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.
