These are the movie premieres that hit the screens starting this January 27:
By Salvador Llopart
Marco Ferreri spoke of gastronomic suicide, in La Grande Bouffe (1973), with sarcasm and bad blood. Dying satiated, killing oneself gorged: Exterminating Angel of oneself. Aronofsky's The Whale returns to the same thing, but without a trace of cynicism. With a candor that unloves. Where the excesses of the protagonist, played by Brendan Fraser, seem the exact measure of his suffering. Morbid obesity, then, as self-inflicted punishment.
I see Brendan Fraser, the film's protagonist, turned into a grieving Moby Dick and I think of Marlon Brando at the end of his life. Either Brando suffered from the disease of excess or he was the victim of a form of self-hatred. In The Whale it's definitely self-hatred. Aronofsky's film begins with a huge man, Charlie (Fraser), drowning in his own adiposity, on the verge of a heart attack. Digital technology helps the enormity of the body, although Fraser himself -who was a kind of Tarzan in his beginnings (George of the jungle, 1997)- has done a lot of his part in recent years to multiply the volume of he. In the best performance of him since Gods and Monsters (1998) and he deserves the Oscar for which he has been nominated for this film.
In The Whale he embodies, with feeling and truth, a writing teacher who hides his image from his students while he talks and talks about honesty. In his face -in his eyes- a pain as great as his body is reflected, while his daughter, his ex-wife (unrecognizable Samantha Morton), and people who love him and take care of him despite of his declared will of abandonment and death.
A story of redemption, then, as El luchador (2008) already was to a large extent, also by Aronofsky. The Whale does not hide its theatrical origin: Samuel D. Hunter, its author, signs the script. And yet we are facing an essentially cinematographic proposal that makes the close-up - of intimacy with Charlie / Fraser - his best instrument. How Aronofsky finds the raison d'être of the film in the movements of the camera through the meager space where the story takes place. Everything is melodramatically set, the pain and the guilt. Everything, except a cloying music that was not necessary. The soundtrack is the unnecessary highlight in the face of Fraser's overwhelming presence. Despite the excess Or precisely because of him, as I say, as a prize.
By S. Llopart
Two and a half long hours of constant presence of Cate Blanchett on the screen. The unconditional are in luck. The Australian actress present in every shot, in every scene, at home second to Tár, the film by Todd Field, director of that impressive and subtle Secret Games (2016), who returns to the cinema after a hiatus of more than fifteen years away from the cameras.
Also this portrait of Lydia Tár (Blanchett) is striking and subtle. She is a classical music orchestra conductor with an impressive resume, who, at the pinnacle of her fame, is suspected of abuse of power, corruption and manipulation. A nothing Manichaean portrait; excessive and complex at the same time. If we were looking for an equivalent in art, one would say that it is like a portrait signed by Lucien Freud, because of what is disjointed and cruel about it.
One sympathizes, from the outset, with this successful woman. Not because she is a woman, no; Field is more skilled than that, and focuses on the bottom line: the ins and outs of her ego unleashed on her. I like this woman because she's played by Blanchett, yes, and because she exudes charm and determination. Charm in the tradition of Leonard Bernstein, for example, which the mista Tár considers her master. In Field's film, we see the world of Tár through Tár's eyes, and what does not enter his field of vision disappears. We listen to his disquisitions on art and music: wonderful…
But there comes a time when life stops being perfect around you. Without realizing it, we find ourselves swept up in a spiral of events, apparently disjointed, that install us in a guilty tension: the feared ugliness in the midst of beauty that Tár proclaims with his attitude. The result, apparently, of a dirty game of power that is cornering her.
Tár could perfectly mean the third Oscar for Blanchett. With what that implies for moments of excess and exaggeration -she wields the baton like a majorette, for example- but also dedication and determination. And determination -blind, if possible- triumphs at the Oscars.
By Jordi Batlle Caminal
The life of a woman told in different phases and discontinuously. Common places and archetypes abound (the drunken writer takes the cake) and an attempt is made to create a climate of melancholy that ends up being forced. The worst thing is the trap contained in the script, an almost indecent final surprise twist. Of course, the function is saved by the gigantic Huppert, capable of defining her character simply by putting out a cigarette and immediately lighting another.
Por S. Llopart
The danger of the caricature of its referent -the unbearable and very poisonous Israeli film Big Bad Wolves (2013)- looms over this Big Bad Wolf, who, like the original, makes unleashed cruelty -and torture- his reason for to be. Humor was present in his reference, as was moral defiance. Here the ethical questions are rather diluted in a shocking plot. With some interpreters -all of them- who go from less to more. Remake more hopeful than the original, and therefore more bearable.
By J. Batlle
Low-budget (and low-category) horror epic, like a very younger sister to The Warren File: The Conjuring and the like: diabolical forces, esotericism, amulets, etc. It offers the uniqueness of being set in Jewish culture and religion and of being located entirely in a funeral home with decadent atmospheres, a space that gives the film a certain visual personality. For the rest, it is difficult for the story, as complex as it is effective, to stimulate the viewer.
By J. Batlle
This film is loosely inspired by true events, but its treatment is that of a classic spy movie intrigue, with an innocent hero (French diplomat in Siberia) going through a Kafkaesque odyssey. Its political interest is irrelevant due to its lack of realism, but the film is considered very well as an escape thriller, with the protagonist (impeccable Lellouche) in perpetual escape, like David Janssen from The Fugitive, between effective scenes of action and suspense.
By S. Llopart
Jesse Brown, America's first black aviator. A hero because of his color and a hero, the film claims, because of his behavior in the much-forgotten Korean War. Friendship in the midst of racism: the camaraderie of war, with powerful combat scenes between propeller planes and the first Chinese Mig jets. Spectacular moments in the midst of the tedium of a life worth mentioning. And it is that, sometimes, the true story, however heroic it may be, can be boring.
