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manueldr
Reviews
El Estudiante (2009)
Good idea, unexperienced director, awful script
I watched this movie because the buzz was too much already and I thought something good had to have. Big mistake.
"El estudiante" has a good idea of a story but the script is so bad it makes good actors (like Jorge Lavat or Norma Lazareno) sound and look false and overacted. With cheesy and prefabricated dialogues it's nothing more than a very sad try to do a Hollywood film but in Guanajuato, MX. Some scenes are such clichés that you could literally translate them to English and name the movies they are in.
The director obviously has no experience directing actors or he is very bad at it. You can see how very talented actors struggle with scenes and end up giving a very poor performance. There are acting shortcomings one can't believe a director could let them make it to the final cut.
The only thing they did good was to merchandise the movie and build buzz around it. How they did that? Publicizing the fact that the writer and director were unexperienced (amazingly in México that's a box office booster) and then using easy and shameless emotional manipulation in the movie to make everyone talk about it.
Very good work by the DP but, then again, wrapped by the rest, it's sad.