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Reviews
La otra conquista (1998)
Very insightful
The conqueror is conquered. That's not the end but the beginning. This film shows us the resilience of human nature. There is a verse in the Bible that says "do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul". We see this portrayed beautifully in this movie. The Spaniards don't stop at the physical conquest but they want to overlay their identity on their subjects. They want to convert the Aztecs to Catholicism. What we see here is not simply a clash of religions but a clash of faiths portrayed by a catholic friar and the protagonist who are both sincere in their beliefs. There is no finger pointing, but an honest and tactful depiction of an issue that is an ongoing problem in many places in the world today.
Un chien andalou (1929)
Imagination gone wild
There's not much that is real about this film. Absurd, irrational, it's easier to predict your dreams than to predict what the next scene will be. It wants to be shocking, rebellious, disconnected, and it is. Especially for such a short movie, Buñuel finds a way to make it memorable. He wants to mess with our minds and has fun doing that. You can spend a long time wondering about the meaning of some detail. It's raw imagination gone wild through the compounded dreams of two surrealists, Buñuel and Dali. The film will always stand out in my mind as one of a kind, more for its shocking value than its contents. I think its value is more in how it influenced future films than in and of itself.
Idi i smotri (1985)
Beyond war
I have to say, I was not crazy about watching this film. I don't normally like war movies. This one was particularly painful to watch because it was so very real. Having grown up in a war zone, I was taken back to those days. I knew the look in Florya's eyes. I had seen it in the eyes of people I grew up with. I recognized his responses, as they were so very similar to the ones taken by the survivors around me. I felt the heaviness in the atmosphere, felt the moments laden with life or death for simple actions. Not many words in this film, yet so expressive. It takes you into the life of a young adolescent and you get to live his life and the horrors that he goes through. You see him age before your very eyes. It's not about the physical aspects of war, not about the artillery, the noise, the heroes, but its effects on the soul. That's what stays with you.
Le fantôme de la liberté (1974)
Absurd and entertaining
This movie reminded me of two films, very loosely. The first was Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould. The second was Pulp Fiction. All three of these films are a bunch of different stories interlaced with each other where one leads to the next and so on. In Phantom, though, you quite literally never go back to the story you left. This can be very frustrating, at first. I didn't know where this was going, and I seem to appreciate consistency when I watch a film, but after awhile, it got me to stop looking for a story and look at it almost as a documentary. Like the Glenn Gould film used the music he was known for to show vignettes of his life, I could see this as Bunuel's view on many different subjects, all thrown out for public view. He conveyed his ideas in a creative, absurd and funny way, which I really enjoyed.