vincentw

I got trapped on a bus in Mexico watching this trash. I could shut my eyes but could not shut out the sound. What's wrong with the Lizzie McGuire movie? The awful title, the songs completely unmemorable except for the lousy lyrics, annoying performances by American actors badly feigning foreign accents, a script as predictable and unbelievable as a cure-all medicine label, a star drowning in CUTE. Disney spent a lot of money on this hokum and they deserved to be laughed off the planet. I realize that this film was not made for people in my age bracket, but if 14-year-old kids really liked it, I despair for the aesthetic future of the human race.

What would a film for women look like? Well, one possibility is Maria Novaro's wonderful reversal of all of the expectations of male-oriented films. Playing with a number of genres and turning them on their heads, Novaro gives us the story of Julia, an ordinary late thirty-something woman, who, used to playing a traditionally passive, "feminine" role, takes on the active role of searching for her missing danzon partner in a journey that takes her from gloomy Mexico City to sun-drenched Veracruz. In the process she changes from object of the male gaze to bearer of the gaze. The film boasts a super performance from Maria Rojo as Julia and fine supporting performances by Carmen Salinas, Tito Vasconcelos, and Victor Carpenteiro. It is saturated with fantastic Mexican music, especially songs written by Veracruz' native son, Agustin Lara. And then there is the dancing. The danzon, where a single glance may give the game away, becomes a perfect metaphor for Julia's journey of self-discovery.

Weird isn't it? Miners from the North of England are all the rage in British films, not that all the mines have closed down. Billy Elliot takes us to the same milieu made popular in Brassed Off and The Full Monty; and the problematics of masculinity in a world where men are not working is again addressed. This time we have an 11-year-old who discovers he prefers dancing to boxing, much to the dismay of his father and brother.

The film is cute and boasts a good performance by its star who has the young-old look of a kid who has known poverty. It also has some beautiful industrial landscape shots. Alas, however, like so many recent British films, it suffers from a sloppy, sappy script and a musical score which tugs relentlessly on the heart strings. Given the premise, any of us could have written the script and we might have been able to resist some of the excesses of sentiment.