DARRYL DE CINE

   Prior to seeing "F1", the upcoming sensation of this season, starring Brad Pitt, let me advise you to revisit (in case you've already seen it) or discover (if you still haven't seen it) "Grand Prix" (1966), directed by John Frankenheimer.   It's a movie about F-1 racing, that includes in cameo roles real pilots of that time like Jim Clark, Graham Hill and Jochen Rindt. It's not an old movie, or rather, it has aged well because F-1 races nowadays are very much like the ones seen in that movie, even though car engines and designs have improuved dramatically since then.  In this movie we follow the story of four racers who are competing for the Formula One Championship, even though the movie focuses more on the story of three of them.  There's Yves Montand, a French actor who was also a heart-throb of the time, as French pilot Jean-Pierre Sarti, a veteran who can´t stop racing, running for Ferrari; Brian Bedford, a Shakespearean theater actor who...

  I was fortunate enough this year to see "Parsifal". It was the first time that it was staged at Glyndebourne. Consequently, the expectations ran high.   Well, in my case, at first I thought the cast had walked into the wrong stage, because the setting for the First Act was the inside of a Manor House ready for a chapter of "Downton Abbey". Traditionally the First Act takes place in a monastery or an abbey. This change of venue lessens the epic of the story, as in this production the plot is introduced as a Family affair instead of the religious conflict from the original libretto. This, of course, affects the development of the plot as sometimes you don't know whether to take it as a parody or the hard drama that it is. In my case, I found the arrival of Parsifal laughable, after he had shot down the swan. Instead of the mysterious hero he's supposed to be, he resembles more the dissolute boy of an upper-class family who arrives home after having done his ...

He aquí una película que uno no sabe si calificar de "milagro cinematográfico" o de "rareza cinematográfica" pues no es una película de ficción, pero tampoco un documental al uso. Aquí la cámara sigue a un torero y su cuadrilla como una especie de ojo invisible, en sus evoluciones dentro y fuera del coso taurino, en unos primeros planos que cortan el aliento. El día que la vi tuve la fortuna de que la proyección fue presentada por su director, Albert Serra, quien nos explicó a los presentes que además los protagonistas -el torero y su cuadrilla- llevaban micrófonos inalámbricos durante la "faena", la corrida, de forma que se grababan todas las exclamaciones y diálogos cruzados durante cada "faena" o corrida. Esto le da al film una inmediatez y,  a la vez, una intimidad creo que nunca conseguidas en las películas taurinas.   Es una película que refleja todos los temas del toreo: la sangre, la religión -entendido como fervor religioso-, la muerte -...