DARRYL DE CINE

Esta es una película que había visto varias veces de adolescente y se convirtió en una de mis favoritas. Años después, de adulto, me quedé con la duda de porqué me había impresionado tanto. Era una película "de acción", como llamábamos a los thrillers entonces. Se había filmado como una “coproducción internacional”. Este era el nombre que se daban a películas comerciales europeas que intentaban competir con Hollywood. Con esta finalidad, dichas “coproducciones” normalmente tomaban "de prestado" una o dos estrellas de Hollywood para la ocasión. La idea era hacer en Europa una película que pareciera una superproducción de Hollywood, de forma que atrajera al público como si se fuera una película "made in Hollywood". Por lo general, a fin de dividir costes, varios productores de diferentes países participaban en el presupuesto y cada productor se quedaba con los derechos de distribución en exclusiva en su país (de forma que, por ejemplo, un producto...

    THE WATER DIVINER: this is a romantic epic, filmed Hollywood style, which will delight audiences, but as an Aussie movie –meaning the likes of “Gallipoli”, “Breaker Morant” or even “The Light Horsemen”- fails utterly.     To begin with, there are two plots in this movie: one is about the journey of a Father -the “water diviner”, who  looks for water wells in the Outback- to find out the whereabouts of his three sons who went missing in Gallipoli, concretely, at Lone Pine –an important battle in the Australian memory-. In this reviewer’s opinion, that quest was enough of a plot to carry on through the whole film.      But then, this movie has been coproduced (or maybe paid for entirely?) by Turkey -and there is a lot of “political correctness” to show for it - and, besides the father´s quest of his three sons, there is another plot about how the Turkish army rebelled against the decadent Ottoman empire –guilty for bringing Turke...

(EN CASTELLANO DEBAJO)  This is indeed the work of a master. Of course this doesn’t mean that you have to like everything that the master does, whether he’s called Tarantino, Fellini or Bergman, for that matter. This time again, as in the case of “Inglourious Basterds” (2009) -where he had Hitler killed at a movie premiere-  he twists history for his narrative’s sake. In this concern, I would have preferred adifferent ending: that  after a night at the town, the characters of Di Caprio (Rick Dalton) and Brad Pitt (Cliff Booth) went to sleep it off, perhaps dreaming of teaming up with their neighbouress, Sharon Tate, or working for her husband, Polanski, in a future film. Next, on the  following  day, they would  learn of the killings of Sharon Tate & her friends by the Mason family. But, of course, Tarantino thinks differently.   Let me argue that my proposed “ending” is not all that far-fetched,  because, at the end of the...