These are the movie premieres that hit the screens starting this December 16:
By Jordi Batlle Caminal
It is not numbered but everyone knows that it is 2. Because everyone saw Avatar, everyone remembers Avatar and everyone, thirteen years after visiting it for the first time, will return these days to the planet Pandora. Avatar was sold to us as the film that would revolutionize fantastic and science fiction cinema, that would divide the history of the genre into a before and after, as Kubrick did in 1968. A prediction that was only fulfilled at a technological and digital level, a field in which that Avatar was indeed an evolutionary work for the cinema of a great, great spectacle. For the rest, it was nothing more than a brilliant hybrid of war film, pro-Indian western and jungle adventure film: a little Far Drums, a little Pocahontas, a few drops of ecology and “new age” spirituality, etc.
Having lost its initial shock, Avatar: The Sense of Water unsurprisingly maintains a dazzling visual display across over three grueling hours of Herculean visual grandeur, but it's decidedly underwhelming on the story side. One of the novelties is that the prominence now shifts to the children of the protagonists of Avatar (the ex-marine and the indigenous woman), giving the story adolescent fever. And another, the incorporation of the ocean to the adventure, Cameronian holy water (Abyss, Titanic) with a good handful of underwater scenes filmed with a clarity never seen before. And between seas and youth, a very silly, childish and naive plot, which sometimes makes one think of an inflamed version of My friend Flipper. Little substance for such a long wait.
Well, after giving us this gargantuan retinal banquet although lacking in vitamins, it is urgent to remember that the thing does not end here: according to the biennial forecasts, there will be Avatar 3, Avatar 4 and Avatar 5 (they are already in production) for 2024, 2026 and 2028. By the fifth, Cameron will be 74 years old and will have spent the last 19 (19 years, wow!) locked up with just one toy. Those of us who admire Terminator, Aliens, Risky Lies or Titanic would have preferred that he spend this time on a greater variety of toys: now a scalextric, then a magic box, a fire truck, some lead gladiators...
By J. Batlle
Jerzy Skolimowski is a resister, a survivor, a Polish filmmaker from Roman Polanski's generation (he was his co-writer on Knife in the Water) and, like Polanski himself, a wandering exile. Little joke, he has been making films for more than sixty years although, unlike the author of Chinatown, with a regular presence (and success) on the screens, his career is littered with ups and downs, gray periods and occasional revivals, perhaps because his films, Very personal and visceral, they don't flirt with the industry like their compatriot's. Skolimowski's turning points are far apart: Walkower, Le départ or Deep end are paradigmatic titles of that stage, which lasted until the end of the sixties, of radical, aggressive cinema of the new European waves. A decade later he would roar with force again in quality works such as El grito and Trabajo clandestine. And the excellent The Lightship soon after, although we will have to wait a few years for its next revival: Essential killing, from 2010, unpublished in our theaters.
Well, behold, at 84 years old, Skolimowski reappears again and in top form in Eo. Its plot base is a tribute to Au hasard Balthazar, Robert Bresson's classic starring a donkey, here taken to another aesthetic and conceptual dimension. The vicissitudes and misfortunes of a donkey are, in effect, the center of this somewhat deranged, Dantesque journey (there are scenes directly turned red), through various European countries, from Poland to Italy, structured in episodes with few dialogues, much and rather thunderous music, nervous strokes, stark violence and humor with a surreal accent. Faced with the purity of the animal, the human being reveals himself as a despicable and ruinous species, condemned to extinction. Far from being a sermon or a moral lesson, Eo is an exercise in cinema in a state of freedom, hard and rough but truly fascinating.
By J. Batlle
We have 45 minutes of footage, half the movie, and nothing has happened. Nothing dramatic, nothing funny, nothing epic, no apparent conflict... A still young and estranged father and his eleven-year-old daughter spend a vacation together in Turkey: bedroom scenes, pool scenes, beach scenes, scuba diving, dinners in the hotel terrace (with La Macarena for foreign desserts), arcade machines, billiards, ice cream, walks and natural, inconsequential conversations... All very bright, sunny, blue sky and blue sea. Wells shows that you can film the routine leisure of others without causing our boredom, on the contrary: we don't mind spending the remaining 45 minutes contemplating the same thing, since everything is magnificently expressed in very pure, clear and transparent images. However, there is something disturbing and hidden, invisible, enigmatic in the story, concerning the family relationship (and the off-screen figure of the mother), which is already intuited in the video that the girl shoots at the beginning of the film and manifests itself. one night, towards the end, during a karaoke, the only moment in which they argue and separate. It is a very complex work, soft and serene on the outside, tremendously convulsed on the inside.
By J. Batlle
Like the clown Koko by Max Fleischer, who came out of the inkwell to rebuke the cartoonist and star in tangles, a hundred years ago, little Nicolás also comes to life from Sempé's brush and converses with him. Jean-Jacques Sempé and his friend René Goscinny, the creator of Asterix and Lucky Luke, conceived the mischievous and funny Nicholas in the late 1950s and during the 1960s he was one of the most popular characters in France. The feature film by Amandine Fredon and Benjamin Massoubre is about all this: about the solid friendship between Goscinny and Sempé until the death of the former in 1977 (Sempé died last year), about the adventures of the boy and also about the life and childhood of each of its creators. The animation is gorgeous. It obviously refers to the model of the recreated albums and has a clear, precise, synthetic line and with the most beautiful and soft colors. A delicious watercolor that, on top of that, celebrates life (although it also talks about death), friendship, creation, art, culture, knowledge... It is an essential event to see with the family before, during or after these holidays Christmas and an enjoyment for audiences of all ages.
By J. Batlle
El sostre groc is a simple and necessary denunciation documentary, because it gives voice to a group of women who in their day, being adolescents or still minors, suffered sexual abuse by Antonio Gómez, their teacher at the Aula de Teatre Municipal de Lleida. The film is divided into nine chapters, following a chronological structure: Ell, L'aula, La Inestable (name of the center's theater company), Els viatges, Els rumors, El director, El silenci, La denuncia and Elles. The victims tell everything, without mincing words, and from the plurality and coherence of their voices it can be deduced that we are facing an irrefutable truth. Their statements alternate with archive images of their activities when they were students: rehearsals, performances, trips abroad and local television programs, in some of them with the presence of the then mayor Àngel Ros, who praises both the training center and the figure from Gómez himself, whom Coixet failed to convince to participate in the documentary. When the complaints began to rain, the crime had already prescribed and Gómez was fired from the Classroom with compensation, according to a teacher, of almost 60,000 euros, a fact that adds a plus of indignation.
