These are the releases that hit movie screens this December 15:
By Jordi Battle Caminal
Eleven years after The Impossible, J. A. Bayona, Jota para los amigos, returns with a similar premise: the recreation of a true tragedy and the desperate fight for survival. Some aspects, however, are different. The great spectacle and the aroma of adventure cinema now have, in The Snow Society, less emphasis, although they do not miss the quote: the plane crash sequence is brilliant, of perfect technical resolution and as attentive to the image as to the sound, very elaborate. And the star system has been renounced in favor of realism, with anonymous actors who speak the vernacular and provide a remarkable degree of verisimilitude.
Assuming the limitation of explaining the tragedy of the Andes again, we must recognize that Jota has done a magnificent, serious and meticulous job, without dwelling on the morbid effect (anthropophagy is presented in a logical and natural way: if there is hunger and there are no lentils...) nor in the inflamed drama (the events are dramatic, but the eye of the camera observes them with equanimous objectivity) and focusing attention on the slow passage of the days, the progressive loss of hope, the fatigue, the physical and moral deterioration, etc.
All this built with the narrative solidity of a race filmmaker. At the end of the day, what ends up important is the beat of classic cinema that reverberates in each image. When, for example, news arrives that there are survivors of the accident, Jota displays a feverish chain of brief scenes that recalls the alert that occurs in official offices upon discovering the three brothers killed in combat in Saving Private Ryan (the connection between Jota and Spielberg would make for a juicy analysis). We could also see The Snow Society as a beautiful Hawksian symphony of a united group, isolated in a single space (one might say closed despite being immensely open) and prone to danger. Let us remember that Howard Hawks, in a similar frozen geography, was the architect (with Chrisitan Nyby as a medium) of The Enigma of Another World, reformulated, already in color and wide screen as here, by John Carpenter in The Thing. Jota's operation is an intelligent one: recycling a chronicle of events into classically inspired film material.
By Salvador Llopart
It is difficult to stop thinking about Champions - or, rather, the treatment of disability in that Javier Fesser film - when faced with the forgetfulness and complexes of this Champions, by Bobby Farrelly, the “Hollywood version”, to call it in some way, from that blockbuster of Spanish cinema in 2018. This American Champions leaves you with the discomfort of a shoe shoehorned onto the wrong foot.
Despite its good workmanship, as a film it is somewhat forced. At times, even annoying. Above all because of the indifference, yes, condescending indifference, towards the physical and mental disability of its protagonists. Its objective is to become a typical improvement film; and typical, in this case, is too close to topical. At no point are high-sounding words said -if we discard a strange "joplines" in the dubbed version- nor are the protagonists offended. It is the tone, the background noise, that is annoying - not even offensive, annoying - because of the obvious indifference to what he is dealing with.
The center of gravity of Fesser's film, which was the members of a Paralympic basketball team, their lives, their attitude, and their particular relationship with existence, shifts towards the adventures of the team's coach and only him. A loser played with his usual charm by Woody Harrelson. Everyone here turns out to be a troupe in this Champions League where personal stories are blurred, like the faces of the disabled, in favor of a film model of improvement and sporting feat, even of redemption seen so many times.
Farrelly, a surname that, since There's Something About Mary, has been synonymous with transgression, and also with blatant honesty, stands here as the banner of something so correct and predictable that you don't believe it, by default. In a well-made film, it turned out in its sports scenes, as I said. But with a route that is too busy - we know very soon how it will end - and above all empty. Cold. Frozen.
Por Philipp Engel
That inclement sun, which punishes stony lives in dryland Spain, has inspired everything from The Hunt (1966) to the novel Intemperie (2013), to give two examples linked to this film by the director of Three Days (2008), again with a dedicated Víctor Clavijo. If Saura is the great inspiration, The Wait shares an actor (the great Luis Callejo) with the disappointing film translation of Jesús Carrasco's novel, and gives clues, with a more decidedly fantastic turn, of what would have been a good adaptation
Por Philipp Engel
Nothing more praiseworthy than glossing the genius of Caravaggio, a wild bohemian dedicated to the most miserable people rather than to power, with a film that flees, like the plague, from the sterile biopic. The director of Romanzo criminale (2005) organizes a chaos, lascivious whirlwind of pictorial orgies and ruined palaces, where life and work mix. But Riccardo Scamarcio is too exalted, and not even the presence of Louis Garrel or Isabelle Huppert prevents the invention from being closer to the grotesque than the sublime.
Por Philipp Engel
Always in favor of fleeing from the academic biopic, as occurs in this psychotronic chronicle of Rimbaud's last years in Ethiopia, when he had left poetry behind to become a calamitous merchant. It is the Lynchian performance, fiercely anarchic, deliberately anachronistic and even funny, that one would expect from the meeting of three talents such as the actor Damien Bonnard, the director of photography Jimmy Gimferrer and the director of rare birds in our cinema such as The Influence or Demonios tus eyes.
By Salvador Llopart
Helen Mirren's work, in her transformation into Golda Meir, the Israeli leader during the Yom Kippur War (1973), is dedicated and efficient. However, the recreation of the moment - told from the Israeli side - is triumphalist and without nuance. Where the enemy is just a pale reflection on the television screen. Despite everything, she talks about an event that gave rise to a spark of hope for the region. It's not the best time for this film, no.
By Salvador Llopart
This is not a Beckett for beginners. It is an attempt to “beckettize,” so to speak, the life adventures of the author of Waiting for Godot, reducing his existence to a set of stellar moments. Despite Gabriel Byrne, its protagonist, the result does not end in an interesting or illuminating portrait. “Dance first, think later,” on which the title is based, is one of Beckett's famous sayings. The film responds better to another of his: “Fail again, fail better.”
