The dark and violent Peruvian Guard Dog is set in 2001, five years after a controversial amnesty for the government-sponsored death squads active in the previous decades. Our protagonist is the vestige of those death squads, an ascetic hit man who still performs some residual executions. He is a Man On A Mission, and one serious dude. After his opening hit, he takes out the photo of his victim and burns out the image’s eyes with his cigarette.
Guard Dog is ultimately more of a mood piece than a thriller. The theme of personal corruption keeps re-emerging, with a grossly rotting apartment ceiling and even a moment of pus-draining. The most interesting aspect of the story is our anti-hero’s encounters with an unjaded young girl who is, in contrast to him, bubbling and full of life.
I saw Guard Dog’s US Premiere at Cinequest, and it plays the fest again March 4 at the California Theatre and March 6 at Camera 12.
In the Mexican drama The Life After, two brothers are raised by a very unreliable single mom. When she disappears and leaves them on their own, they go on a road trip where the emotional damage she has wreaked on them is exposed. It’s well-acted and well-photographed, but grim and slow-paced. Ultimately, I’m just not convinced that this story needed to be told.
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.
The Illiterate is a Chilean two-hander of a drama. A woman in her mid-50s can’t read. She navigates life by telling passersby that she has lost her glasses and needs them to read the signage to her. A woman in her 20s comes to read her the newspaper. Prompted by an unread letter from the older woman’s father, the younger woman decides to teach her to read. The older woman is proud and prickly, and they clash. Each has a meltdown as we move from first to second to third act. When she finally reads the looming letter from the father, it’s underwhelming.
The illiterate is played by the accomplished and appealing Chilean actress Paulina Garcia (Gloria), and The Illiterate is mostly an excuse for Garcia to act up a storm. Not much else here. Too bad, because I love promoting Chilean cinema and really wanted to like this.
In the Chilean gem Gloria, we meet a 58-year-old woman who has been divorced for ten years. This ain’t An Unmarried Woman where a woman must learn to adapt and become independent. She supports herself with an office job, and she gets along with her adult kids, but they have their own lives. She doesn’t stay cooped up in her apartment, she tries out yoga and laugh therapy and cruises a certain Santiago disco – a meat market for the over 50 set. She already is plenty independent, and she knows what she wants – some adult companionship and a little nookie.
On one outing to the disco, she meets a distinguished and sweet-tempered gentleman who is a great dancer and who absolutely adores her. Of course, he also has some flaws, to be discovered later. Gloria eagerly embraces the good things that happen to her, and when there are bumps in her road, she refuses to wilt.
Gloria was a big hit at last year’s Berlin Film Festival. Part of Gloria’s appeal to some audiences is, no doubt, an unusual amount of nudity and sex for a film about people in their late 50s and 60s. But I think the best part about Gloria is the resiliency of the main character – she takes her lumps for sure but refuses to withdraw into victimhood.
Paulina Garcia is extraordinarily good as Gloria – her performance carries the movie. She has the ability to suffer an indignity without becoming pathetic. Sergio Hernandez is very, very good as Gloria’s new flame, as is Alejandro Goic as her ex. Gloria is a crowd pleaser.
The Year & the Vineyard is an interesting, funny, original movie, shot without a budget. It was written, directed and edited by Spanish director Jonathan Cenzual Burley. The story is set in a small village in the beautiful countryside of Spain in 2012. It begins when a strong macho Italian, who is a fighter for the International Brigade, literally falls through a hole in the sky and lands in a vineyard. He believes he is fighting the Spanish Civil war in 1937. The local priest, who is very funny, flamboyant and a little odd, is convinced the Italian is either an angel or a saint, and, after a thorough examination, concludes that neither is correct.
The Italian stays at the home of a very shy teacher and the 2 men become friends. The teacher is in love with a local girl and the priest and the fighter encourage him to sing to her to minimize his nerves, so that he can actually declare his love to her through song. The scene reminded me of Romeo and Juliet when Romeo declares his love to Juliet when she is standing on a balcony.
The Italian sees a picture of his lover from 1937 in a history book and notices that she is also fighting in the war. His sole desire is to be reconnected with her back in 1937, and so the men try to figure out how he fell out of the sky in the first place. Finally, by throwing stones up in the air close to where he fell, they finally realize that there is a hole in the sky that he is able to climb over to go back to 1937. He does this with the help of a ladder and his friends.
What struck me about the director is his absolute passion and belief in what he is doing. His Grandfather fought in the civil war and played a small role in the movie. In addition, filming took place where Burley spent his summers as a child, so his personal connection was apparent. You could see how hard he worked to put this piece together. It took him about a year to make the whole film from start to finish without a budget. His actors are not well-known, but I was impressed with their ability. He finally finished the movie on Sunday, days before the world premiere at the Mill Valley Film Festival, and I was lucky enough to attend and see him introduce it to the audience. It was exciting to see how dedicated Jonathan Burley is to his work.
The Year & the Vineyard was funny and cute and, even though the start was slow, I really enjoyed the whole production. The audience was clearly engaged, and being present and hearing the answers to our questions, you can see that this man is committed to his art.
Our Marin correspondent Zeke Ortiz represented us at this year’s Mill Valley Film Festival.
The high stress care of a difficult 88-year-old grandmother is tearing a Basque family apart. They think that she’s addled, until one family member after another come to realize that she actually is lucid and diabolical. She’s so evil that it becomes either her or them.
Monserrat Carulla makes the most of the delicious role as the conniving grannie. You may have seen her in the excellent Spanish horror film The Orphanage. The rest of the cast is excellent, too.
It’s a dark comedy and much, much darker than American audiences are used to. She does some very bad things to sympathetic human characters and to innocent animals.
This Spanish movie is in the Basque language and is also titled Urte Berri On, Amona!.
