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gerardo-41
Reviews
Avida (2006)
Funny nonsense
This movie is an absolute hallucination; there is no plot, visually is black and white standard, nothing new, but it is powerful in the realm of the subconscious. Avida is a fat woman that somewhat resembles Divine: a woman that is eating chips all day and when her dog is kidnapped she asks to the kidnappers to take her life. So you'll have an approximate of your worst nightmare from a drunken night when watching it. The movie was selected to compete in Cannes but was discarded immediately. Maybe this kind of experiment is a cool thing to watch when smoking a good joint but i wonder what is the meaning or transcendence of this mess. At least when you watch a David Lynch movie you are also confused but you can appreciate the work behind: In his movies there's good direction, organic and artesanal decorates, good actors and the presence of emotion as another character but here is all nonsense. Funny nonsense, anyway.(There's a cameo from Claude Chabrol). All is absurd and pointless but it acquires some meaning if you see it with the eyes you watch your dreams.
Tideland (2005)
Terry Gilliam at his best
This movie is an uneasy one. A little girl has to live in the dark and bizarre world her parents inhabit. The wonderful thing is how she deals with it; due to her innocence she transforms the world inside her mind and all becomes happy for a moment, when she rides in the old rusty school bus that lies upwards on her father's house's field and talks to the heads of dolls she couldn't afford to buy complete. The sad thing is that it is not real. She deals with madness, loneliness and her parents drug addiction (she even cooks the spoon for them). So her mind is her salvation and shelter, the beautiful and magical world where she escapes from what is ugly just to awake and return to it. She finds herself suddenly encouraged to change by a witch and her retarded and visionary brother and later rescued by destiny to maybe lead a normal life or maybe not. All the people that says it's unwatchable shouldn't see any more movies. Watch it with new and innocent eyes as the director says or forget about it. I'm so happy that in American cinema there's still artists and not just patriotic businessmen making movies. This is Terry Gilliam at his best.
The Manson Family (1997)
A cult classic and an example of perseverance by director Jim Vanbebber
This film is beyond horror cinema or docudrama. It's a fearless movie, one in a million for the uneasy subject and the way it describes an era, the end of the sixties and the beginning of contemporary media coverage of murder in Hollywood. It took from 1988 to 2003 to make and it was due to the zero concessions director Jim Vanbebber made to the film industry and obviously to a small budget. It's absolute underground and once you watch it you'll be haunted forever. I loved the way it's made thematically because it doesn't glorifies or condemns Manson and is also impartial when it comes to the victim's point of view. From the opening sequence you have flowers stained with drops of blood, the acting is adequate when it comes to describe a generation so lost and disperse at the end of the sixties. Visually it takes you from pastel pale tones and scratched emulsions that evoke a real sixties b-movie to the high definition late nineties and the blurred TV style of the eighties. You have the story as lived and told by the murderers before and after the killings, the story as watched by 80's media and the seeds planted on the same lost minds of the young people of today. Having read Helter Skelter and Manson in his own words i think is the closest recreation of the case so it scores beyond 5 stars. It gets until your guts and clarifies any doubt about what really happened. For me is as clear as this: A lot of young people with many drugs, sex and free time and no love or aspirations, thinking they were being so neat by living out of the system and with so much freedom and mental confusion as to make what they made: kill the so called pigs because untalented Charlie couldn't get a contract with a record label. Retaliation, creepy crawling, "stabbing and stabbing", they lost it and found themselves suddenly in hell and more lost than before. If you want to see graphic murder depiction, rivers of blood, great camera-work and photography then go for this one. It's a great drama of a real case, one of the blackest points in recent American history. A symptom of the infections that this country spelled on it's people after world war 2 and Vietnam and the beginning of new cults, leaders, fakers and outsiders. Also great is the music made mostly by Phil Anselmo. A cult classic and an example of perseverance by director Jim Vanbebber from whom a lot of Hollywood "movie makers" can take note when making garbage just for money.