Films Seen - March 2004
[Pre-'96 films not included.]
MONSTER (27) (dir., Patty Jenkins) Charlize Theron, Christina Ricci, Bruce Dern [How could anyone think this is the best film of the year? Reductive exercise in victimology - especially, though not only, compared to the Broomfield docs - which says 99% of what it has to say in its first 5 minutes. Wuornos spends her childhood looking for love, attention, someone to tell her she's beautiful, but is constantly rebuffed, never given much of a chance till finally (cue V.O. explication and ominous shift in background sound) she stops looking and turns (cue opening title) into a Monster; you could walk out right there and still be able to talk intelligently about it, even without the introduction of the catalyst - her relationship with Selby - which occurs in the next 5 minutes. Theron is fine, as Theron always is, but struggles every step of the way against a makeup job of ELEPHANT MAN proportions; Ricci is effectively creepy and passive-aggressive, but it's more presence than performance (and she still looks about 12 years old); Jenkins' script pre-digests the experience - note e.g. how Aileen's victims get steadily less deserving of their deaths, 'complicating' our response in mechanical fashion - while her direction deals in clichés like a song montage to indicate happy couple-hood; central relationship is unusual, and it's good that the film concentrates on it so much - supporting cast barely exist - but it hardly goes deeper than Needy meeting Needy. Aliens Ate My Baby Award for the year's silliest line that could've been a tabloid quote: "I must've been about 13 years old, because I remember I'd just put the baby up for adoption".]
THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST (46) (dir., Mel Gibson) James Caviezel, Maia Morgenstern, Monica Bellucci, Hristo Naumov Shopov [Remember in ALMOST FAMOUS, when the little kid is told he's really 11 (not 12), and shakes his head with a kind of poleaxed expression and says: "This. Explains. So-o much"? That's me after watching this harsh, gory Passion Play, which explains so-o much - the Catholic (and evangelical Protestant) emphasis on guilt, sin and punishment; the militant nature of American church groups (Greek Orthodoxy seems more willing to turn a blind eye on social issues, saving its strength for nationalism); the apparent naivety of the "crusade" rhetoric coming out of the White House - serving above all to mobilise the faithful for the upcoming (or is it current?) clash of civilisations against the Muslim hordes. Some have waggishly - or not so waggishly - compared it to S&M porn but in fact its mentality is closer to a suicide bomber's, putting the emphasis squarely on pain and suffering as the gateway to a (largely unseen) salvation - even the style is close to a horror movie, with shock moments in the early scenes (an animal's cry shattering the silence, a demon suddenly appearing to Judas with a shriek on the soundtrack). Gibson overdoes the slo-mo and can't get much narrative momentum going (was the flashback after Peter's thrice-denial really necessary, given the target audience?), except in the scenes with gradations of feeling and dialogue-driven interaction - notably Pilate against the mob, showing the random, multi-faceted ways History is made and touching on the theme of subjective human truths vs. the single divine One (even if it does make fears of anti-Semitism understandable, leaving little doubt as to the question 'who killed Jesus?') - making it ironic that he once planned to show it without subtitles. Otherwise, good on the physical detail and managing a certain undeniable dreamlike feel - the effect of seeing familiar events through the curtain of an unfamiliar language and non-Hollywood faces - but all a bit alien and misguided to this mild-mannered, optimistic Believer, harping on the least useful, most alarmist aspects of Christianity. First half was fine, but I spent most of the second half being alternately bored by the constant graphic violence and moved by the occasional moments of kindness and charity. Does that make me a bad Christian, or a good one?]
PETER PAN (58) (dir., P.J. Hogan) Jeremy Sumpter, Jason Isaacs, Rachel Hurd-Wood, Richard Briers [As with BIG FISH and Munchausen, a Peter Pan story that's really (or also) about Peter Pan Syndrome, the man who refuses to grow up and prefers to flit around having fun instead of getting in touch with his feelings. The girl is initially happy to join him in adventure (with a mild but pointed sexual element), but soon wants more - Commitment, one might say; he's sadly unable to supply it, earning the most withering put-down a woman can deliver: "You're just a boy" (the ending is much like SPIDER-MAN's, opening the door to a link between Peter Pan-ism and 'adultescent' comic-book geeks, if anyone wants to make it). Richer and sharper than most kidpics, the details harsher - Tinker Bell's a jealous, vindictive sprite; Peter nearly executes one of the Lost Boys, and Hook routinely kills his pirates when they do something wrong; even mermaids are nasty, scaly creatures - and the sense of humour wackier, closer to the British original than the raucous travesty of HOOK with its food-fighting Lost Boys (sample gag: Hook frantically trying to think 'happy thoughts' so he can stay afloat above the jaws of the snapping crocodile: "Black Death! White Death! All kinds of Death! ... A nice cup of tea!"). Let down mostly by an inexpressive Peter and general untidiness, incl. a tendency - is it an Australian thing? - to overdo the big moments, notably "I do believe in fairies" (which is cringe-making); includes slapstick, gender roles, Hook-Wendy bonding, CGI dreamscapes, even the mirror scene from DUCK SOUP - all this, and Pan playing the Pan-pipes! A copious, erratic movie.]
MASKED AND ANONYMOUS (34) (dir., Larry Charles) Bob Dylan, John Goodman, Luke Wilson, Jeff Bridges, Jessica Lange, Val Kilmer, Penelope Cruz [Meet Bob Dylan. Bob is a confused celebrity. On the one hand he envies dumb animals (who "just are what they are"), celebrates the "common things in Life" - including, presumably, the Common Man - resents oeuvre-minded critics who try to tie him into the whole 60s counter-culture deal and ask questions about Janis and Jimi, and declares he's "stopped trying to figure things out". On the other, he seems constitutionally unable to stop thinking and talking about the state of the world and the search for Authenticity - even though he's now pretentious enough to put footage of real-life death and violence over the opening credits, narcissistic enough to include (or allow director Charles to include) a slow pan across a roomful of transfixed listeners as he performs, and (on this evidence) ravaged enough by the years of excess to have shed most or all intellectual depth along with his brain cells. Pompous lines - "How do you define War in this day and age?", "Are you aware that this is all a play?" - pile up amid the bad puns, sly in-jokes (the Rock Star asked if his songs will still be recognisable when he performs them live) and wacky character names; verbosity and circumlocution are the order of the day, no-one ever gives a straight answer ("What are you drinking?"; "I'm drinking my life away"), and the whole thing comes close to being unwatchable - at least till the canny viewer decides to cut his losses and concentrates on incidental pleasures, the tickled delicacy in John Goodman's grand animal energy or Dylan himself, whose fastidious eccentricity irresistibly recalls a rumpled Salvador Dali. Might be even better if the representative of freewheeling anti-corporate values were played by someone - anyone - more charismatic than the glum Luke Wilson; he's no Owen.]
CHEAPER BY THE DOZEN (20) (dir., Shawn Levy) Steve Martin, Bonnie Hunt, Piper Perabo, Hilary Duff [Who'd be a parent? You give up your life, race around trying to keep everyone fed and clothed, then get taken to task by puny, self-loathing films like this for daring to think of yourself and maybe have a career instead of cleaning up after ungrateful brats ("They're monsters!" says an onlooker, understandably). "I don't have to sit here and pay the price for your life choices," sneers one of them precociously after Dad tries to pursue the dream job he's been after for decades, refusing to accept a situation where they get picked up 45 minutes late from school till the parents, duly chastened, move the clan back to the idyllic small town where they can forget about careers and be "thankful there's such a thing as Family"; really quite a noxious film, pushing such a zealously child-centric agenda it can only be designed to make parents feel bad for their shortcomings - like so many sitcoms and 'family' films, it gives the sense of having been made by high-achieving industry types channelling their guilt at never seeing their kids due to work, divorce, etc, building an idealised picture that includes its own failure, condemnation ("you can't have it all") and punishment. Some things are just puzzling, e.g. why, in this discipline-free household, is there such a big deal made over the (22-year-old!) daughter's sex life? Others are actively offensive, like the sketchy attempt to give each kid some shorthand trait (though nothing is ever developed) or Martin as the 'fun' Dad, playing ball and trying to be a pal (see also PARENTHOOD) - but mostly the assumption that a parent should drop everything, right that second, to help a kid with his homework when the kid demands it, and that he's not worthy to be called a parent if he doesn't. Such contempt for grown-up stuff goes beyond family values, to a kind of repressive infantilism - not to mention crap jokes, rampant cutesiness and horrid song montages. Has a Beatles track ever been so degraded?]
RADIO (35) (dir., Michael Tollin) Cuba Gooding Jr, Ed Harris, Alfre Woodard, Debra Winger [True confession: I watched the first hour of this, then kind of skimmed through the rest. Not necessarily a walkout - i.e. I'd probably have stayed to the end, in a theatre - since the film is interesting (if terribly bland and undistinguished) in soliciting sympathy for / identification with a mentally-handicapped hero without any special-powers compensation offered for his deficiency: he doesn't have an incredible pitching arm, or an obsessive-compulsive memory for numbers, or the ability to run really fast like Forrest Gump - he's just "got hisself a good heart", and the film becomes a celebration of goodness for its own sake (as if to say 'what more do you need?'), not even giving any back-story reason why the Harris character helps Radio till quite late in the game (though of course it'd be better had it never given a back-story reason at all). Put it down to the vogue for 'Christian values', or perhaps the New Nice - a diffident thumbs-up directed at the mainstreamers whose indie cousins worship David Gordon Green - though you do wonder why Debra Winger chose to come out of semi-retirement for something so resolutely (almost wilfully) un-special. Disarming moments of small-town atmosphere, and Gooding certainly tries hard - but can't quite dislodge the Burning Question at the heart of his performance: Are those teeth real?]
GOTHIKA (45) (dir., Mathieu Kassovitz) Halle Berry, Robert Downey Jr, Penelope Cruz, John Carroll Lynch, Charles S. Dutton [Subtext, please! Coming, coming ... God and the Devil turn out to be in league, both being emblems of the same patriarchal system based on the oppression of women (its symbols including the 'Anima Sola', a woman in chains) and concealment of said violence, repression used - as someone points out - as a "survival mechanism"; our heroine is initially part of this system, helping The Man keep her sisters down, but is then forced to the other side, having to redeem herself through humiliation and ritual bonding - "Time to wash away your sins," says a nurse, forcing her into a communal shower with all the other naked women - till she finally overthrows both God and Devil, heralding a new system based (as the final shot suggests) on compassion for all the oppressed, not just women. Feminist-spiritual readings aside, a watchable ghost story that suffers by being shot like an action movie, i.e. with a pounding thrusting style - camera stalks around the heroine as she waits in fear, risking giggles as it soars up at her face and into a CU of her eyeball - very little eerie stillness and some of the top flash-merchants in the business, see esp. John Ottman's busy score and Matthew Libatique's shallow-focus images (also see the use of Water as recurring motif, representing - as the film explains - the lure of apparent madness / transcendence that distorts the mirror, yet sees the world as it really is). All a bit silly, with spontaneous combustion and writing that writes itself, though I must say I've never seen Ms Berry - an actress I usually despise - looking so expressive and beautiful: the model's toned hardness and that strange self-conscious tension are no more, replaced by a new confident glow that's serene yet sexy. So much for the feminist reading...]
ALONG CAME POLLY (37) (dir., John Hamburg) Ben Stiller, Jennifer Aniston, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Debra Messing, Alec Baldwin, Hank Azaria [Just the gags, ma'am - or, as our hero's father puts it: "It's about the ride". No plot, no structure, not even a meet-cute - the mismatched couple just meet - no real characters either: Ben Stiller does Ben Stiller circa SOMETHING ABOUT MARY, Aniston is supposed to be this free spirit but just seems neurotic, and the legacy of "Friends" gets in the way - I kept superimposing Rachel's girly-girl sensitivity, esp. since the film is written with Polly mostly offering support as our hero gets into slapstick scrapes. Gags themselves do occasionally work, mostly due to ranging far and wide - from premature ejaculation to community-theatre productions of "Jesus Christ Superstar" - but the prevailing idiom is the gross-out, plus a weird panic-stricken fear of being touched (a slap-happy boss, a hug from a fat secretary, too-close contact with a sweaty opponent on the basketball court). Just about worth seeing for a couple of supporting turns, notably Hank Azaria with gloriously mangled French accent and Alec Baldwin as aforementioned boss, snapping out his lines and working his hands like a gangster - and of course Hoffman is always pretty good, even when stuck with lines like the definition of "sharted" (please: don't ask). Also, what's the deal with this current vogue for upset-tummy gags in romantic comedies, see also Sandra Bullock wolfing one too many chili dogs in TWO WEEKS NOTICE? Is there anything less romantic than Irritable Bowel Syndrome?...]
LE DIVORCE (52) (dir., James Ivory) Kate Hudson, Naomi Watts, Leslie Caron, Glenn Close, Thierry Lhermitte, Matthew Modine, Stephen Fry [Savoir-vivre, je ne sais quoi and other phrases taken from The French, Those Wacky French, with their sangfroid and nonchalant bons mots like "Lovers are a pastime one tends to outgrow" - though not so much the younger generation, with their wild hair and worthy causes, and constant railing against cultural imperialism. Ivory craves sophistication - the old-fashioned kind, based on control and elegance - like a potato farmer in café society, as well as a certain languid rhythm he's always prized in his own work, dancing gracefully around painful truths in REMAINS OF THE DAY or A SOLDIER'S DAUGHTER - mad obsession, whether money-worship or Modine's jealous rage (he's an American, of course) is the main villain here, and it's no accident that the little girl watches a clip from THE RED SHOES (quietly prompting her to take off her own red sneakers). The film is itself quite sophisticated, smart enough not to make the French infallible - they're wrong about a French Baroque painting, of all things, with British and American philistines turning up to rub salt in the wound - and alert to fine detail like the children's table (very old-school Europe) at the family dinner, or the small awkward pause of cross-cultural confusion when Hudson gives her bra size in a shop. The actress herself seems moon-faced and inadequate, but there's compensation in Close as a Gertrude Stein-ish writer and especially Lhermitte as a humorous and (again) languid middle-aged seducer, like Sam Shepard gone debonair. Hard to find a theme, except perhaps the admonition to "go with life as it unrolls" - "Qu'est-ce qu'on attend pour être heureux?" asks the song over the opening credits: "What are we waiting for to be happy?" - but it's not really a theme-driven kind of movie. Just a trifle, and it only works in bits and pieces - yet it sometimes feels, in these LOST IN TRANSLATION days, like Ivory's the only director out in Studioland making films for grown-ups.]
CALENDAR GIRLS (38) (dir., Nigel Cole) Helen Mirren, Julie Walters, Linda Bassett [Ladies! Don't be ashamed of your sagging middle-aged bodies! You too can model for a nude calendar, FULL MONTY-style (just as long as there's "no front bottoms")! But don't forget your values - good old-fashioned North of England values, based on Getting On With It without making a "big hoo-hah" - and remember: money corrupts! Remarkably safe and conservative comedy, weighed down with a sticky pastoralism and nebulous nostalgia for "England's green and pleasant land" ("Jerusalem" is either the ladies' favourite hymn or the only one they know); picturesque village fairs, views of the Yorkshire Dales and lines like "This isn't ... France, for god's sake!" add to the cosy feel, though the (real-life) heroine seems to be a lot more ambivalent than the film gives her credit for: twice she does things that are less than admirable - winning a contest with a store-bought cake and keeping quiet about it, then later choosing an inappropriate sponsor for the calendar based only on their money - but the lack of finer feeling isn't pursued, the final act treated as a side-effect of celebrity rather than the inevitable playing-out of some festering character flaw. Not to worry, ladies! You can have your wee adventure, go on "The Tonight Show" and be back in your dull middle-aged routine - with no-one getting hurt, and things going quietly back to the way they were - just in time for tea. Don't forget the big fat plug for Virgin Atlantic!...]
FRANCE BOUTIQUE (45) (dir., Tonie Marshall) Karin Viard, François Cluzet, Judith Godrèche [Starts brightly, set behind the scenes at a home-shopping network with lots of amusing products to be flogged - from paint that doesn't drip to a whistle for use in avalanches, plus of course the main attraction, a machine that gets rid of your fears - then falls apart. Relationship angst feels as perfunctory as the national-malaise undercurrent - 'France' being the heroine's name as well as ... well, France - though it's really just a case of the candy-coloured comedy never quite gelling with neurotic-depressive characterisations; opening credits seem to be channelling WILL SUCCESS SPOIL ROCK HUNTER? and it needed that blithe, splashy quality to really take off (though Viard is great as an ageing, insecure presenter). Increasingly half-hearted, with notably chaotic non-climax and strange emphasis on the violent rage of sexy young women (as opposed to the neurotic passive-aggression of older ones). Possible best line: "Careful! Mayonnaise isn't always photogenic!".]
SCARY MOVIE 3 (57) (dir., David Zucker) Anna Faris, Charlie Sheen, Simon Rex, Anthony Anderson, Regina Hall, Leslie Nielsen [Equal-opportunity spoofery, taking on not just the obvious, fair-game targets - Pamela Anderson, Mother Teresa - but also annoying little kids, the differently-abled and even rappers and hip-hop culture (special mention for the pint-sized homeboy who jumps on the others and starts dry-humping vigorously whenever the "I love you man"s get emotional). Lots of dead spots but the anarchy seems more genuine than it was in its predecessors, with at least one shtick - the orgy of sudden, meaningless, zanily escalating violence sparked by the innocuous line "It's a wake" - exploding rules of narrative coherence in the same way that e.g. heroine's reaction to the (offscreen) ship's whistle plays on the convention where a cut from indoors to open country often gets bridged with sudden sound (it's a meta-joke, like characters humming along to non-diegetic music). Reference points include not just scary movies but THE MATRIX, 8 MILE, LOTR, SIGNS and the only decent gag in BRUCE ALMIGHTY, not to mention gratuitous (but apposite) mention of POOTIE TANG, but the scattershot style and preference for silly over puerile - very little toilet humour but lots of bits like Sheen's dementedly cheerful "Hey!" as he hums along with the radio on That Fateful Night - recall the old ZAZ style, albeit more slapsticky (all credit to Faris, who can hold a permanent 'oh!' of indignation - she'll make a great Margaret Dumont someday - and is pretty much note-perfect in the speech where she tells the kid about his dead mother). And of course, just when you're wondering if the echoes of AIRPLANE! are actually there or just wishful thinking, Leslie Nielsen opens the cellar door - incidentally saving the world from Evil - and announces: "I just wanted to tell you both, good luck. We're all counting on you"...]
PAYCHECK (53) (dir., John Woo) Ben Affleck, Uma Thurman, Aaron Eckhart, Colm Feore [So much for auteurism: not one for Woo-watchers, despite a trademark pigeon cameo, but this sci-fi actioner - which could've been made by anyone - still amuses, if only for the ingredients: amnesia, MINORITY REPORT-style future-gazing, "a lens powerful enough to look around the curvature of the universe" (a.k.a. the McGuffin) and that great old chestnut - see e.g. CHARADE - where the seemingly random contents of an envelope are in fact the key to the mystery (call it the 'Something On That Table Is Worth 10 Million Dollars' Moment). Trouble is, it's entirely plastic and insubstantial, never even trying to convince, clearly contrived for maximum movie-ness: hero gives himself cryptic clues to follow in the future, when a full explanation would be both possible and plausible (doesn't he get out long enough to leave the scrawl on Uma's mirror?); hero booby-traps the fiendish machine by rigging it so it explodes when it gets down to its sixth hydrogen tank (cue frantic cross-cutting and race-against-time climax) when putting the trap on the second or third hydrogen tank would be both quicker and smarter; and so on. Incidental pleasure: the line "two-dimensional imagery" inadvertently spoken over our first glimpse of Mr. Affleck (one dimension too many, imho). Improbable political subtext: memory-wiping as metaphor for current spin-driven brainwashing and selective public memory (WMDs, etc). What we want to see more of : films with Aaron Eckhart and Colm Feore playing partners in crime, preferably evil non-identical twins with a plan to rule the world.]
WRONG TURN (57) (dir., Rob Schmidt) Desmond Harrington, Eliza Dushku, Jeremy Sisto, Emmanuelle Chriqui [Some folks don't think much of this one, and it's hard to mount much of a defence: can't really call it "subversive", because it isn't, but it does do (at least) two things that work very effectively. First, it lets its heroes discover the extent of the danger they're in around the same time as the audience - and before the psycho rednecks are onto them - sparing us the sadism of waiting for one clueless teen after another to meet the slasher, and allowing us to identify as they try to escape (best bit, rivalling the famous 'car scene' in SCREAM 2, is the sequence where they try to sneak out without waking the monsters, having just realised what they're up against - the suspense quickened by our knowledge that they're bound to fail, or there'd be no movie). Second, it makes them smart and verbal, neither obnoxious like the kids in CABIN FEVER nor indistinct like the ones in TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE Redux - and maybe it was seeing this on a double-bill with the latter that made me appreciate lines like "A faux James Brown is really quite intolerable", or the serious yuppie doctor adding heft to the college kids, or the inevitable teenage lovers dropping trou in the middle of nowhere and the girl joking it's really a "probability experiment" designed to get help ("What are we always doing when people show up...?"). Simply put, you don't want to see these cool, resourceful people die, which is why it's so much more gripping than the rest of the year's neo-horrors; in itself, not amazingly well-made - the climax is banal, and the latex-heavy hillbillies look like something out of THE NEVERENDING STORY - but the modest production values are preferable to the hollow flash of CHAINSAW MASSACRE, and even the obligatory cult-movie references have a certain wit. Heroine (heading for apparently deserted hillbilly shack): "I need to pee". Concerned Hero: "Uh ... I need to remind you of a little movie called DELIVERANCE."]
THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE (44) (dir., Marcus Nispel) Jessica Biel, Jonathan Tucker, Erica Leerhsen [Well done on a technical level, but remaking an interesting (if overrated) horror milestone and deliberately taking out all the stuff that made it interesting isn't something I can get behind. No beasts-in-a-slaughterhouse vegetarian subtext, no darkly comic dinner with the family, no unsavoury crippled brother to evoke a complex response, pity as well as repulsion. Standard slasher-movie thrills, padded out with the lurid and grotesque (possible nadir: the low-angle shot of obese trailer-trash and her hatchet-faced sister looming over our heroine) and an emphasis on style that sometimes does more harm than good: a chase scene is diluted when it moves from inside the claustrophobic house out into the yard - but it means the scene can be played amid billowing white sheets hanging on the line, prettily spattered with blood. Leatherface gets a boring back-story - taking revenge for being teased as a child - with a hint of crucifixion imagery to suggest our heroes are paying for the sins of others, but it's all pretty slick and soulless. Jessica Biel = Babe, however.]
MY LIFE WITHOUT ME (65) (dir., Isabel Coixet) Sarah Polley, Mark Ruffalo, Deborah Harry, Scott Speedman, Amanda Plummer [Thought I'd find this offensive - cancer chic, dwelling on terminal illness - but in fact those likely to be affronted are those wanting more of the hospital wards and deathbed speeches (e.g. those who've lost friends to the disease), given how glossed-over everything is : terminal illness barely gets a look in, the focus being squarely on the heroine's decision to change (what's left of) her life as a result - and the fact that she does it alone, without even telling anyone she's dying, makes for surprisingly compelling existential baggage (where does decision become denial?), crowned by Polley's luminous collusion of grounded and ethereal (the eyes shine with dreams but there's something sensible to the set of the mouth; she's the art-school prodigy who made amazing save-the-whales collages, then gave it all up to raise a family). The camera loves her, studying her face, the down on her arms, a raindrop perched on the edge of her eyebrow; skin tones glow, and the super-talented Ms. Coixet even manages to coax a performance out of Scott Speedman - but what's really effective (and touching) is the introversion, as if everything were taking place in the heroine's mind: the world falls away, she loses herself in her project ("Things To Do Before I Die") and fights Death to a draw by in effect re-creating her life, implicitly turning it into a work of Art. Powerful concept - more powerful than it was in MY LIFE because re-creation here is a pure, wholly private act, not out to preach or celebrate but just to express the artist - though it all seems a bit too easy in the end: is self-expression really all it takes to achieve transcendence? (Or do you just end up with bad, self-indulgent Art?) Can't really defend the occasional magical-realist interludes - everyone in a supermarket breaking into dance, like Grand Central Station in THE FISHER KING - or philosophy sound-bites, though bonus points for brief soundtrack appearance by the Langley Schools Music Project. Even if it does make it sound like a horror movie...]
EL BOLA (37) (dir., Achero Mañas) Juan José Ballesta, Pablo Galan, Alberto Jimenez [Not awful, but this kind of story - child abuse, and the do-gooder family who decide to Get Involved - needs to be done with a light touch, otherwise it's just a blunt instrument (or maybe that's the point). The abuser's obviously a bad parent (duh) but the duality the film seems to be setting up, two families who are similar yet opposite - a beating vs. a tattoo - is unconvincing, poorly balanced and exasperating just on a basic, what-if-that-were-my-kid level: non-battered youngsters just seem to be running wild, and opportunities to show there can be discipline without beatings and abuse aren't taken (Mom tells kid not to have a chocolate before dinner, but simply backs off when he ignores her). 'Good' parents are so unflappable one almost starts to sympathise with the 'bad' father, just because he seems to be the only human being in this movie - after his son gets arrested for playing on the train tracks (where his gang like to play chicken in front of the train as it speeds towards them), Model Dad doesn't even raise his voice, merely explains that it's dangerous adding "Don't be angry; I'm telling you this because I love you". As a film, understated but drab, and oddly truncated at only 80 minutes; New Spain vs. Old Spain indicators pretty blatant (AIDS-compassion and tattoo parlours vs. hair cut short and a half-senile grandma), though I guess that's for Spanish viewers to get annoyed over. Shouldn't they have made the bad dad a Catholic, though?...]