Reviews
Fight Club (1999)
Six Ways to Saturday's Fight Club
Early this year, I saw Adam Bernstein's "Six Ways to Sunday", a violent psychological view of gangsterism. It's a coincidence or David Fincher (or his scriptwriters) saw/copied some innovative plot elements from Bernstein's movie .
And well, this theme is not new in cinema. From David Lynch filmography we can find that statement, being the most recent "Lost Highway". Or just remember Alan Parker's "Angel Heart".
But David Fincher is capable to bring that issue again with a witty dose of weird-black comedy through Pitt/Norton's performances, as somehow sequels to their characters in "Twelve Monkeys" and "Primar Fear", respectively.
Fincher is following Hitchcock's steps -and that's a compliment.
Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace (1999)
The Marketing Menace
"Hey, let's make a movie to sell some toys!". That's the commitment. How dare George Lucas to say this movie is a relief of this cynical age... Some people said that the movie was made to amuse kids, not critics. I say those kids are not stupid anymore. I don't care about the "timeless saga": this movie is a yawning lapse of time. I know George Lucas -and all the industry behind him- doesn't care about what I'm writing here. He just wants more money to buy more machines to do CG animation for Steven Spielberg and the rest of clan. The script is redundant and pretentious -uuh! Anakin is like Jesus Christ-; the performances are stiff as an old table -just the Queen shows some acting wood-; the CGFX are nice due to a well-inspired art direction... Well, George Lucas destroyed in minutes whatever he had created all these years. Please, open your eyes and be sincere... Don't let the marketing brainwashes you.
Six Ways to Sunday (1997)
Oedipus consummated
"Six ways to Sunday" is not a 'funny gangster's flick' where the important plot is not if the boy is cold-blooded or not... This movie is a psychological view of the violence triggered by a real ill sexual life. If we do a deep research, we'll find that all the actual gangsters-mobsters shared the same problem. The script has suspense well built, using good tricks in order to surprise you. It's an imaginative gangster movie -if you insist- avoiding the Tarantino's BlahBlahBlah, the Coppola's Glam, the Scorcese's DeNiro-ism/Pesci-ism and the DePalma's Stereotypes...
Los caifanes (1967)
Promised Modernity
Los Caifanes shows how mexican youth, from different social/economic levels, was looking for that promised modernity during the sixties... Basically, two points of view confront their wills: the medium-up class and the medium-low class... Big difference? In Mexico, yes it was, it is and maybe, it will be...