kinaidos Reviews

Memories of Underdevelopment (1968)

A classic from a very troubled year

[9/10 · 11 February 2007]

Sergio, a bourgeois intellectual living off of (seemingly tenuous) rental income as a property holder, decides to stay in Cuba. The conflict set up between his intellectual convictions and the reality of Cuban life in the wake of the revolution makes up the central problem of the film. The film presents a year in the life of the protagonist, a year culminating in the missile crises of 1962. What makes the film is the candid nature of it's reflections on the role of the intellectual in political life - certainly THE hot topic during the summer of 1968. The film is also a stylistic tour de force, welding together neorealistic drama, newsreel footage, montages of life in contemporary Havana as seen from Sergio's flat (through a telescope), and some filmed Shavian-styled debates amid the action. Far from being a typical propaganda piece, the films treatment of the future of the revolution was very open ended, candid, and thoughtful. It's a film that emerges from the debates about the future and which stages it's own participation in that debate. The film features two significant cameos: Edmundo Desnoes - the author of the novel on which the film is based, and Gutierez Alea himself. Both cameos occur in diegetic reflections about art: a debate about literature in the case of Desnoes, and a talk with a young director in the case of Alea. This film is almost impossible to find in the US thanks to the Cuban expatriate zealot nonsense. It's available in Mexico though - on a fairly well mastered DVD. It's worth seeking out. It's one of the best Cuban films ever and one of the greatest films of the new wave era.

Senda de gloria (1987)

Valuable but mediocre

[7/10 · 27 November 2006]

First off, this is a 30 hour mini-series broadcast on Mexican television in the late 80s. The unedited series is presented in the boxed DVD set. The story covers the history of the second phase of the Mexican revolution from the presidency of Carranza through that of Cardenas. The historical novella is fictionalized by presenting the story through the eyes of the family and acquaintances of a general who somehow manages to stay close enough to the powers that be throughout to provide a window into the whirlwind of Mexican politics at the time. This is valuable piece of historical fiction because it provides the viewer with a good picture of how educated Mexicans tend to perceive their own history. The fictional family at the center of the story helps provide a bit of relief from what would otherwise be a rather dry and complicated journey through the twists and turns of the latter years of the Mexican revolution. The writers actually do a pretty good job of working the fiction and the history together, presenting most of the drama at times when the history is moving a bit more slowly. The DVD transfer is poor quality. I don't know if the series was filmed or taped, but the image on the DVD is of extremely poor resolution with a great deal of digital conversion artifacts. The score is terrible. Production value throughout is mediocre to bad. The writing and the acting and the concept make the series valuable, in spite of these shortcomings. The series is readily available throughout Mexico (e.g. Sanborns, Walmart). It is not subtitled in any language.

Broken Sky (2006)

Worthwhile attempt, but too self-indulgent

[4/10 · 18 June 2006]

The film is a bit tedious. It's mostly a silent film, with the bulk o the story provided through a series of voice-overs. While making a silent film like this is not such a bad idea, this is one of those films where the lack of dialog and the repetitive early scenes make it simply tedious. You don't understand the reason for the tedium until well into the picture, and by then it's too late. The first 40 minutes of film is something of a slow piece of Mexican soft porn, and unimaginative soft porn at that. Later in the film the style of the first 40 minutes starts to makes sense, but it's too late, because by then the audience is lost. There is some nice location shooting at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. I've often wondered why more films aren't shot there. The campus is built on the edge of lava fields that lend the campus a very otherworldly feel. My biggest problem with the film is that the director/writer has made the film the way he wanted to see it without regard for how a viewer who doesn't know the story will view it. You can't ignore the audience when you tell a story.

The Intruder (2004)

More than just visual

[9/10 · 8 April 2006]

The film is not visually stunning in the conventional sense. It doesn't present a series of pretty pictures. Instead it is a visually interesting film. It forces the viewer to constantly process or perhaps imagine the context of the various shots. This sort of thing is easy to try but hard to succeed at. The film refuses to use the crutch of a genre to help the less than fully engaged viewer get what's going on. Instead the film touches on and moves through a number of different genres. The trick to loving the film is being able to enjoy this playfulness. I suspect 99% of North American viewers will just not get it. If you try to pin down the narrative of this film, or the philosophical message, or the symbolist structure, etc. you will waste your time. There are none of these. The film only feints towards these genres and others at times. The only unifying force in the film is Claire Denis's own sense of what fits together. There are so few feature length films that come close to satisfying Kant's description of what art is, namely the enjoyment of the power of judgment itself instead of simply subsuming experiences under concepts. Film usually takes the easy way out and opts for the simpler pleasure of understanding what's happening. Most film is not art. Most film doesn't come close to art. When a film does, as this one does, and is still enjoyable by a large range of viewers, it's something of a miracle. My on negative comment is that at times I find the film too simplistically buying in to the various narrative threads that run through it. The Tahiti father-son narrative, even though it's not exactly conventional, ends up making things a little to clear and simple. It dominates too much.

Izo (2004)

Intriguing but nearly unwatchable

[2/10 · 31 May 2005]

This film is intriguing, but it's also a mess. After the first hour the random violence ceases to do much of anything but bore. The shell of a plot introduced by the modern characters is so shallow that it doesn't convincingly shape the narrative. There is not a single character in the film that one can connect with. Finally the melange of montage sequences are so random that they merely annoy. This film feels like a very bad attempt to make an overly serious film by a mediocre film student. It was extremely disappointing. The point of the film seems to have been to portray something of the relationship between the social order and violence, but that point is so trite at this point in history that it simply does not warrant over two hours of random violence, arbitrary montage, and a bunch of bogus depth psychology.

Bad Education (2004)

Great design but weak in the details

[7/10 · 26 December 2004]

The film plays on the various abuses of power and plays with the standard narratives one generally sees concerning these. Usually the abusive priest is denounced and is brought to justice. Usually the director who abuses the casting couch is eventually undone, while the abused goes on to fame and fortune when her real talents are discovered on the screen. Amaldovar makes us think that we are traveling down these well worn paths only to surprise us and take the story in a completely different direction. Along the way the comfortable tales of a justice that really does not exist become simple tales of banal tragedy. Then Amaldovar takes this a level deeper by making these ultimately unrealized justice fables the imaginings of the characters themselves. Obviously a film that sets out to do all of that is likely to be a bit weak when it comes to the details. Quite a few of the individual scenes are not very convincing. The actors seem to be struggling to come up with anything beyond the immediate in terms of motivation. The pool scene for example is very poorly directed. It's a great flesh scene, but the Angel character makes no sense. He makes even less sense in retrospect when you realize why he was there in the first place. He's a hustler. So why is he so off-putting when it comes to hustling Enrique? The ensuing awkwardness drives the plot, but it makes no sense in terms of the characters. The super-8 films that Angel and Berrenque take together don't seem to have any point at all. The don't reveal anything. They aren't interesting as a plot device. (That aren't very believable as something that could be used potentially for blackmail for example.) This is a very good film, but it lacks the clarity and precision that might have made it a great film. This film without the hot property of Gael G B would probably have fallen rather flat. There is a lot of ingenuity behind it, but the execution is lacking.

Salón México (1949)

Superbly Shot Noir

[9/10 · 18 November 2004]

The star of the film is really Figueroa's cinematography. He turns a few recurring motifs (e.g the dance sequences, the staircase to the heroine's apartment) into anchors. That and the rock-solid acting help give the melodramatic plot enough weight to work as a sort of lower-class tragedy. The story is simple. A woman works as a dance hall girl in order to put her sister through boarding school, the sister's only chance to make it out of the otherwise impenetrable class barrier. She runs into trouble with a third-rate hoodlum over some money they win in a dance contest. That relationship eventually undoes her. Figueroa shoots the film in high-contrast black and white with intensive use of spot lighting. This gives even continuous group scenes something of the feeling of montage. This gives him a continuous palette of edits ranging from soviet-style montage, to rapid cut closeups of individuals lit by themselves, to medium range scenes where the characters are foregrounded and backgrounded using spots, all the way to simple outdoor scenes shot in natural lighting (reserved for moments when we are in or near high-society). The music is quite good. The egregiously sexual dances give one a much clearer sense of the emotions driving the Salon than any description could. The bookend mariachi "Si Juarez.." (If Juarez had not died) is amazingly poignant close to the story. This film belongs to a rather common genre in Mexican cinema: the cabaretera film (stories about lower class women who work in dancehalls). Two other examples worth watching from the same genre, both available on DVD: La Aventurera, and Victima del Pecado.

Vera Drake (2004)

Powerful character piece

[9/10 · 24 October 2004]

While Vera Drake is a film about abortion and the various hypocrisies and power trips coloring the history of abortion legislation, it's really more of a film about the status of the individual. Much of the silence and slowness in the film, a quality which inattentive viewers will find boring, is there for a reason. It helps carve out a personal space for the character. It forces us to face a person rather than a place holder in a plot or the object of a judgment. Vera's silence when asked by the police to explain herself, her awkward and tearful attempts to put it all into words, in fact hints at a deep personal history. For example, when asked how she learned how to do what she does, whether she was ever *in trouble*, she can't answer. We watch her struggle to put it into words, but she fails. Sometimes one's motives like Kane's Rosebud, are best left unexplained, left to the sphere of private reflection. Vera does have a well-developed worldview that is of a piece with the charming, ebullient embodiment of the stiff-upper lip that she so wonderfully is. She helps young women. She belongs to a tradition of women helping women. She helps them perform an action they could have performed for themselves. Rather then leave them to their own devices she helps them do something women have been doing for a long time to remedy the effects of the careless sexuality of wanton, drunken or just plane piggish men. Vera believes she is helping young girls out because that is what she has experienced for a long time. It has become such a part of who she is that she can't even remember when she started doing it. The law calls it abortion because, well, that's what the law says, but beyond the tautologies of the legal culture Vera understands herself as helping girls out because that is what she has experienced for much of her life. This clash between rules and experience is not something that can be framed as an argument. It's the clash between *it is written* and *deep down I know*. Vera's inarticulate agony is the same as Antigone's really, the clash between what she knows in heart and what the law says is absolute and irreducible. I think Mike Leigh has finally found a purpose for his hallmark squirm sequences - to force us to confront an individual where we would most solidly have a tendency to categorize, summarize and judge. Though perhaps that's been the point all along - that what matters most lies beyond arguments and judgments, and one gets at it by forcing the audience to endure characters in their most inarticulate moments. Thanks to some great acting and some deft direction (a good variety in pacing that never let the film drag for long) this film succeeds in putting you in contact with a character in a way that is more typical of live theater.

The Motorcycle Diaries (2004)

Wonderfully populist, lamentably Hollywood

[7/10 · 2 October 2004]

This film cannot decide whether it wants to be a piece of gritty populist verité or a Hollywood style hero-as-boy pic. There are some wonderful scenes of young Ché and Alberto among the people, and some great montage sequences in which the common mestizo is front and center. These moments are punctuated by short bursts of Hollywood (e.g. a scene where Ernesto swims the Amazon - shot and cut in a very Hollywood fashion with rapid cuts back and forth across the river, closeups of Ernesto struggling, etc.) All in all the screenplay is just a little too Hollywood for a film about the quintessential revolutionary. The film also lacks any clear trajectory on the part of the characters. They don't develop. They realize things, but they don't appear to change. The fault lies in the screenplay. It wastes too much time cobbling together simplistic narratives and devotes too little time and effort into providing the actors with a way to show the characters en route from one state of mind and heart to another. Che would soon become the archetype of the angry young revolutionary, yet the Guevara we see is something like a dark and sexy St. Francis. The only anger we see is a single stone tossed at a truck picking up day laborers. The only thing that seems to change from Buenos Aires to Caracas are a few ideas and the landscape. This is nonetheless a very good film for the job the actors do with the script they have to work with, and for Salles's and his editor's great pacing. It's a gorgeous film with beautiful landscapes and beautiful vignettes of the common man. It's a great feel-good piece of populist film-making. It is just not a very searching or profound look into the life, mind or soul of the icon at its center. It's good, but it could have been so much more.

The Barbarian Invasions (2003)

Enjoyable Slow Paced Ensemble Piece

[7/10 · 29 September 2004]

The well-off oil futures trading son of a left-leaning '68 francophone Canadian professor returns to Canada when he learns that his father is dying. The film turns on the clash of values between the son and father as well as the father's questioning of his own worldview as he approaches the untimely end of his life (at 53). The talking heads aspect of the film is nicely muted by the emotional trajectory of the renewed father-son relationship and by the general humor that accompanies the ruminations of the father and his friends. The pace of the film is very relaxed, and while the father and son are clearly central characters, the director manages to maintain a strong ensemble feel. We see enough of the subordinate characters that they become something more than filler. They become embodiments of different strategies for facing the anxiety that accompanies the absurd project of trying to view a life as valuable. Two flaws make this film less than classic though: very leaden writing in the first half of the film, especially where the son is concerned, and a mostly unconvincing sequence toward the beginning of the film where the son uses bribes and street-smarts to procure a private room for his father. It's so poorly written and acted that it comes across almost as shtick. Nonetheless this is an excellent film in the way that it melds the intellectual and emotional trajectories of the story, and for its well directed and acted ensemble style.

The Letter: An American Town and the 'Somali Invasion' (2003)

Fascinating but somewhat mundane

[8/10 · 29 July 2004]

The subject matter is fascinating: a seemingly left-leaning town's reaction to the sudden migration of a Somali community to their town. A tolerant mayor loses an election because of it, and her xenophobic successor creates a firestorm of problems by penning an ill-conceived open letter asking the Somalis not to bring any more of their kind to town. The Somali's choice of residence is almost surreal: snowy Lewiston Maine. While the subject matter is fascinating the film is too much like a extended TV documentary segment. The same principles of selection are used unreflective: people speaking at public gatherings, confrontations with police, acts of violence. The end result of all this is that we get a much better picture of the mindset of a neo-nazi group pictured in the film than we do of the Somalis themselves. A more human touch would have been welcome, as would less of the tiresome monologues of neo-nazis spouting their nonsense. We've heard it. It's not interesting. It's not even politically significant. The 15 to 20 minutes of neo-nazi speech making presented in the film is merely annoying. The film is definitely worth watching though. It is a good study of how an otherwise tolerant town reacts to strangers of color (and Muslim) in the midst of the USA's xenophobic orgy post 9/11. Production values are generally above average, and the interviews featured in the film are generally rather articulate. It's well paced, and the sheer strangeness of the subject will keep you glued to the screen.

Our Lady of the Assassins (2000)

Columbian Riff on the Death Drive

[7/10 · 3 March 2004]

An aging writer and pederast returns to his birthplace, Medellin. As the film develops we discover that he feels bent on self-destruction as feels that he as finished with what it is he can do in life. His self-destructive urges are piqued by a love affair with a boy hit-man. He quickly loses his moral repugnance toward the boy's frequent murders, and a dark stoicism replaces it. Early in the film we see him crying at the memory of his deceased kin, but by the end of the film he faces the deaths of those he loves with coldness and detachment. There is a stark streak of misanthropy that runs though this film. It surfaces in the protagonists repeated complaints about excessive human breeding, but it goes beyond that to include a renunciation for his own worth and of any special value in those he loves. The despondency that first seemed to comprise questioning his own life's purpose reveals itself to be a renunciation of the game of treating any life as purposeful. The protagonist's self-destructive misanthropy and the self-destructive violence of Medellin society merge, or rather come to be seen as one in the same.

Mambo (1954)

Rough but worth roughing it

[8/10 · 27 February 2004]

The sound and the editing are rough to the point of being distracting, and the film starts slowly. Those are really the only minuses though. The writing is good, the directing is good for the most part. The actors are well directed at least, and the pacing is good.

There are three real draws to this film: Silvana Mangano's solid performance, a great supporting contribution by Shelley Winters, and a rather intense melodramatic screenplay. Rossen is not credited as a writer, but I find it hard to believe that he didn't have a significant hand in it. Many of the scenes are written in a style quite close to his.

Briefly the story runs as follows, a poor venetian in love with a dead end guy is taken under the wing of a Mambo dance producer (Shelley Winters). She briefly finds fame and then a problematic and complicated marriage with a count (the why of it you will have to find out for yourself). Her marriage is troubled by her relationship with her former lover Mario.

This film has been on my to-watch list ever since seeing a brief snippet of it in Nanni Moretti's "Caro Diario". For the most part I think it was referenced as a dancing film, but if you watch this you'll see there are some subtler ties to (which I can't mention without spoiling the film).

Silvana's closing lines: "Perhaps in my third world, the absorbing world of the Mambo, I could find forgetfulness of the past, and in time peace and happiness."

The Sea Wolf (1941)

A film better than the book

[7/10 · 27 February 2004]

The Jack London book on which the film is based is rich in characterizations and philosophy, but rather poorly constructed and plotted. Rossen has substantially and quite artfully turned this into a rather taught seaborne suspense picture. What we lose is much of what makes Wolf Larsen into one of the greatest anti-heroes in literature. That is really only alluded to in the film. What we gain is the integration of the Maud story-line, correcting the worst flaw of the novel. It's a masterful solution showing just how good of writer Rossen was. Don't watch this to write a book report on the novel though. The plot is completely reworked. Garfield and Robinson are tremendous. Ida Lupino is too, for what little we see of her. Her power helps make the Maud character big enough to make sense. Any lesser actress would have been as submerged as... Well I can't say, that would spoil it.

Laawaris (1981)

The Big B does drag

[25 June 2003]

This is a Bollywood film titled "The Orphan". Thus the plot is a given: our hero will follow a winding road toward the ultimate discovery of his true father, and along the way he will discover his true nature. Alienation will be undone by solidarity. The poor and downtrodden will have their champion. One love interest will meet her untimely demise, and another will have her man.

Our first glimpse of our hero as an adult is as a walking trope of machismo: coveralls open to the waist revealing a chest of dark black hair. One of our final glances reveals a side of the big B that I surely did not expect. The penultimate musical number features Amitabh in drag, with five costume changes, and he's damned good at it. The film is worth the watch for this sequence alone.

Goya in Bordeaux (1999)

Artistically wonderfull, but a bit too much cliche

[7/10 · 28 April 2003]

The visual appeal of the film is exceptionally strong, from costuming to the sparse Jarmanesque sets, to the period settings. The part of Goya is superbly played. Yet too often the character's, mostly that of Goya himself, stoop to uttering banal platitudes about art, about freedom, about life.

There is also a bit too much docu-nonsense in the film. Surely with the advent of the Biography channel one need not waste precious feature film time rehearsing an Art-101 bio of the man. One can find that elsewhere. What a waste.

Still for the look and mood of the film and the quality of acting, I'd recommend it pretty strongly.

I also recommend watching this film close on the heels of Jarman's Carravagio in order to understand why films about art really must avoid talking too much. Jarman's film is difficult, but it doesn't annoy one with the hubris of always trying to explain genius the way Saura's film does.

Friday Night (2002)

poetic, insightful, even humorous

[8/10 · 27 April 2003]

This movie is not for the sort of casual movie-goer who must have a plot driven, dialogue heavy entertainment vehicle in order to be satisfied. This film is typical Denis: intensely visual, with sparse dialogue and a very minimal plot.

The premise of the film is a simple one. A woman about to move in with her lover is caught in a traffic jam during a Paris transit strike. She picks up a stranger, and they have a one-nighter.

The film's focus is the little things that make up sexual attraction, the situations, the glimpses, the attitudes, the predilections, etc. It manages to present this in an almost completely visual way without ever becoming dull, pretentious, or difficult to watch. The film has a minute logic to it which manages to pull the viewer along from scene to scene using humor, suspense, and a good deal of empathy for the central character.

This film invites one to reflect on the way in which sex relates to the variety of life's anxieties: anxieties over self-image, anxieties over one's future, anxieties over one's significance, etc. It also provides an interesting vantage point from which to view the over-romanticized over-serious status that sex is given in main-stream American cinema.

Go to this film with the intent of viewing a wonderful piece of art. There is some work required on the viewer's part, but it's worth the effort.