It’s amazing what a restaurant at the sea front of Sitges can get away with in terms of value for money. We had a meal today sitting outside in the sunshine watching the waves breaking over rocks and the spray being caught by the breeze. Very nice. Not something which could have been said for the food. At a cost of €21+ IVA and extra bread one could expect more than very ordinary muscles in cold sauce with a small plate of calimares and a cold unexceptional crema catalana.
Thoroughly disillusioned we came back and hired two films. We know how to compensate ourselves for a poor experience.
Toni’s choice was 'Turistas' (John Stockwell, 2007.) This turned out to be a hackneyed story with unsurprising elements that have surely now passed their sell-by date. Foreign tourists find themselves facing horrors after an accident leaves them stranded in a strange culture. The stage for the drama was set in the Brazilian jungle with a depressingly two dimensional ‘baddie’ ripping out vital organs from a dwindling band of unwilling donors.
The second half of the film loses its way in a weak story line and a totally confusing sequence underwater when I defy anyone to work out exactly what is happening and to whom, though by that point you have ceased to care.
The gory action is effectively handled with a few moments of stomach churning horror, but the flaccid plot line takes away too much to make the gratuitous elements more than fairly interesting episodes of Grand Guignol.
The central bad character, a variant on the mad doctor, could have made a fascinating element in this film. I like the idea of a Brazilian fed up with the historical ‘rape’ of his country by the old colonial powers and the modern rape by America. His way of redressing the balance is of extracting the liver and kidneys of the gringos and helicoptering them to a peoples’ hospital in a poor part of Brazil. There was some mileage in developing this character, but it didn’t occur and he remained an uninteresting and flat projection of crazed nastiness.
My choice was ‘Blood Diamond’ (Edward Zwick, 2006.) a film which appealed to all my small l liberal notions of what a concerned film should be about showing the corruption of western society and the devastating effect of our greed on Africa etc etc etc. Just what a reader of Third World First should be looking at!
Well, there were some pretty pictures and the start of an interesting story but it soon degenerated into a script which highlighted certain aspects of the story and then took loving care to make quite literal the metaphors outlined earlier in the script.
The basic story line could have been made into a Western with very few changes except for losing the High Moral Tone which was unsuccessfully grafted on to this limp account of trafficking in diamonds.
The film seemed to assume that graphic violence set in Africa would in some way compensate for the relentlessly romantic outcome that could be envisaged early in the film.
Di Caprio is wasted in the role of the Rhodesian diamond smuggler and his look of boyish innocence (enhanced by his neat beard) looking nothing near the thirty-one he claims in the film to be detracts from the character of hardened soldier of fortune. Looking like that, of course we expect him to do the right things like give up the diamond and die honourably while speaking to his girlfriend that never was on the phone; mixing his blood with the earth of Africa and holding off a mercenary army! Easy-peasy for nice boy next door Leo.
The dead heart of the film is connected to the son of the black fisherman. This boy is taken from his mother and brutalized by the Rebels who indoctrinate him in the ethos of bloody warfare. As soon as the boy is taken, and his father is not killed by the rebels but forced to work in the diamond mine, you start praying that the inevitable confrontation between father and son will end with some degree of realism.
That is not the forte of this film and it cannot resist the sickly sentimentality which robs it of any claim to be considered a fitting comment on the horrors of a disgusting set of circumstances and a consequently inhuman series of atrocities.
The neat (and sartorially tidy) ending in some wood panelled and book lined lecture theatre in London and our black fisherman/diamond miner given a standing ovation as he prepares to relate his harrowing experiences, leaves one with a sour taste of betrayal and a nagging doubt about what happened to the two million pounds!
This is an old-fashioned film with a cynical veneer of social comment. It satisfies neither as entertainment nor as social documentary: a good idea wasted.
Thoroughly disillusioned we came back and hired two films. We know how to compensate ourselves for a poor experience.
Toni’s choice was 'Turistas' (John Stockwell, 2007.) This turned out to be a hackneyed story with unsurprising elements that have surely now passed their sell-by date. Foreign tourists find themselves facing horrors after an accident leaves them stranded in a strange culture. The stage for the drama was set in the Brazilian jungle with a depressingly two dimensional ‘baddie’ ripping out vital organs from a dwindling band of unwilling donors.
The second half of the film loses its way in a weak story line and a totally confusing sequence underwater when I defy anyone to work out exactly what is happening and to whom, though by that point you have ceased to care.
The gory action is effectively handled with a few moments of stomach churning horror, but the flaccid plot line takes away too much to make the gratuitous elements more than fairly interesting episodes of Grand Guignol.
The central bad character, a variant on the mad doctor, could have made a fascinating element in this film. I like the idea of a Brazilian fed up with the historical ‘rape’ of his country by the old colonial powers and the modern rape by America. His way of redressing the balance is of extracting the liver and kidneys of the gringos and helicoptering them to a peoples’ hospital in a poor part of Brazil. There was some mileage in developing this character, but it didn’t occur and he remained an uninteresting and flat projection of crazed nastiness.
My choice was ‘Blood Diamond’ (Edward Zwick, 2006.) a film which appealed to all my small l liberal notions of what a concerned film should be about showing the corruption of western society and the devastating effect of our greed on Africa etc etc etc. Just what a reader of Third World First should be looking at!
Well, there were some pretty pictures and the start of an interesting story but it soon degenerated into a script which highlighted certain aspects of the story and then took loving care to make quite literal the metaphors outlined earlier in the script.
The basic story line could have been made into a Western with very few changes except for losing the High Moral Tone which was unsuccessfully grafted on to this limp account of trafficking in diamonds.
The film seemed to assume that graphic violence set in Africa would in some way compensate for the relentlessly romantic outcome that could be envisaged early in the film.
Di Caprio is wasted in the role of the Rhodesian diamond smuggler and his look of boyish innocence (enhanced by his neat beard) looking nothing near the thirty-one he claims in the film to be detracts from the character of hardened soldier of fortune. Looking like that, of course we expect him to do the right things like give up the diamond and die honourably while speaking to his girlfriend that never was on the phone; mixing his blood with the earth of Africa and holding off a mercenary army! Easy-peasy for nice boy next door Leo.
The dead heart of the film is connected to the son of the black fisherman. This boy is taken from his mother and brutalized by the Rebels who indoctrinate him in the ethos of bloody warfare. As soon as the boy is taken, and his father is not killed by the rebels but forced to work in the diamond mine, you start praying that the inevitable confrontation between father and son will end with some degree of realism.
That is not the forte of this film and it cannot resist the sickly sentimentality which robs it of any claim to be considered a fitting comment on the horrors of a disgusting set of circumstances and a consequently inhuman series of atrocities.
The neat (and sartorially tidy) ending in some wood panelled and book lined lecture theatre in London and our black fisherman/diamond miner given a standing ovation as he prepares to relate his harrowing experiences, leaves one with a sour taste of betrayal and a nagging doubt about what happened to the two million pounds!
This is an old-fashioned film with a cynical veneer of social comment. It satisfies neither as entertainment nor as social documentary: a good idea wasted.
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