Chico & Rita: Grade B

B

Chico & Rita (2010)

Limara Meneses, Eman Xor Oña; Directors Fernando Trueba, Javier Mariscal, Tono Errando. (Spanish; subtitled).

This low-budget animation is the story of a Cuban pianist in 1948 who plays jazz in clubs and dreams of making it big. He meets Rita, a club singer with an extraordinary voice and convinces her to join the band. It works for a while, but Chico cannot commit and Rita becomes jealous and finally a fancy rich guy “discovers” Rita and whisks her off to New York and the fast lane. Chico pursues her but by this time she is a star and living large. The decades roll on. The structure of the story is reminiscent of “Remains of the Day.”

The characters are not well developed emotionally, so the romantic story is only sweet and affecting. The animation is old-fashioned, hand-drawn, simple and colorful, with lots of flat panels of saturated color, no textures or rounding, making it look like an artsy graphic novel (comic book). The sets and scenery are drawn in loving detail, especially those of prerevolutionary Havana.

The music is good, but not what I expected. I was waiting for hard latin jazz, maybe meringue, salsa, Tito Puente, Miami-style blaring trumpets, etc., but instead it was mostly ballads with hardly a pulse, pleasant enough but disappointing.

Oddly, the end-credits reveal that there were at least a dozen animation companies, from all over the world, involved in the production of this feature. I can’t imagine why that would be, but it does explain why the animation is so variable. For example, the main characters’ skin color kept changing . In the beginning, Rita is lightly tanned, while Chico is chocolate, but later, the reverse is true. Maybe that was on purpose, but I doubt it. On the upside, there is one brief dream sequence, maybe three minutes long, that is truly spectacular and mind-blowingly creative, unlike anything else in the movie. I have to wonder why that team was not given more input; it would have made an astonishing movie. Instead, this animated story is more charming than spectacular, and for that, worth seeing.

The Last Circus: Grade B

The Last Circus (Balada Triste de Trompeta) (2010)

Carlos Areces, Antonio de la Torre, Carolina Bang; Writer-director Álex de la Iglesia.(Spanish, subtitled).

This is one of the strangest movies I have seen in a long time; a dark, violent, horror movie; a bloody splatter picture; also a farce, a cutting political satire, and a sweet romantic comedy. It is so mind-blowingly, creatively original that I have to give it high marks. Its 107 minutes grind on too long however and the story degenerates into meaningless chaos as it comes to its prolonged, tragic finale, so it gets graded down for that.

Set in the 1930’s and the Spanish civil war, a group of circus performers is forcibly drafted into Franco’s army, but the head clown refuses and ridicules the nasty officer. For his efforts he is imprisoned, tortured, and killed, but not before he advises his confused young son to be a sad clown, not a happy clown, because life is no longer happy. The son grows up and joins a circus as an incredibly incompetent sad clown. He is so bad that he actually makes people laugh. Ironically, the circus’s happy clown is actually a psychotic woman-beater who lords it over him just as the fascist soldier humiliated his father. The pathetic, dumpy and weak sad clown naively falls in love with the happy clown’s girl, the beautiful trapeze artist, and is consequently beaten to a pulp. Retaliating, he attacks the happy clown, ripping his face apart with a farrier’s hook, in one of several extremely violent, bloody scenes, that are yet somehow squirmingly comedic because of the costumes and sets.

The sad clown escapes the police by running into the forest and living naked in a cave like an animal. A hunter finds him and takes him home as a curiosity, and you’ll never guess, the hunter is the very army officer who killed his father. The sad clown plots his revenge, but first he improvises a fantastic clown costume out of draperies and props suggestive of papal garb.

But suddenly the happy clown reappears, not dead after all, but horribly disfigured, in a fantastic makeup job. Further tragicomic-horror clown battles ensue, including a chase up a church steeple reminiscent of the chase up Mount Rushmore in Hitchcock’s North by Northwest. There are also visual allusions to Picasso’s Guernica, Puccini’s Pagliacci, and to other historical and cinematic landmarks.

The original title, A Sad Trumpet Ballad, may have some significance that escapes me, but is otherwise just the name of the musical sound track. The cinematography, and especially the lighting, are exceptionally striking throughout the movie. Costumes and makeup are unbelievably creative, as is the writing itself. Directing is excellent and well paced, until the last act. Violence and sexuality are integrated into the allegorical civil war theme and used well. Ultimately, the movie does not present a single, easy to grasp political message, or comedic tone, or horror theme, but is a dizzying pastiche of many of those, engaging the viewer on multiple levels of relentless creative turmoil.

Broken Embraces: Grade C

C
Broken Embraces (2009)
Penelope Cruz, Lluis Homar. Writer & Director Pedro Almodovar. (Spanish, subtitled)

The combination of Almodvar and Cruz is usually a winner, but not this time, and it is the director who did not hold up his end of the deal.

The main character (Homar) is an aging blind writer who must come to terms with his past (shown in time cuts), when he was a sighted film director. Working on his last film, he had a passionate affair with his leading lady (Cruz) who was two-timing her rich but gerontological husband. As we learn later, children of indefinite paternity follow.

But it is a soap-opera story full of clichéd melodrama that produces no dramatic tension and little interest. Instead the only things to keep a viewer interested are Cruz’s acting and Almodovar’s directing. Cruz is a fine actor and does an impressive job with the weak material, but the main thing about her in this movie is how she looks. The director has her in dozens of costumes and wigs, with all kinds of makeup and sometimes no makeup, which is a bit shocking, to see her as an ordinary woman. If Almodovar wants to burst the movie bubble and show her as just a woman, fine, but what’s the point? We knew that. We go to the movies for the fantasy.

As for the directing itself, it is interesting and colorful, as you would expect from Almodovar. Having the camera pan back and forth between actors having a conversation was like watching a tennis match, but it was interesting, and it did work, and a technical marvel, as the focus stayed completely sharp. But despite these and other creative innovations, you have to ask, what is the point? There was no significant story driving it all, and only very mundane dialog. I felt like I was watching a daytime soap on Univision. So there is enough interest here to make the film worth a look, but that’s all.

Sex and Lucia: Grade B

B
Sex and Lucia (2001)
Paz Vega, Tristán Ulloa; writer and director Julio Medem. (Spanish, subtitled)

I’ve been charmed by Paz Vega ever since 10 Items or Less (2006), so I looked at this one, which was among her first half dozen roles on the big screen, at the tender age of 26. Even then she had all the mysterious, earnest, and intense looks, glances and gestures that make her so compelling. Comparisons to Penelope Cruz cannot be avoided.

This is not a great movie, serving mainly as a vehicle for writerly self-aggrandizement. It is a story about a writer who, perhaps unwittingly, is writing the story that we are watching unfold, except sometimes he is also unknowingly acting it out. In the end, it doesn’t add up, and gets so caught up in its tricky self-references that after a while the viewer just tunes out, listens to the melodic language and watches the lovely scenery, good acting, and the mesmerizing Vega.

The cinematography is beautiful, some of it stunning, where color saturation is pushed so hard clouds become pink. In some scenes the film is almost solarized to give the impression of intense heat. Locations are gorgeous, sets are interesting, especially the country house, and the costumes are good.

As for sex, well, there is considerable naked writhing, but apart from the odd nipple or buttock, there is really nothing to look at. The characters are hypersexual at times, but hey, they are young. That’s really not the point of the movie. Rather, it is the complex characters and convincing acting.

Timecrimes: Grade C

C
Time Crimes (2007)
Karra Elejalde, Bárbara Goenaga; Writer and director Nacho Vigalondo. (Spanish, subtitled).

Hector1, a perfectly ordinary middle class guy (Elejalde) is sitting in his back yard with his wife when he spots a naked woman in the nearby woods. He goes to investigate and is attacked by a scary guy with his head wrapped in blood-soaked bandages. Terrified, Hector1 runs, stumbling into a nearby scientific laboratory where a technician urges him to hide in a big vat of milk. That doesn’t make a lot of sense, but it is just barely believable, so we go with it. Well, what do you know but that big vat of milk is actually a time machine! It’s a terrific realization of a time machine. Why do we always assume such a machine would involve complicated electronics, sparks and electric motor noises? The vat of milk sends Hector1 back in time, but only an hour. He emerges from the vat as Hector2, confused, and walks back through the woods to spy Hector 1 sitting in his lawn chair with his wife, an hour ago. Hector2 is enraged that this “other fellow” has appropriated his wife, and vows to kill him. The scientist explains that the other fellow is himself, but Hector2 doesn’t get it. Presumably, if he did kill Hector1, he, himself (Hector2) would cease to exist. Hector2 then inadvertently gets into a car accident, cuts his head, which he wraps with bandages. A buxom young woman comes to his aid. Needless to say, she will end up naked in the woods where Hector1 will see her. The plot convolutes further until a Hector3 emerges from the time machine! I was unable to keep the time travel paradoxes sorted out, and it seemed like a lot of illogical nonsense to me. Maybe my mind is just too inflexible. I would have preferred more insight into the characters’ thinking, rather than just watching their strange behavior. But the story has a neat idea and the movie is amusing enough.

Talk To Her: Grade A

A
Talk To Her (2002). (Spanish, subtitled)
Javier Camara, Dario Grandinetti, Lenore Watling, Rosario Flores. Director Pedro Almodovar.

In this ingenious story, a male nurse (Camara) attends to a beautiful woman (Watling) who has been in a coma for four years. He washes her hair, applies lotions to her body, and massages all her muscles every day. It is not difficult to imagine how that relationship might develop. He talks to her as if she were fully present, reading to her, telling her about his day, confessing his secrets. That approach is cheerful and charming at first but soon you realize that he actually prefers a woman who is no more than a beautiful body, the ultimate dehumanization of woman into a male sex object.

In a parallel relationship, another man (Grandinetti) is emotionally attached to a woman he only recently met (Flores) but she had an injury and goes into a coma at the same hospital as the first pair. Camara urges Grandinetti to talk to his comatose woman the way he does to his, but Grandinetti thinks that is too weird. The men nevertheless develop a friendship around their concern for their women. Grandinetti’s relationship with his woman is sentimental. He is in love with the memory of who she was, not the corpse she is now. The two men form an emotional relationship that might be more grounded in reality than their relationship with their women.

The pace is slow (as European films are for Americans), but the filmmaking is enjoyable, with lots of clever symbolism and dark humor. Acting is strong, and the music is outstanding, ranging from Carlos Jobim to K.D. Laing, to Henry Purcell. Cinematography is a treat for the eyes. Almodovar’s well-known misogyny is evident, but his exploration of sexual feelings, emotions, urges, and relationships goes beyond simple categories.

Pan's Labyrinth: Grade B

B

Pan’s Labyrinth (2006)

Ivana Baquero, Sergi López, Maribel Verdú. Director Guillermo del Toro. (Spanish, subtitled).

Chthonic is the word that comes to mind to describe this film. Along with dark, muddy, creepy, bloody, disturbing, and in the end, tragic. A preteen girl (Baquero) is brought with her pregnant mother to a military compound in Spain, in the mid 1930’s during the Spanish civil war (nice cars). The Captain, the woman's husband, but not father to the girl, is a Nationalist, hunting anti-fascist rebels in the woods around his compound. The girl lives in fantasy, which is the main theme of the movie. She enters into the underworld guided by insect-like fairies, and is instructed to undertake dangerous trials involving scary monsters, an allusion to Dante’s Inferno. The underground world, and much of the movie, is rendered in a dark blue tone that obscures detail and which I found very unpleasant to look at. However the animation effects, especially the fairies, are highly imaginative, and elevate the movie above mediocrity. There is no story, really. There are a few mini-melodramas, but no overall narrative. It is a hodge-podge of imagery from Peter Pan, Alice in Wonderland, Brothers Grimm, and Mayan mythology. Good imagery it is, but even a fairy tale is supposed to be a tale, and there isn’t anything coherent here. The child’s point of view is not consistently held so it is not just a charming fantasy either. The above-ground theme of the civil war involves torture, blood and violence, making it not really a children’s movie, so you have to wonder who the target audience is. If there is an analogy between the underworld adventures and the politics of 1930’s Spain, I didn’t get it.

The Perfect Crime: Grade A

A

The Perfect Crime (2004)

Rafael Gonzalez, Monica Cervera, Luis Varela. Director: Alex de la Iglesia. Spanish (subtitled).

Gonzalez is a department store clerk, head of ladies wear, locked in a comically serious sales contest with Varela, head of men’s wear. More fun is Gonzalez’ nighttime romps with the gorgeous women clerks in his department. He stays overnight in the store with each one, and they dress up fancy off the racks, serve themselves a feast from the deli department, toast each other in furniture (with the tags dangling from the glasses), and “sleep” in the bedding department. One plain-looking clerk (Cervera) is left out of the rotation however and that is trouble. When a murder plot develops, the movie shifts gears, from frothy farce to dark and macabre comedy full of visual and situational humor that ranges from slapstick gag to magical realism, to existential and sociological commentary. The Spanish title is funny and more appropriate (El Crimen Ferpecto). As long as you overlook the stereotypical dehumanization of the women, it is a thoroughly entertaining movie, well-acted and directed throughout.