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moody1032
Reviews
A fost sau n-a fost? (2006)
A small city, it's men, their Christmas trees
It is surprising that the movie got good rates from viewers outside Romania. It is incredible easy, as a Romanian, to connect to every image and to every word, so it becomes quite difficult to isolate the message that one can only receive through the experience of living the last 16 years in Romania, from the more general, human background of the movie. The movie is not a comedy. There are moments when you laugh. There are even more moments that will make you smile. But a comedy does not keep you thinking of it for days.
It's 22nd of December. 15 years from the Revolution. Three days until Christmas. Throughout the movies, the Christmas trees work as extensions of the characters. Manescu, the alcoholic history teacher finds in his apartment a cheap and ugly tree that he doesn't remember buying. Piscoci, the friendly retired old man (a surprise, since movies taught me that old men are lonely and isolated), takes advantage of the trip to the tiny TV studio, in the station owner's wrecked car, and stops on the way to buy a tree. Jderescu, the TV station's owner and talk-show host, a men that keeps statues of Plato and Aristotle on his bookcase, a host that starts his show with pretentious quotes from Heraclit and gets offended when his former job, as a production engineer, gets mentioned, well, Jderescu does not have a Christmas tree. So he will buy one, when Piscoci gets one. There is also o beautiful tree, shortly passing buy in the hand of an ex-student of Manescu, now working outside the country.
"No man can cross the same river", states Jderescu in the beginning of the show. Yet Manescu, the man who protested in front of the city hall in 1989, comes cross with that original day. We see him getting more and more wrecked, closing within himself, looking sideways, hesitating before each answer, facing old enemies, as powerful now as they were then, trying not to remember the mix of courage and cowardice from 22nd of December 1989. The callers in the show argue that he was not there on that day, and he gets lost in demonstrating otherwise, increasingly rabid, aggressive, more and more outnumbered.
And, meanwhile, an ignored Piscoci demonstrates, based on common sense, that the truth of each callers does not have to exclude the Manescu's truth.
Close to the end of the movie, we get two great moments. The only phone call in Manescu's defense is a mirror set in front of all those who speak before, reflecting an image so hideous that can only get rejected. And then, after this purification, to fill in the remaining time of a failed show, Piscoci narrates his memories of that day. So, was it or not a revolution in their small town? Well, no big history happen in there. Just small, human stories.
Ten stars, without a doubt. Just a handful of movies haunted me so many time after the end credits rolled on.
The Constant Gardener (2005)
Definitely overrated
This seems to be obvious for any activist: behind any complex situation there is a simple explanation. And this movie was probably made just for activists. Tessa Quayle is introduced in the beginning of the movie through a bad-structured speech about the Iraq war being motivated by oil companies interest. Strucked by the originality of this theory, Justin falls in love with her, the result being a sex scene that has nothing to do with the rest of the movie (well, if we don't consider the pregnant nudity and the gross toe-sucking-while-driving scenes). Taking a look at the whole pre-African story, nothing there seems to be at least a bit credible. The rest of the movie has some logic, but is undermined by the absence of non-stereotype characters. There is no place for shades of grey in any of them, and how comfortable is to meet again the perfect British gentleman, the expansive and food-loving Italian, the computer expert kid, and the whole cast from another thousand thrillers. If you are a conspiration theory person or an anti-bush activist, you may enjoy this movie for confirming all the things that you already knew. But if you are looking for more than this (and not too much more, really), avoid this movie.