Birthday Wish.

If this had been released today it would've been the coolest present ever.
Still had a fantastic birthday hehe.

Happy Birthday Max!

He has played chess with death, narrated for von Trier, been the Savior, the Conqueror, an emigrant, a priest, an Allen player and a moving dad.
Today he turns 81 and we can only wait and see what else he has up his sleeve.
You can always go watch Shutter Island to celebrate him but I suggest you find your copy of The Seventh Seal, sit back and enjoy the work of one of the greatest acting masters of all time.

Love is All We Need *1/2

Director: Jorge Durán
Cast: Cauã Reymond, Ângelo Antônio, Fabiula Nascimento
Simone Spoladore, Victor Navega Motta

Love is All We Need (Não se pode viver sem amor) is the third film by Chilean writer/director Jorge Durán. Set in Rio de Janeiro during Christmas Eve, it follows multiple characters as they reach collective epiphanies revolving around love of course.
Young Gabriel (Motta) and Roseli (Spoladore) arrive to the city looking for the boy's father, unemployed lawyer Joao (Reymond) decides to try the criminal way in order to get enough money to elope with his girlfriend Gilda (Nascimento), while university professor Pedro (Antônio) wonders where his future will take him.
To say that the film's opening credits (a Saul Bass-y stars and jazz stunner of an opener) are much more interesting than anything that comes later, might be a disservice to anyone who worked in the film but becomes quite accurate when the movie reaches its climax.
Durán focuses on forcing the connections instead of letting them grow organically and all the characters seem to know they're predestined to know each other and learn something valuable.
It doesn't help that each of their stories isn't never that interesting to begin with and we might create assumptions of our own to make the whole thing matter more.
Therefore as Gabriel travels around the city looking for his dad we begin to assume he might be connected to Gilda-the stripper with a secret-in the end of course they are, but not in conventional ways.
The characters' motivations are never clear and the actors end up giving extreme performances that hurt the film's theme of unity (Reymond and Antônio are all about restraint, Nascimento is extreme theatrical and Motta intends well but suffers because of the ridiculous twists his character endures).
Durán chooses to end his film with a moment that should recall magical realism but comes off as a tacky deus ex machina complete with the ugliest looking visual effects ever.
If the director was trying to unite the rawness of digital film (in honestly most of the film has the texture and look of a soap opera) with the richness of Brazil's culture, the result is often more confusing, dull and shallow than magical.

Alice in Wonderland ***

Director: Tim Burton
Cast: Mia Wasikowska, Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter,
Anne Hathaway, Crispin Glover, Matt Lucas, Stephen Fry
Michael Sheen, Alan Rickman, Marton Csokas, Timothy Spall

Lewis Carroll's books of Alice in Wonderland have been adapted into movie form since the medium began. From silent versions to the subversive animation of 1950's Disney to Jan Svankmajer; Alice's story has always fascinated artists who tend to explore the horror that lies in the innocent.
It makes sense that Tim Burton would want to do his own version, and even if it's not the definitive take fans of the filmmaker were expecting it to be, it's a lovely ride and one of Burton's most mature films to date.
Taking Carroll's text for a spin, he makes Alice (Wasikowska) a nineteen year old girl about to be married to a man she barely knows.
Encouraged by her deceased father (Csokas) to use her imagination and spoiled by the dreams she's had all her life about strange characters and a mysterious land, she follows a white rabbit (voiced by Sheen) on the day of her engagement.
She falls inside an all too familiar hole in the ground where she finds the door to Underland, a place populated by weird characters who insist she's come to fulfill a prophecy.
Soon she learns that not only she has been there before (creating an interest dilemma between what reality is in dreams while giving Disney the opportunity to make endless sequels relying on this concept) but this time in particular she's set to end the reign of the evil Red Queen (Carter) and hand the crown to her sister the benevolent White Queen (Hathaway).
Alice teams up with Tweedledee and Tweedledum (Lucas), the Cheshire cat (Fry), the blue caterpillar Ebsolem (Rickman) and the Mad Hatter (Depp), among more famous characters, as she explores this wonderland and learns lessons for her own life.
Obviously stuck somewhere between the director's vision and the studio's demands Alice in Wonderland is uneven in narrative terms as it struggles between the edge of Burton and Carroll, with the status quo preserving by way of forced naivete Disney specializes in (it's surprising but the animated version is much darker than this).
Therefore we see how Burton inserts his dark humor and macabre nature by way of the art direction, concealed symbols and unexpected character quirks.
In this way Hathaway's, Nigela Lawson-inspired, White Queen takes an aim at social terms of perfection with a lunatic side (watch as the actress deliciously travels from Barbie to Chucky in seconds), Carter indulges in the oddity of her character's construction (her giant head and blood red lips are almost iconic), while Depp surprisingly underacts his way out of the Hatter's madness, creating a character that moves more than it disturbs (his character's post traumatic stress disorder might be a bit too facile but also allows Burton to take a subtle aim at the effects of war).
Perhaps it served Burton to tone down his darkness because the film achieves a calm and sense of equilibrium that allows both opposing visions to co-exist and deliver entertainment that's clever and simple.
In many ways the film is more shaped after The Wizard of Oz than any previous incarnation of the Alice story and in the same way frames the protagonist's adventure against unconscious manifestations.
At first Burton stresses too much what "real life" character will inspire each Wonderland inhabitant but soon this becomes an opportunity to decipher if Burton finally found a way to comment on the power of dreams.
The fact that this Alice often wonders out loud if she's inside a dream doesn't make her smarter than Oz's Dorothy, but serves as a well meant, if underwritten, attempt to encompass female liberation and the Industrial Revolution overthrowing Victorianism.
For all the flaws in Alice in Wonderland we are rewarded with lush scenery, extremely thought out character design and a filmmaker surprisingly finding marvels under restraint.
Like his heroine, Burton enters a land that thrives with the promise of unknown terror but his ability to refresh his aesthetics despite compromise is the real wonder.

Cold Water of the Sea **

Director: Paz Fábrega
Cast: Luis Carlos Bogantes, Lil Quesada Morúa, Montserrat Fernández

Cold Water of the Sea overflows with beauty to conceal the fact that it has nothing to say. Set in a Costa Rican beach during the New Year, the plot follows Rodrigo (Bogantes) and Mariana (Morúa) a young couple who travel to the coast so he can settle a business deal.
On their first night there they find Karina (Fernández) a seven year old who seems to be lost and tells Mariana of the hardships she endures at home.
The following morning they wake up to realize the little girl has disappeared. Rodrigo goes on with life as usual but Mariana is stricken in a different way and begins an introspective journey which unleashes past traumas and connects her to the girl in an unexpected way.
If all this sounds very Persona and Fábrega in a way is implying there exists a metaphysical connection between them (can they be each other? will rescuing one mean salvation for the other?) this is only suggested by forced methods of visual poetry and ominous silences.
The director assumes that by showing moments where "nothing" happens, the audience will be immersed into the profundity she thinks her movie has.
Therefore we have scenes where Mariana dives into a filthy pool (in an obvious "problematic cleansing" metaphor) or she sobs quietly answering "I don't know what's wrong with me" to her concerned boyfriend.
There is also a recurring theme of sea snakes lying on the shore; supposedly they come out due to the low temperatures in the sea water but other than for biological novelty's sake-and stunning visuals of course provided by cinematographer María Secco- it serves no real purpose within the plot.
Is the director suggesting that Karina is a snake? Is Mariana's past the snake? Like the phenomenon involving the reptiles, the whole movie is actually plagued with elements that intend to contribute to build something but make no sense and more than that, never engage the audience into the issues onscreen.
A past of sexual abuse is suggested with trickery, a physiological event that confuses instead of stating and we never understand why Mariana's profession is important to the plot.
Kudos though to little Fernández who builds her character in a way that we wonder if she's a victim or The Bad Seed. Her movements in front of the camera are as natural as they come and her eyes suggest enough viciousness and innocence to merit her a much better movie.
The adult actors fall under the director's spell and spend the whole movie underacting to the point of dullness.
We never understand why Mariana came with Rodrigo, then he disappears for several key scenes and seems to be annoyed by her more than he's worried.
Morúa, who probably intends well, never taps into the inner life of her character and as much as Mariana is driven by inertia, Morúa makes her every action too mechanic.
As appealing as the movie is on pure visuals alone, everything we watch serves no actual purpose but unlike something Bergman or Antonioni would've made, the void here feels unintentional.
It tries so hard to be symbolic and important that it forgoes the road of coherence (within its frame of course) in favor of a series of moments that truly never engage people watching or the characters within the film.
Why do Mariana's friends appear at the beach? Why is Karina's relationship with her mother so strained?
As the movie becomes more and more frustrating we witness other events that reveal that it's probably because Fábrega doesn't have the capacity to make something universal out of everything she wants to say.
She has problems contextualizing the movie for example and until the end, it's never quite clear for audience members (especially those who don't speak Spanish) that the movie takes place during the last days of December and once there they will be even more confused by very Costa Rican traditions that onscreen come off as completely different things (camping at the beach is easily mistaken as extreme poverty or even refugee camps).
While this means that the director perhaps didn't intend her movie for foreign audiences, the pseudo metaphysics, draggy narrative and psychological lack of depth in the whole thing, might imply that the only person meant to enjoy and "get" the film was the director herself.

Happy Easter.

Is it normal that I think of Charlton Heston more than I think of Jesus during Holy Week and Easter?

How to Train Your Dragon **

Director: Dean DeBlois, Chris Sanders

Once again disregarding time accurate conceptions in favor of contemporary behavior and any trace of verisimilitude within the time and characters, Dreamworks Animation Studios delivers what might be one of their most successful attempts at maturing.
In How to Train Your Dragon we meet Hiccup (voiced somewhat annoyingly by Jay Baruchel) a young viking who's the shame of his town.
While everyone else in town-including other kids his age-indulge in the tradition of dragon slaying, Hiccup pretty much messes up every time he leaves the house.
His father Stoick (voiced by Gerard Butler in an unimaginative 300 way) the village leader leaves for battle and expects his son to have achieved something when he returns.
Fortunately for Hiccup he meets Toothless, a young dragon (of a race nobody has seen before!) who befriends him and soon enough he's not only taming all the other dragons but becomes the village's favorite son.
For all the Oedipal and quasi-environmental issues at its center, there is really nothing in this movie you haven't seen before.
It indulges itself with cliché after cliché; from the characters' names to the things they do. Really what is it with Dreamworks insistence of disregarding everything in favor of contemporary personalities children will enjoy? Don't they have the slightest sense of historical conscience?
The film is somewhat entertaining though and visually it's beautiful to behold (Roger Deakins acted as visual consultant) but it puffs more often than it soars.