Reviews

First half hour of this films wanders among characters' stories and relationships. They are too many of them to keeping track of. And the story never starts. What is going on? First Junie's action occurs after 18 minutes. She kisses Otto. And then everything turns gray, undefined. Nemours falls in love. She realizes that but doesn't react clearly.

Other stories appear in the middle. But we don't have idea what's the point in all this. When the love triangle is about to close, the writer throws one his character into the void. The only interesting and visible conflict in the movie dies before seeing the light. And we are back to an ambiguous situation where the characters don't know what they want. And in turn don't do anything concrete. The end is more of the same.

The main character doesn't care too much about anything. And then we don't care too much about the movie. There is almost no conflict during the film, and when it appears it disappears immediately.

As the film deals with the about-to-happen death of the main character, the screenplay writer uses the adoption of Truman as the driving force of the film. This is a good idea. It appears a little to late (about 12 minutes) in the film time. But the problem is it scarcely shows up afterwards. The adoption issue should appear more often to give the spectator the sense of important matter. Instead of that, the film dilutes itself in the actual Julián (Ricardo Darín) problems and the story of Paula and Tomás (Julián's friend and cousin). What we feel is the story do not evolve, we get stuck in a sequence of events which take us nowhere. Truman's adoption is taken back later in the film. But it's too late as it is the end of the story.

During the first ten minutes we learn that Rebecca (Juliette Binoche) is a photographer investigating terrorism, putting her own life in danger. Until an explosion takes her back to home. Twenty five minutes later she decides to quit her job. Twenty five minutes later she decides to take her daughter to a refugee camp in Kenya.

Until this very point, nothing really happens in the story. It looks like Erik Poppe thought the subject (the terrorism) was enough to carry on the audience. I don't think that worked.

The actual story starts after a whole hour of film. Here Rebecca takes a series of decisions making changes in her life and her family. And it's kind of interesting, but you are already too bored by that time.

I think the film presents Rebecca's difficulties for staying at home, as the main conflict. But it seems to be too weak for making the story flow.

This movie takes on a complex subject: obesity and bullying. I guess the intention of the film maker was good. The movie tries to remark a positive view. While the underlying message is to keep fighting for making things work. And that is praiseworthy. But that's the only positive thing about this movie.

The dialogs are hard to believe. Specially because they are presented as a sequence of speeches hard to connect with each other. After each scene I found myself wondering if someone could ever say something like that. Using those words in such a context. I guess that's why I didn't see any character in this movie. Mainly there were actors speaking their lines, sometimes laughing, sometimes crying. But it was hard to connect the same character between scenes.

I guess the original idea must have been good.

The main idea is not original, but is alright. Trying to deal with many aspects of life. The problem is it's full of clichés. Everything is too obvious and predictable. In the end, the film is boring.

Several scenes are too childish. In the beginning, when the boat passes along them. Patricia goes down the water without reason. At first you think she got hit by the boat. But when John-John gets her out of water you can see she is not hurt in the head.

The plot leaves a lot of actions without explanation. Or, at least, the plot is too plain. It's like someone telling you what happened during two hours in just a couple of minutes.

This film is an excellent critic about singers coming to Buenos Aires from other Argentinian provinces in the sixties. They used to go up in the ranking for a couple of long plays, and then fall down again. Some of them kept selling their music for years. As was the case of Palito Ortega, who apparently got mad with this film producers after watching the film. The storyline depicts Pajarito Gómez's career as he is invented, sold and used by record companies. The songs and lyrics for the sound track were made by the film writers themselves. Another piece of art parodying the actual music those artists published by the time. The plot is perfect. Actors performances are very good too. If you like acid humour and you don't like poorly talented artists, this is a must see.

I saw this film because I had never seen a Philippine picture before. I'm curious about films from around the world.

The director seems to be trying to produce a Hollywood-like film. Personally, I don't appreciate that. And, what's even worst, the result of this imitation is awful. Most dialogues are build with different takes and speech continuity is broken. You can easily tell where the film was edited at any moment. The timing between phrases is odd.

Sound and picture quality seem to be right. But most of the time you are inside a house, a motel, or a pharmacy. You can see very little of Philippines. It is comparable to any low-budget romantic TV show.

Actors won't get a prize for their performance. Sometimes you think you can believe them, but they muff sooner or later. Cristine Reyes and Ara Mina's bodies decorate the film but they never got fully naked so don't even think about it.

The story tries to be controversial, I guess. I'm not sure if this is considered a transgression in Philippines. But when I'm seeing a picture like this, when it's clear that is a bad film, all I can wish for is a story where something different happen. Well, it's not the case.