This was a solid Southern Gothic story. Good characters and acting. It’s quite bleak, which fit my mood.
Not a heap of a lot of plot, but it didn’t need it. Just throw crap at the characters and see how they deal with it, then amp it up a few notches and see how they deal with that. Certainly not a carefree movie for people who like happy endings, but I liked it anyway. The depth of atmosphere and fate and how would these people deal with that kept me through to the end.
Oh, this film tells the story of Mrs. Eunice Paiva, who fought all her life to know what happened to her husband, the engineer and Congressman Rubens Paiva. During the military dictatorship he was taken from home by plainclothes soldiers and never returned. It was based on a book written by her son, Marcelo Rubens Paiva, a talented writer. Two of the best Brazilian actresses head this cast: Mrs. Fernanda Torres and her mother, Fernanda Montenegro.
This film has been a huge success across the country. I think it will have the biggest box office of the year for a Brazilian film. I decided to take my mother to the cinema to watch this film. Hopefully I can do it this weekend.
The comments from people who watched the film across the country were all very positive. Many people repeat that the spectators remained silent or were holding back tears when the lights came on at the end of the session.
Although the kidnapping of Mr. Rubens Paiva happened before I was even born, the crimes of the dictatorship still have an impact on the country. The wave of misinformation that sweeps the nation without stopping creates conditions for people with severe cognitive problems to defend the most abject actions of dictators. The funny thing is that all the reactionaries go crazy with the defense of such unrestricted and absolute freedom of opinion and make a point of pretending that the country spent more than 20 years governed by people who will spend eternity with Pol Pot in the devil’s lap.
Take Mr. Bolsonaro for an example. Despite having been considered one of the worst military personnel in the country by the Generals of the Dictatorship, Mr. Bolsonaro liked to mock the pain of the families of those who were eliminated by the military. Some “patriots” were trying to boycott this film, but these types of people cannot watch a film without bad actors, direction, special effects and would never step foot in a cinema to learn a little about the country’s recent history anyway.
In this image, Mr. Bolsonaro points his finger at a poster that deals with communist militants who disappeared while trying to create a Cuban-style guerrilla movement in northern Brazil. The poster mocks with a slogan that says that anyone looking for bones is a dog.
The irony is that he had to leave the army precisely because he planned terrorist bomb attacks just to get a pay raise.
Honestly, I don’t know any in English. But I believe that many American universities have good Latin American studies departments with good Brazilian scholars. Off the top of my head I remember Mr. Thomas Skidmore.
Thanks! I don’t know that I’ve read much Skidmore? At my old department, our guy who did Latin America was JT Way and his focus was Guatamala… Most of the stuff I’ve read on Latin America in general has been through the lens of US foreign policy (since a good bit of my studies focused on the CW and the relationship between punk and that).
I’ll see if I can get a copy of that book sometime. The film too!
I was watching a couple episodes of season 2 of The Arcane, as I remembered liking the some of the creative animation style and voice work in season 1. But man, that plot is incredibly convoluted and hard for me to follow, especially given that season 1 came out way back in November of 2021, which was approximately 80 years ago. They didn’t even play a recap at the start of season 2 episode 1, and I’m certainly not going to go back and watch season 1 all over again to refresh my memory. I also don’t have any familiarity with the video game so that doesn’t help.
I’m thinking about quitting the show. Seems like a totally preventable mistake on the part of Netflix.
“Barbara” was so good that I decided to try another Christian Petzold/Nina Hoss project, “Phoenix.” It’s even better! Excellent, haunting stuff, best movie I’ve seen in a long time.
The story that follows this unsettling introduction is a slow unravelling, full of hints and feints: an intricate weave of tangled knots and dropped stitches from which, very slowly, the truth of the past begins to emerge. Nelly is looking for her beloved pianist husband Johnny, a gentile, but her friend Lene (Nina Kunzendorf), a clerk in the Hall of Jewish Records, is deliberately keeping them apart, for reasons that emerge only slowly and in fragments. Lene wants to leave Germany and its horrors, to start a new life in Palestine; Nelly is unswerving. When she finally finds Johnny, however, he recognises only a glancing resemblance to the wife he believes to be dead. Wanting to access her fortune (inherited from relatives massacred in the war), he asks Nelly – now going by the name of Esther – to pose as herself.
TDLR; I recommend the movie, it’s fun and lots of visual eye candy. Particularly great if you like musicals.
Did not know they had broken it up into two movies, but that aside i’ve read the book and seen the play twice. Took my partner since she really liked the play, and it’s her bday tomorrow. Overall i can say i really enjoyed it! I had some small nitpicks, but i can genuinely say that i had a good time with it. The set design, costuming, the casting and performance were really great, i almost want to say the set design and costumes were a particular delight for me.
Performance-wise most everyone does their part well but i’m surprised that Ariana Grande really embodies the Glinda character. She does pull from Kristin Chenoweth’s performance but it still feels like she takes it on and adds to it. I did feel that Cynthia Erivo (playing Elphaba) had some moments where she didn’t play the character quite as hostile as i’m used to, but she does bring a certain fragility to the role that shines in certain scenes. If you’re into musicals this will likely really be up your alley, i’m curious to hear what someone who is unfamiliar with the play and book thinks about the movie.
This past week marked 58 years since the opening night for the Broadway premiere of “Cabaret” in 1966. At the time, the country was in deep turmoil. Overseas, the Vietnam War was escalating, and at home, our most regressive forces were counterpunching against the progress demanded by the civil rights movement. The composer John Kander, the lyricist Fred Ebb and the playwright Joe Masteroff wrote “Cabaret” in collaboration with the director Harold Prince as a response to the era. The parallels between the rise of fascism in 1930s Berlin as depicted in the show and the mounting tensions of the 1960s in America were both obvious and ominous.
I played the Emcee — the Kit Kat Club’s master of distraction, keeping Berlin mesmerized while Nazism slipped in through the back door. Night after night, I witnessed audiences grappling with the raw, unsettling reflection that “Cabaret” held up to them. Some material was simply too much for the audience to handle.
I watched the film with my wife and I really liked it. Mrs. Fernanda Torres is excellent in her portrayal of Mrs. Eunice Paiva. Despite showing the authoritarian acts of the military at the time, the film avoids scenes with explicit violence. Physical and psychological torture is present, but it is more suggested, yet it is still shocking. This may surprise many people, who today are unfamiliar with the history of their own country.
The saga of Mrs. Eunice, who was kept somewhat unaware of the horrors of the dictatorship by her husband, is somewhat reminiscent of Mr. Edmund Horman’s journey in the film Missing by Costas Gravas. Mr. Horman and Mrs. Paiva had to deal with the brutality of a bloodthirsty dictatorship, tried to use legal means to find out what happened to their loved ones, only to be met with the cynical disdain of the brutes. Mrs. Eunice transformed herself, went back to law school and became a lawyer, fighting for human rights, especially for native Brazilians.
Despite its great commercial success and critical acclaim, some people have noted that the film portrays a very specific slice of Brazilian society. The characters are members of the middle class, artists, intellectuals, journalists, etc. The only character who is outside of this universe is the family’s maid, who does not have much of a voice in the film.
Still, we Brazilians are rooting for this film to qualify for the Oscar and win the award for best foreign film. Is that important? Yes, we like awards, we like to root for our own things, and at this time when criminals who attempted a coup against democracy in 2023 are being investigated and will most likely be arrested. It would be great fun for a film that denounces the idols of these terrorists to win an award like the Oscar and more exposure in the world.
This sounds great! Hopefully, it’ll get some attention here and get at least nominated for an oscar. I also hope it’ll get distribution here, maybe on one of the streamers. That might help it’s chances for an oscar.
I believe so, this film will gain more space abroad. Sony Classics is handling the distribution in the rest of the world. The subject may be heavy, but the film seems to have been made with European audiences in mind. ETA I mean, It is very beautiful, very well crafted and and it doesn’t go into too much detail trying to explain the country’s society, history or politics at the time. Despite addressing the dictatorship, it is much more a drama about a family that was the victim of a heinous crime. This crime has already been investigated, but none of the identified criminals have been tried or punished.
From what I’ve read, the film will premiere in the United States next January.
