie critic (Rafael Spregelburd). He’s proud of having not written a rave review in the past two decades and he’s so pretentious that he thinks is French (very nice touch). He lives to pile snark on romantic comedies, a genre that he despises. His editor says, “You are a terrorist of taste!”. He is so negative through-and-through, that he is a pretty miserable person to be around.

Then, he meets (cute) a vital and captivating woman (Dolores Fonzi). To his discomfort, he is pulled into every cliché of a movie romantic comedy (when they kiss for the first time, fireworks even go off in the sky above), and he starts becoming uncharacteristically happy, even giddy.

Writer-director Hernán Gerschuny has created a winning, character-driven comedy. His protagonist’s entire identity is to be unsatisfied by anything and everything. Yet it turns out that he can be hooked by the same joys that he thinks he is above.

The Film Critic is full of references that will delight movie fans – and especially cinephiles, movie critics and movie bloggers! The critic holds forth with a hilarious recounting of rom com conventions (“why are they always running?”). And, of course, the woman that HE meets looks uber cute in a beret, and he races to the airport at the end.

Gerschuny delivers great comic timing. One of the protagonist’s colleagues watches an “experimental short film” (ba dum) “by a Taiwanese director” (ba dum) and then NAMES the director. And THEN he says, “I think he’s got something to say” as it becomes apparent that the “short” is a security video.

All in all, The Film Critic is a satisfying hoot, now available for streaming from Amazon Instant Video, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.

Cinequest: EIGHTYSEVEN

March 6, 2015 by movie gourmet

The Ecuadorian coming of age film Eightyseven traces three teenage buddies through an eventful 1987 and shows us a reunion in 2002. Their families range from inattentive to hostile, so the guys are able to hang out at a hideaway, get up to some nocturnal hellraising and become entangled with a free-spirited girl. And then there’s a pivotal event that changes them forever.

Eightyseven is thoughtfully written and well-crafted by promising co-writers and co-directors Daniel Andrade and Anahí Hoeneisen. It’s a fine little film. I saw it at Cinequest 2015.

WILD TALES: the first Must See of 2015

March 6, 2015 by movie gourmet

Okay, here’s the first Must See of 2015 – the hilariously dark Argentine comedy Wild Tales. Writer-director Damián Szifron presents a series of individual stories about revenge.

We all feel aggrieved, and Wild Tales explores what happens when rage overcomes the restraints of social order. Think about how instantly angry you can become when some driver cuts you off on the highway – and then how you might fantasize avenging the slight. Indeed, there is story that has the most severe case road rage since Spielberg’s Duel in 1971. Now Wild Tales is dark, and you gotta go with it. The humor comes from the EXTREMES that someone’s resentment can lead to.

Wild Tales has been a festival hit (Cannes, Telluride, Toronto and Sundance) around the world and was nominated for the Best Foreign Language Picture Oscar. I saw Wild Tales at Cinequest 2015.