27 lines
2.6 KiB
Plaintext
27 lines
2.6 KiB
Plaintext
when a film is produced on a shoestring budget by a couple of hardworking filmmakers and when it tells the story of a genuine tragedy , the easy path for a reviewer who hated the movie is to give it a pass .
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toss out your usual objectivity , ignore how many times you checked your watch while viewing it , forget how unbearable it was to sit through , and find some meaningless way to compliment it .
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this , of course , will be of no service to your readers , but at least you'll avoid the hate mail from the movie's fans .
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thus it is with a heavy heart that i review the movie paulina ( not to be confused with the recent movie paulie about a talking parrot ) .
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directed by vicky funari as a labor of intense love - she spent the last one third of her life on film - the movie blends documentary footage with historic and fanciful recreations to relate the bitterly sad and true story of paulina cruz suarez .
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paulina was a maid in vicky's household when vicky was young .
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i got to learn the film's background when i attended a screening in which the two women who made it were present .
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for those without such context , the reaction to the film may be that it is a parody of a bad indie film .
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the acting is amateurish , the story is maudlin , and it has all the visual appeal of a bad home movie .
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grainy and overexposed , the movie , shot on 16mm film and videotape , has little to recommend it .
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confusingly composed , the movie jumps about jarringly as it tells its story .
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quite bloody at times , the story , full of horrific images , seems designed to shock and repulse us .
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why else would you include a scene with a completely nude and bloody 8-year-old paulina ?
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another scene has a teenage paulina being fondled on a bus by the man sitting next to her .
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in retaliation , she bites off part of his finger .
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this covers the both of them in a bucket of blood .
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the passengers on the bus then view the girl in their minds as everything from saint to sinner .
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one , for example , sees her as an aztec priestess holding out a large heart that she had just cut from a body .
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the lugubrious tale has paulina being raped and beaten .
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certainly she had to endure a miserable life .
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but that does not guarantee that a movie about her will necessarily being good .
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i felt trapped in the theater watching it .
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only the opportunity to talk with the filmmakers afterwards made the movie bearable .
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paulina runs 1 : 28 .
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the film is in spanish with english subtitles .
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it is not rated but would be an r for violence and nudity and would be acceptable for older teenagers .
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