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Reviews
El Manzano Azul (2012)
Nice Story on an Andes Setting
City boy from divorced parents is sent out to the Venezuelan Andean mountains to spend time with his maternal grandfather. Although the story is straightforward, the mood is relaxing and the humor is light enough to take you smoothly through its 120-minute run time. Acting from Miguelangel Landa and the boy is of a great quality. Mr Landa has been in notable local movies like "Cangrejo" and is refreshingly good portraying a sick old man with stories to tell. The cinematography is excellent, with the foggy "páramos" (essentially cold mountains with sparse vegetation) as the backdrop. Editing is well done, shifting from the older narrator to the younger protagonist in a way that moves the story forward. Although there are some clear anachronisms (201x model car in a 20-year flashback?), the movie leaves a good feeling of Venezuelan cinema.
Watchmen (2009)
Excellent Movie from Dated Material
Many people say that the Watchmen movie had a hard job to live up to its source material, the original graphic novel. But although it's an excellent asset in terms of its characters and philosophical underpinnings, the novel is a liability because it forces the director to create a revisionist historical science fiction movie. I mean, how do you recreate the tension of nuclear holocaust and transmit it to a public that is too young to remember it? How can you remember that it's in the 1980's when you see a flying owl-mobile? (Notice that I haven't read the novel)
When you forget the scenery because you're too busy watching the fight scenes and the 80's background starts to sound like a oldies radio station, you begin to pay attention to the sum of its parts instead of the whole.
Fortunately, Watchmen has great parts that shouldn't leave you disappointed. For example, the relatively-unknown three-name actors who play Rorschach and The Comedian. Their excellent work allows you to contemplate a couple of fully-drawn characters that are more psychopaths than superheroes. If you extract the Rorschach story from the movie, you could have a film that stands on its own.
Dr Manhattan, besides distracting you by being blue, CGI and naked, still has enough lines to make you imagine what it would be like to be a omnipotent entity that gets sick and tired of mingling with humans.
The fight scenes are very 300-like but since most of us forgot 300 and were embarrassed to rent it again, the speed slow-down and acceleration effect is a guilty joy to watch.
In essence, if you haven't read the novel and don't have any expectations for this movie "changing your life" or anything like it, you're certainly enjoy it for the visual treat and the sheer effort of each one of the people involved, specially the director and his actors.
King Corn (2007)
Removing the dubious conclusion, the work is excellent
King Corn is an excellent documentary of the entire process of the corn kennel, from its genetic origin to its final use in food. The young protagonists start out from their worry that the junk food they eat will make them live less years than the previous generation and use this energy to investigate the main column of American food which is corn. As they decide to grow an acre of corn in IOWA, they interview people from all stages of the process and make sure that their work is not seen as a all-out criticism of corn. Reading between the lines, you can conclude that although the corn subsidies have made food much cheaper for Americans, it has also reduced its quality. Of course, you have to figure that out yourself since they don't propose a solution.
However, they interview enough people to allow you to think. For example, when talking to a farmer that operates a cattle feed lot in which cows are given antibiotics so they can process the excessive amounts of corn that will make them fat, the man replies bluntly: "yeah, we can have our cows eat grass, but that would make it more expensive".
They also give a primer on high-fructose corn syrup, the preferred sugar in the USA food industry. Heck, it's sugar. But since it's so cheap, tons of food products contain it.
King Corn is an excellent movie for those who don't understand farm subsidies and why they were put in the first place. It's also very balanced and does not cast any of the participants as evildoers. It's just the final (baseball) scene that lets in their youth idealism and pretty much disowns the extensive work they did for the past hours.