Spanish – Page 6 – The Movie Gourmet

TRUMAN: how people say goodbye

May 8, 2017 by movie gourmet

Javier and Ricardo Darin in TRUMAN — Javier Cámara and Ricardo Darin in TRUMAN

This may be the best movie I’ve seen this year. In the deeply emotionally affecting and humane Spanish film Truman, Tomás (Javier Cámara) leaves Montreal to pay a surprise four-day visit to his longtime friend Julián (Ricardo Darin) in Madrid. Julián has been battling cancer and has just received a very grim prognosis. Julián has chosen to forgo further treatment, and his cousin and caregiver Paula (Dolores Fonzi) is hoping that Tomás can talk Julián out of his decision.

Julián is a roguish bon vivant, although now hobbled by illness. Tomás is a responsible family man. As the four day visit unfolds, Tomás tags along as Julián cavalierly settles his affairs. Because of the circumstances, even the most routine activity is heavily charged with emotion. Julián, who has always been a wild card, is now a tinderbox always on the verge of erupting into some socially inappropriate gesture. Julián is particularly focused on arranging for adoption of his beloved and ponderous dog Truman.

Julián is a wiseacre, but his reaction to a moment of kindness from an very unexpected source is heartbreaking. Julián goes to say goodbye to his son, and then the learn a fact afterward that make this encounter exponentially more poignant. Truman has an especially sly ending – the granting of one last favor, however inconvenient.

The Argentine actor Darin is one of my favorite screen actors: Nine Queens, The Secret in their Eyes, Carancho, The Aura. As a man living under a death sentence, Julián has adopted a bemused fatalism, but is ready to burst into rage or despair at any moment, and Darin captures that perfectly.

I was blown away by Javier Cámara’s unforgettable performance, at once creepy and heartbreaking, in the Pedro Almodovar drama Talk to Her. Cámara is a master of the reaction, and his Tomás stoically serves as the loyal wing man to a friend with hair trigger unpredictability, often in a state of cringe.

The Argentine actress Dolores Fonzi (The Aura) is excellent as Paula, whose caregiver fatigue finally explodes.

Packed with bittersweet emotions, Truman is never maudlin. The Spanish director Cesc Gay, who co-wrote Truman, has created a gentle and insightful exploration into how people can say goodbye. There’s not a single misstep or hint of inauthenticity. Again, Truman is one of the best films of the year.

(Note: The crappy trailer below fails to capture all the humor and deep emotion in this film.)

DVD/Stream of the Week: THE AURA – smart enough to plan the perfect crime, but is that enough?

February 4, 2017January 31, 2017 by movie gourmet

The Aura is a brilliant 2005 neo-noir from Argentina that I wasn’t familiar with until the Czar of Noir Eddie Muller programmed into the 2017 Noir City film festival.

The Aura is about a taxidermist who leads a boring life, but fantasizes about the Perfect Crime. He is perpetually cranky because he is so dissatisfied, but he resists getting out of his life rut. It’s not easy to be his friend (nor, apparently, his wife). Unexpectedly, he finally finds himself in position to participate in a major heist.

He is epileptic (the movie’s title is from the sensation just before a seizure); he and we never know if and when he will pass out from an episode, a particularly dangerous wild card in a thriller. He also has a photographic memory, and that can help him if he has the nerve to go through with the crime.

The taxidermist is played by one of my favorite actors, Ricardo Darin (Nine Queens, The Secret in their Eyes, Carancho, Wild Tales) . I like to think of Darin as the Argentine Joe Mantegna. Darin can expertly play a slightly twisted Every Man, and he excels at neo-noir.

The rest of the cast is excellent, especially Walter Reyno as The Real Thing criminal, Alejandro Awada as the taxidermist’s long suffering only friend and Dolores Fonzi as the intriguing woman in the woods.

Sadly, writer-director Fabián Bielinsky died at 47 after making only two features – the wonderful con artist film Nine Queens (also starring Darin) and The Aura. Those two films indicate that he was a special talent.

Darin’s taxidermist is smart enough to plan a Perfect Crime, but professional criminals have that sociopathic lack of empathy needed to carry out crimes. Does he? Does he get the money? Does he get the girl? Does he even escape with his life? It’s a neo-noir, so you’ll have to watch it to find out.

By the way, the dog in this movie is important. Watch for the dog at the very end.

The Aura is available to rent on DVD from Netflix and to stream on Amazon Instant.

THE AURA: smart enough to plan the perfect crime, but is that enough?

January 18, 2017January 18, 2017 by movie gourmet

The Aura is a brilliant 2005 neo-noir from Argentina, that I wasn’t familiar with until the Czar of Noir Eddie Muller programmed it into the 2017 Noir City film festival.

Darin’s taxidermist is smart enough to plan a Perfect Crime, but professional criminals have that sociopathic lack of empathy needed to carry them out crimes. Does he? Does he get the money? Does he get the girl? Does he even escape with his life? It’s a neo-noir, so you’ll have to watch it to find out.

By the way, the dog in this movie is important. Watch for the dog at the very end.

DVD/Stream of the Week: WILD TALES

August 2, 2016 by movie gourmet

Okay, here’s 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 was 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.

SFIFF: LEAF BLOWER

April 20, 2016April 20, 2016 by movie gourmet

LEAF BLOWER. Photo courtesy of the San Francisco Film Society.

Leaf Blower is an amiable Mexican slice-of-life comedy. Three young guys are drifting rudderless though their adolescences, doing what teenage males do – wasting time, busting each others balls and achieving new heights of social awkwardness and sexual frustration. Its first screening at the San Francisco International Film Festival (SFIFF) is on April 24, and director Alejandro Iglesias Mendizábal is expected to attend.

In his promising first feature, director and co-writer Iglesias Mendizábal has created an entirely character-driven portrait of male teen friendship and restlessness. After all, the only real plot is whether they will find the keys that one of them dropped into a pile of leaves. But we want to keep watching these guys to see what happens to them, and it’s all pretty funny.

Ruben (Alejandro Guerrero) is too cool for school. He’s sure that he’s the only one in charge of his life – he just doesn’t know where he wants to go. So he masks his indecision and avoidance by brooding.
Lucas (Fabrizio Santini) is nervous and a little hyper, but his bossy girlfriend totally paralyzes him with dread. He’s always a day late and a peso short, the kind of guy who is stuck wearing his dirty soccer uniform to a funeral.
Emilio (Francisco Rueda) is constrained by his status as the fat kid (and I was a fat kid, so I relate). Self-isolated, he yearns to be more social, but then counterproductively comforts himself with more and more calories.

All three are sexually awakened but inept. Only Lucas has a girlfriend, and she causes him to sigh painfully every time his cellphone rings. Ruben and Emilio are so intimidated by females that they’re too scared to even borrow a rake from one.

Come to think about it, Leaf Blower is not a pure coming of age movie because its characters don’t seem to grow or change as a result of their experiences. It’s more of a “being-of-age” movie because they just are who they are. Perceptive and observational, Leaf Blower is pretty far away from the American Pie kind of teen comedy.

The 59th San Francisco International Film Festival (SFIFF) runs through May 5. Throughout the fest, I’ll be linking more festival coverage to my SFFIF 2016 page, including both features and movie recommendations. Follow me on Twitter for the very latest coverage.

Cinequest: MAN UNDERGROUND

March 12, 2016March 12, 2016 by movie gourmet

The sci-fi comedy Man Underground is centered around the entirely humorless Willem (George Basil), who is emotionally scarred by a failed relationship and an occurrence that he believes was an encounter with space aliens. Unburdened by any lack of confidence, Willem makes his way as a lecturer and Internet personality specializing in paranoid theories of government cover-ups. He decides to make his own biopic, assisted by oddball acolytes Todd (Andy Rocco) and Flossie (Pamela Fila).

Most of Man Underground fills out the portrait of the deeply troubled and absurdly misguided Willem. But, even with cringe humor, it’s hard to watch Willem when it turns out that the really interesting characters are Todd and Flossie. Todd and Flossie finally get their due, but too much of Man Underground is about Willem.

Cinequest: MAGALLANES

March 3, 2016 by movie gourmet

The title character in the Peruvian psychological drama Magallanes is a loser, but is he a lovable loser? Played by Damián Alcázar, Magallanes bounces around from odd job to odd job. He can’t break even driving a borrowed outlaw taxi around the squalid streets of Lima, he lives in a basement hovel and he has one friend. Magallanes glimpses a person from his past, and it rocks him into a series of life-changing events.

Magallanes starts out as a caper movie. But we learn that his one friendship is from his military service in a death squad unit, dispatched to repress the indigenous population with the harshest methods. What this unit did years ago has scarred all the characters (except two snarky cops), and Magallanes is revealed to be a study of PTSD.

What is driving Magallanes’ behavior in this story? We find that we is trying to right a past wrong. But what? And by whom? The revelation in Magallanes is that some wrongs cannot be righted.

Magallanes is a showcase for Mexican actor Alcázar, whom U.S. art house audiences saw in John Sayles’ Men with Guns and as the lead in Herod’s Law. Alcázar makes Magallanes so sympathetic that the movie’s climax is jarring and emotionally powerful.

I saw Magallanes at Cinequest, where it plays again on March 10 and 12.

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.