I saw this movie yesterday because the movie I went to see was cancelled (a Russian movie in the SP International Film Festival). I saw part of the series on TV, series which I thought was not bad, sit-com typically Globo style.
Take care before going to watch this movie! Mainly because this movie is high (at least for now) rated 7.5 here on IMDB. Which is simply ridiculous!!!
First something is not a movie only because is played on the big screen. Os Normais is basically a poor TV episode stretched to fit 1.5 hour. People indeed were laughing, but they laugh when the main characters say words like f**k, dic*, son-of-a-******, etc. It is cheap laugh, they laugh on coincidences that are so ridiculous that you think that the writter (Fernadn Young) was on booze. The script is not laughable at all. Actors are good comedians (except for Marisa Orth, she is really bad), and make the movie a little better.
Technically the movie is horrible: the sound looks like coming from another planet other than actors mouths, the camera keeps doing Brazilian Soap-Opera shots, moving like an afraid rabbit, the photography is so poor that you don´t know when is day, when is night, when is anything. You can almost see the lights reflected everywhere. The colors are everything but the beautiful Rio-de-Janeiro. Brazilian TV directors are horrible, who knows how to translate poor mass-consumption things to poor people, put them in movies and this is the final result: Os Normais.
I don´t want to judge bad or good movies, because it depends for who. I think I can judge them technially speaking. But definitively this is not a more than 5/10 movie for IMDB standards. Don´t be fooled by brazilians nationalists that fill IMDB thinking that Cidade-de-Deus should have won an Oscar, that Carandiru will win in 2004, and than anything that comes from Brazil is excelent. The latests good brazilian movies was Central Station and Bus 174, that were pieces-of-art, the rest, some are ok (Cidade-de-Deus, Carandiru, Amarelo-Manga, Abril Despedaçado, O Bicho de 7 cabeças, etc.), and some are piece-of-garbadge (Os Normais, Apolonio Brasil, Lisbela e o Prisioneiro, O Auto-da-compadecida, etc.)
If is your style, if you spend more than 1 hours watching open-cahnnel in Brazil: go watch asap, you will have loads of fun, and don´t go if you like David Lynch, Eric Homer, Jim Jarmuch, Scorsese, Kubrick, Wes Anderson, Mullen, and the list goes on and on...
