DARRYL DE CINE

(EN CASTELLANO DEBAJO) This is a movie that I have followed closely as I know some of the people who have worked in it. It has proved to be quite a success in Australia with more than 2M USD taken at the box office. As for the movie, it is a “British film” because the plot, location, dialogues and characters are all British while, in fact, it is a Spanish Production directed by a Catalan lady, Isabel Coixet. It is an atypical or non-commercial movie as there is no love story, sex scenes or unsolved murder to carry the plot. This movie deals with people’s reactions when faced with the unexpected or with what some of us would call progress. In the film a lady, played by Emily Mortimer in a marvellous low-key performance, moves to a seaside village on a UK shore in 1959, rents a store and opens a bookshop. This bookshop stocks a progressive style of literature, selling books by Ray Bradbury and Nabokov and other avant-garde authors of that time. There’s a delicious nod...

(DEBAJO EN CASTELLANO) This is an American movie (meaning that the story  could only happen in the USA), filmed in English and directed by an Italian,  Paolo Virzi.  I had read that Virzi wrote the script thinking of Donald Sutherland but I got the impression that Helen Mirren stole the show. The plot line basically is a comedy with an unexpected ending. Among its achievements, one is the language. The dialogue never sounds as if it were “translated” into English from another language. Somehow this movie reminds me of Sorrentino’s “The Youth” –a movie filmed in English but told from an Italian or European point of view as opposed to a Hollywood treatment-. But, as I think, Sorrentino’s model was Fellini’s “Otto e Mezzo”, I can´t tell which are Virzi’s models. Another good thing of this movie is that the two main characters seem credible despite their erratic behaviour and, in their relationship, the movie achieves an intimacy or closeness hard for Hollywood mo...

(DEBAJO EN CASTELLANO) This is the kind of movie that I can´t help recommending it. There have been two (2) movies on Churchill in 2017. The first one “Churchill”, in my opinion, was a complete failure perhaps with the exception of Miranda Richardson as his long, patient and suffering wife but without never losing her temper with him. The Churchill portrayed in that movie, played by Brian Cox, as a hesitant & fearful character afraid of launching the invasion of Normandy was –again, this is my opinion-  not credible.  Instead, the second instalment on Churchill in 2017, “Darkest Hour”, is about how Churchill became PM in 1940. What’s interesting in the movie is all the shadow manoeuvring behind the scenes to avert his designation while France was collapsing and Dunkirk was coming next. There was  previously last year a movie called “Dunkirk” seen from the point of view of the servicemen, while “Darkest Hour” is quite the same story but told from the to...

(EN CASTELLANO DEBAJO) This is a film which made a big impression on me at the time and have not seen since (1). It was also my first impression of Ibiza (in the sense that I had not read or seen before anything related to that island). As a schoolboy in the sixties from the past century, we were taught that Ibiza was part of the Balearic Isles & that they produced cheese and shoes and, of course, that Palma of Majorca was  already a tourist magnet. I saw that movie back in 1978, that is, during the so called “Transition” (the change of regime in Spain from Franco’s to our present democracy). I was 19 years old at the time and easily impressed. As a product of my times, after Franco’s death, censorship was lifted and sex arrived on cinema screens (as well as on magazines and the rest). I remember that, sort of following the trend, I saw movies such as “The last tango in Paris” (which I did not understand at all); “Il Decamerone” by Pasolini (which I found ...