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Jasmine GreenTea 08/02/2011 7:59:00 AM
The author of this would-be comment is probably obsessed with her own sense of importance. She needs to look sophisticated and important. She only manages to eventually come out as a vacuous sterile unempathetic bore.
Don't take her word! "Biutiful" is a difficult film, filmed in jerky hand-held shots, in what looks like bluish film-grained footage, edited in a nervous, unconventional way. Some of this fragmentariness existed in "Babel", but here it acquires a wholly different sense.
Inarritu suceeds to tell a touching story without ever using any of the melodramatic trick many directors would have been forced to resort to.
Of course, you may --like the poor author of this patronizing blog -- choose to stay above all the smouldering drama and roll your eyes with disgust at the lack of harmony and aestheticism of this film. And have her knee-jerk reaction at the mere mention of "big words" like death, guilt, human empathy. Your choice.
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BlackEye 04/30/2011 5:52:00 AM
Jack,
Just because you disagree with a review, doesn't mean it is poorly written or that the reviewer is contemptible or stupid. Tell us what YOU liked about Biutiful and what it meant to you. If I hadn't seen the film, and only went on Melissa's review and your comment, I would go with her, because your comment is semi-literate and 100% ad hominem attack. Calm down and write something meaningful. Show us how insightful you are, not how clueless you think she is.
Mr. Black
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BlackEye 04/30/2011 5:44:00 AM
Clever, well-thoughtout, insightful reply. If only Biutiful were half that smart. I am poor and uneducated and I think Biutiful is the ugliest film of the year.
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Lvives 02/11/2011 1:56:00 AM
Melissa: Your review is spot on. We have "pornography" of all sorts in this film - is that why mostly men seem to love it? Anyone really concerned with these issues (undocumented African immigrants, sweatshop labor, dysfunctional families, poverty) will recognize they were exploited in this film, not to give depth but to function as exotica, colorful background, a peep into an off-limits world. Guys, grow up.
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Ika Santamaria 02/07/2011 2:00:00 PM
Melissa, you have not see
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02/02/2011 3:51:00 AM
Lol.
@Jeanvigo -- what you said (ranted about) was nothing more complex than this: you need to leave your day job and make that movie you've been obsessing about for 20 years.
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Jack 02/02/2011 1:27:00 AM
This might be the most poorly written review of the year. It's too bad that critics such as our friend above, lack any creative radar in both their artistic taste and writing ability. Melissa was too busy being mesmerized by portman jamming herself in swan to write an honest review of the only film worth reviewing this year. I know it's really tuff making 30k a year scribbling scathing reviews about films you likely were too unintelligent to read the subtitles. Melissa was just sad that she couldn't be watching no strings attached, a film she feels really portrays the modern American relationship. It is truly disgusting to have people claim they know this much about filmmaking, when in reality this pig would pick the social network to win best picture.
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tetas grandes 02/01/2011 6:20:00 AM
my my, a check list: or, in Inarritu parlance, an 'original screenplay'
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AdelaRogers 01/29/2011 7:43:00 AM
Sorry folks. Melissa's review is more than valid. This is a film that would fail the "Orlando Test" as named by Half the Audience editors for films which, if their main character's gender were changed to the opposite, would not carry the same universal significance. Plainly put, if Uxbal had been a WOMAN dying of ovarian cancer, who had to wear a Kotex pad 24/7, whose estranged bi-polar husband was sleeping with her sister, who was dabbling in all kinds of off-the-grid money-making schemes to feed her kids, and who was doling out psychic indulgences, all the while trying to make things more comfortable for the sweatshop workers, keep immigrants from being deported, and persuade drug dealers to... not deal drugs-- you'd all banish it in a blink to the Lifetime Channel. And you'd be somewhat correct.
This story is obviously a very personal one for Iñárritu, and that's all very touching indeed, but personal stories often seem like amalgams of rambling thoughts and small private moments that unless you were there, you won't understand. If we remove the emotional push-button of a terminal disease, we are left with an episodic travelogue of the ugliness of humanity in the modern world-- it's everyone for him- or herself and trying to keep things fair and orderly is like sweeping sand from a beach. It's a journey that has no beginning nor end, so we never really get anywhere.
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K. Colby 01/28/2011 2:56:00 PM
Good to know that the Village Voice has not changed its hiring of self-absorbed pseudo-intellectual film critics that feel superior to all filmmakers mainly due to the fact of their own frustrated careers in the film industry. Have no problem with criticism...just hate the dishonest "semiotical" inferior analysis which ones usually finds in the halls of The Graduate Center or Columbia...
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jeanvigo 01/05/2011 8:37:00 PM
A 10 point plan for Melissa Anderson:
1. Suggested revisions/edits (sorry I can't underline or use italics in this interface) as follows:
The indifference and oblivion of the hermetically sealed world views of filmmakers like Lena Dunham and Sofia ”I Can NEVER Be Antonioni” Coppola is even more morbidly obese than “Biuitful” in terms of soggy ideas, elephantine with miserabilist, hang-with-your-angst humanism and redemption (read: plain, frumpy rich girls just need some sex in the case of “Tiny Furniture”) jibber-jabber.
And instead of: For all the hand-wringing hooey, Iñárritu says nothing more complex than this: Father feels worst. Add as follows: For all the hand-wringing hooey, Aronofsky says nothing more complex than: Ballerinas need medication; Coppola says nothing more complex than: Movie stars are babies; Dunham says: (see above)
2. Take the #7 train to Roosevelt Ave in Jackson Heights.
3. Rent a back-facing, first floor apartment in a community of 1st generation, working-class immigrants.
4. Get a job as a nurse’s aide at Flushing Medical Center (city run, mind you).
5. In your break time, go around the corner to some of the basements in buildings to see all sorts of clairvoyants who make a living off the families of the ill that desperately want to communicate with G-d (this is very prevalent in many cultures stuck on the wrong side of imperialism and the hegemony of wealth and Soho House)
6. Write an investigative piece about the real injustices and horrors that could rival the fictions in Biutiful that MILLIONS of people in our very own city endure.
7. Defend your piece from downtown elitists who find it to be melodramatic hogwash by saying: “but I actually saw all this before my own eyes! Really!”
8. Now retake your Film or Literary or Art Criticism course in college and read Kierkegaard’s “Fear And Trembling” and “Sickness Unto Death;” Christian Metz’s “The Imaginary Signifier;” and Chapter Three of Robert Kolker’s edifying “A Cinema Of Loneliness” for starters.
9. Give some recognition to Innaritu for trying to say something where so many other filmmakers with his ability to get greenlit fail.
10. And then figure out how the logic of your criticism of Biutiful must them discredit films like Schindler’s List, Ray’s Apu Trilogy, Umberto D., La Strada, Ikiru (which Innaritu references in this film), and some great recent indies like Courtney Hunt’s Frozen River and Deborah Granik’s Winter’s Bone. (I can go on for a 100 more films, but you get the point of the relevance of pain/suffering/salvation as themes for art.)
PS. While you’re at it, give David Fear a hug. May the both of you debate whom you’d rather trust your very survival with in a mine collapse: Uxbal, Johnny Marco, Nina Sayers, Aura, Jesse Eisenberg’s Mark Zuckerberg, or Miles from Sideways.
At least Armond White has the idiocy to bare the disparity between his role as a film critic and his self-effacement.
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Bocheball 01/01/2011 2:56:00 AM
That's one lame ass simpleton review. There are many ideas being dealt with in this film, one of which is the underside of globalism. We see people toiling beneath the surface in a Spanish society that denies them an existence except in the basement of a warehouse. It's also a film about repeating life cycles of families, the linage of dead fathers and the havoc they leave behind, something Bardem's character wants to break from as he struggles for his life and his children's. His character is complex and layered, a flawed man doing bad things in an attempt to take care of his family.
The director is telling a story of life on the fringes of society, the struggles which you call manipulative muck are quite real but in your bourgeoise world it's easy for you to dismiss it all as manipulative when in fact the struggles are painful and complex and quite real.
The visual style is claustrophobic and after a while I craved something other than a medium close-up or full close up. But again it reflect the world of the central character, who is trapped
in a non stop hell.
