Reviews by giuvax

One of the best Coen's movies. As usual, they joke about everything, they are serious about everything. They let suspence grow bigger and bigger... and then? It seems they're right there, in front of you, answering "what did you expect from us?" A silent strong powerful sarcasm as in Raising Arizona. All the actors at their best. Simon Helberg cameo (Howard Wolowitz in TBBT).

I liked so much the first half of this movie that I couldn't like the other half in the same way. It seems Cuaròn loved very much Terry Gilliam, especially some settings, scenes, lights as in Twelve monkeys or Fisher king. But the beauty of the first half, carefully sipped and full of assayed passages, dissolves after the first hour. Everything becomes too much spoken, or too less. The shooting part is really too long and though the way it all ends sounds good (cinematically speaking, I'm not talking about the plot), I just got the feeling the things could be structured much better.
Wonderful Caine and Moore.

A small tv movie with no particular strengths and also some rhetoric. Along the lines of "Dead Poets Society" but with less force. Interesting actors, but not all persuasive all the time.

This is one of those movies that I suspect I saw too late, because the fact of the extreme body does not convince me at all, the narrative solutions seem obvious and narrative turnings predictable, and the external eye that tells the story, since he should be the protagonist's one, rather than discouraged or disillusioned or unknowingly stray it seems to me quite pleased and itchy (and, if you're asking, no, the matter is not sex, if it ever was); this makes it difficult to remember who is the narrator, which the director overwhelmingly seems to want to replace to, and makes it difficult to maintain the point of view ideally neutral or, paradoxically, 'pure' which seems to be declared at the beginning. So, I do not feel pain, I do not feel joy, and I can't even feel the squalor of the absence of both.

I had forgotten this movie somewhere and I couldn't remember why it was on my 'to-see' list. I started watching with little interest because it was in danish with english subtitles and I was afraid I would not be able to understand at all.

But the movie killed me. It is a terrible movie though its poetry, though its dreams and flights. It is very disturbing.
With an alternated structure between animation and real scenes, the story starts from the death of a young porn star who leaves a five year old child, which the uncle decides to take care of. So, exhibited and commodified sex would not be a problem if it wasn't part of child's everyday life, in a way that the uncle tries to uproot and fight. But, as it turns out, not in the normal and peaceful ways you would expect. By which we understand the choice of animation, to describe things that would not be possible to show using a child actress. And by which we understand the inverted choice, with the reality of the animation and cutscenes for fantasy, dreams, imagination. But above all, we understand the inclusion of some crucial points not properly descriptive, but powerful, as some stylistic choices and visual suggestions that literally tell more than the story itself. You might say, speaking in music, that there are instrumental parts stuck sometimes in the middle of verses sung. Which is something I do love, because I really like those who are able to tell you something without the need of a description.
Degraded, in this film, is not only the body, also: all the things seem to be degraded, the people around, places, situations, because the initial trauma, the death of the mother, seems to have pervaded everything, or permanently permeated every other sphere of life of the child and his uncle. Everything becomes abnormal, even the initial shareable goals of the man. The movie gets increasingly grotesque in a nonlinear way, preventing a complete identification, with an uncosolatory final that threatens to lose sight of the purpose of complaint.
The punch in the stomach remains nevertheless. And this makes it necessary for me, like all imperfect and wrong but powerful movies.