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Reviews
Siete días siete noches (2003)
empty noises, empty gestures
Despite relatively professional production values, this is a terrible movie. The conflict of the three main characters is totally incomprehensible, absurd and irrelevant. The acting is of the poorest quality, despite the strong scenic presence of Orisel Gaspar and Eduaye Muniz. They all engage in interminable yelling, exaggerated posturing and puerile dialogues which end up as empty noises and empty gestures. Gaspar and Muniz could do better with a better script and a better director, but this is just cartoonish and stereotypical acting.It is difficult to find any redeeming value in this movie, any sequence worth remembering. And if there is a political message, I missed it. The only excuse is that this is Joel Cano's first film.
Historias clandestinas en La Habana (1997)
A Chain of Commonplaces
I have never seen so many commonplaces packed in 70 minutes of film. We have a magic place in which people fall in love instantly or find their lost loves thanks to the attraction of the magic beautiness of the land; honest people who find each other; bunches of good natives and most of all: poor acting.
On top of that, the movie, with its constant references to Che Guevara, to the evilness of money and to the sacrifice of the people, is a badly disguised propaganda of Castroism, trying to perpetuate the myth of "a dream that failed because it was too beautiful". This is Marxism for tourists at its worse. It works like a bad parody of Endless Love surrounded by natives.
The Quiet American (2002)
Too Quiet a Film
Philip Noyce's cinematic surfing between human relations and politics ends up dilluting itself in manichaean political concepts and lacks human intensity to reach the soul of the character's drama.
Beautifully shot, with an extraordinary performance from Brendan Frazier, which brilliantly makes the transition between a supposedly naive scientist with a human heart, to a shrewd manipulating spy, and an apt performance by Michael Caine, the movie is narrated in a very conventional way, having probably too much respect for its source, the Graham Greene novel of the same title, ending up as a cold, extremely quiet rendition of a literary text, devoid of visual impact.
Wo de fu qin mu qin (1999)
A potentially good story wasted in crowd pleasing cliches
Although beautifully shot and superbly acted this is nothing but a run of the mill melodrama, full of overused sentimental and predictable cliches.
This could have been a wonderful and touching story and it is unfortunate that such a good and deservedly prestigious director as Yimou chose the easy narrative way out.
Un paraíso bajo las estrellas (2000)
One of the worst movies of all time
It is unbelievable how a director (Chijona) with a previous good film and a writer (Aguero) with a respectable career can come up with a non-sensical story such as this. The humor is crass and unfunny, the situations do not allow for suspension of disbelief and nothing sustains the plot of this unbearable film. To top it off, acting is of the worse quality. I do not know who does a worse job in her respective roles, if Thais Valdes or Daisy Granados. The Cuban cinema is plagued with bad movies, but this one is at the top of the infamous list.
Musíme si pomáhat (2000)
Excellent visual language
Under the guise of a light comedy of errors, director Hrebejk launches a very serious assault on the perils of totalitarianism, blind hatred, opportunism and revenge without sermonizing on the issues. On top of the importance of its subject which is treated with a humor which derives the best from the Czech cinema of the 60s (Kadar-Klos, Forman, Menzel, Chitilova), this film has the strength of an excellent visual language in which images narrate while words only underline, which to me is perfect cinematic communication in the very best artistic sense.