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rebornandgrow
Reviews
Aqui Tão Longe (2016)
Mummy! i have a soup of letters, but i cannot make one word with them.
This series was introduced when there's a rerun of "The X-Files" going on - yes, i dare to compare both. No, i'm not talking about budgets, acting, or special effects. Let's see timelines: as far as i can tell, the X-Files had two: the main one, which was about the "golden quest", let's call it this way, of the two protagonists; and the second, which was the unrelated cases that we suppose FBI agents would investigate. Here's the thing: IMHO, the X-Files has the "unknown" as their overall theme. The writers and producers were smart enough to never leave this framework, where you can talk about creepy stuff, fantasy, monsters, vampires, legends, folklore, nightmares, ghosts, science fiction, and aliens, either with humor or with dark atmospheres, but you cannot talk about beautiful girls running on the beaches, cars that are high jump world record holders, or a science guy that with a Swiss knife has an answer to everything. That would be ridiculous. Also, the two main characters may evolve, but they have personalities. Those are the problems of this series that also repeats the two timelines: the writers wanted to talk about so many things, that in the end we couldn't tell what was this all about. Even if accept the suspension of disbelief within the main timeline of the terrorist thing (since when anyone became a family member and starts to live (!) in their very same house all of the sudden just by claiming their past lineage), or completely strange coincidences, most characters are non-believable: we have the super cliché Einstein- level-chemistry-boy, he knows and do everything, the past, the future, and alongside the bad guy, is the only one that can manipulate, and also talks funny with proverbs; all other characters are dumb or almost: the grandfather is a watchmaker that only do watchmaking and wanders around his dead darling; the father is like a thin Homer Simpson with hair; we have the hard- working kid at a car garage, and the hard-working young female medical doctor; the grandmother has a nose and she thinks that something is going on; one foreigner that talks bad bilingual just because; and one girl that talks "awesome". It seems that the writers wanted "to fish" several smaller "targets" for the purpose of audience, because gone are the days when the Public Television in the 1990's and first years of the century had consecutively produced high quality series, that had focus and were well written - this series is neither. Because in a small market, and with private networks specialized in light soap operas, light soap operas can turn into eucalyptus, invading everything, from movies to TV series. Within the episodes, we have the long suffering of dying characters from unbearable diseases (from now on, ER is only about broken nails); the don't- take-too-many-pills-at-once-because-that-is-dangerous episode; the medical doctor having a one night sexual adventure with a gay friend and having his baby; the taxi-driver-homage when there's a massacre in a motel; the corrupting politician (of course!); exploding a tax public service (well, nobody likes them anyway); the mother having a one night lesbian affair, it-was-just-an-experience thing (seeing a trend here?), in one of the most ridiculous out of character episodes i can remember. At a certain point two of the main characters are supposedly killed, but in the next episode one is alive, but we can't tell how on earth she survived (either the writers understood that "killing" such a great actress like Margarida Carpinteiro was a huge mistake, one of the two really believable characters, or maybe i missed something). Apart from the latter, the only other interesting character was the bad guy, and it's a shame that the story was not only about him and his madness, the one and true theme of this series, not terrorism, or economic crisis, or ridiculous love affairs, or drinking, or drugs, or cheating the wife, or unemployment, or corruption, or crime, or death, or revenge, or niche themes that goes on and on and on.
Os Gatos Não Têm Vertigens (2014)
Only cats have infinite lives all other animals just one
This is a fun movie about several tragedies, placed in a dark Lisbon. Overall i think the main subject is friendship.
The story is basically about an unexpected relationship between an old woman and a (still) teenager, which are connected by a mutual feeling of being abandoned and unloved.
The movie tends to demonstrate in its universe that all blood family relationships are at some sort damaged or tragically nonexistent or unresolved, and i think there are two "cats" losing consecutive lives as the story progresses until both main characters achieves a mutual purpose, that is, they help one another to destroy the "spirits" of their lives that were working as a cage of protection but also as a repressive\self-destructing condition. (the movie title is in plural and while it supposedly refers only to the teenager i think the woman is another cat too).
I also wonder if by the end both characters switch roles, the boy is the real older character (the only one that evolves into maturity) and the woman the only one that returns into a rejuvenated younger life, where she gets the chance to be a mother again and change a path of wrong into good; so the lesson here is and despite everything in between, "to love" is not necessary related to real blood relatives and comes out of indestructible friendship.
The movie benefits a lot of having two of the best actors of their generation, the highly respected Nicolau Breyner (a small part, but Breyner is at a stage of his career that he can fill a screen with just an eye blink) and Maria do Céu Guerra, the latter as the protagonist and the one that really pushes the movie into a succession of laughs and tears and her connection with the young actor is what makes the movie interesting. A great performance by an actress which isn't afraid of swearing like if she regresses into a rude-revolted teen against her own family as well as criticizing severely how the elder are being treated by an ever increasing narcissistic society, as if old people are just like any other trash being dumped into a recycle bin.
The problem of the movie is that the story itself after a while becomes too predictable and too unreal, like, e.g., a friend of the teenager all of the sudden knows where the woman was taken and goes to that location without any problem (and the place, which we can eventually think for the high or upper middle class, it's obviously open to everyone...) and talks to her and everything is fine again, which gives some reason to most of the critics that are heavily criticizing the movie as just a soap-opera dialogue entertainment. I guess they are right about it here and there (another example, it was obvious there was a sex scene intended for the teen and a girlfriend, which didn't add anything to the movie, but the scene is cut out while the action is just starting, as if the director wasn't sure if it cheapen the movie too much; also there's another concession in the highly debated trailer which clearly implies a "dirty" story between an old woman and a young boy, a shame really).
So the movie does have potential but the reality is that it drags too much in its concessions into a blockbuster movie with soap-opera's light entertainment, that is, like we often said around here, "um conto-da-carochinha" (a Portuguese popular fairy tale named after a famous one, that is often used in a phrase where something is told but the audience knows is pure fantasy) where ethics are mostly static and the end is always happy, typical of some recent Portuguese cinema, that probably thinks that to sell enough tickets they need to be empty. Even so, Guerra's performance was so solid that it lifts the movie into a much higher level.