yurdakul-peksen

Uysallar is the story of a successful architect in a midlife and identity crisis who (barely) tries to keep his dysfunctional family together while looking to find closure from his past (traumatized by his emotionally distant, egoistic and stern father) in the times of the dog eat dog, fast-living, consumeristic, and "you don't know your neighbors anymore" type of world.

A promising package overall...interesting set up of a plot and characters, good camera work, for the most part good acting, great soundtrack(even though barely any punk rock), top locations, lovely production design, funky graphics. Especially when you consider that the vast landscape of turkish tv show industry (which is the world's fastest growing and Second highest television series exporter after the US) has been and is still delivering for the most part mainstream and mediocre productions full of outdated images of society(gender clichés, nationalism and overblown drama).

And here comes the BUT: The series felt like a bag of many good ideas that are thrown together like puzzle pieces with the hope they will come out as a perfect whole somehow. The main flaw is that there was no thorough commitment to explore the choices, motives, sub-stories of many important characters(especially Nil, Ege, Mert, Moloz and Fevzi). This affected their relatability on the one hand, and mattered a big deal to the choices of the main protagonist and the dynamics of the story on the other. They simply needed more depth and hence more time for exposure. Maybe it was not a creative decision but budgetary, maybe there will be a second season, which I doubt, but who knows.

In the end, a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. But also, I still think the glass is half full.

First things first: the script is probably as close to real life as it can be. Main protagonist Mithat Esmer (RIP), who also happened to be the uncle of the director Pelin Esmer, was really a collector and played his real self. Viewed in this light, the director, imho, is paying her respects to this really unique person, as well as letting us to join her at puzzling over the mystery of her enigmatic "uncle the collector".

In addition to the really pure and unforced acting of Mithat Esmer and Nejat Isler, the neighbours, the mood in the post-earthquake "tear down-and-rebuild" era Istanbul is portrayed strikingly authentic. The documentary mannered shots in the streets of Istanbul or the scenes with the street/small business vendors(most of which are probably real characters and no actors) do not feel like out of place at all even though rest of the movie has a rather "cinematic" feel.

And the ending, oh that ending. It could not have been crafted any better. Without wanting to spoil it, the unadorned, unpretentious, slow but effective language of the movie, reaches its peak one last time before everything "disappears in nothingness" forever.

If you like a bittersweet story, real characters, dont miss this slow burn gem.

To fully comprehend and grasp the dramatic dimensions of this film, I recommend to watch the documentary " the Collector" too, which she made 7 years before this one.

...after you have landed an indie hit? If you had a gazillion of incoherent opinions about the world and your homeland? If you are mad, confused and overwhelmed about/by the politics and the society? If you have watched too many movies and wanted to integrate your influences all over the place at any sacrifice? If you wanna sell your -in the core- interesting, exciting, weird but overall half-baked ideas that were maybe influenced by some bizarre dreams you had or just popped into your mind after you had too much LSD? Well, you might go and shoot something like Southland Tales. Of course everyone has his own opinion and no one should judge artistic devices and expression since it's entirely subjective and there are no rules to it. So arguing over tastes and opinions is really senseless. But having read many reviews mentioning "real genius" and "a masterpiece", I would like to respectfully disagree. To me it felt like a missed shot at achieving something big, something which was supposed to be an avant-garde and unprecedented work so it would become a cult movie. And when it got horribly out of control, all you can do is trying to patch the whole thing up and sell it so that the intented result was exactly this: "a profound sci-fi satire, an artistic mindfuck".

Too many wildy combinated ingredients doesn't make the soup taste any better. Intention and execution are really two different pairs of shoes.