No somos animales

I watched this largely because I love Argentina. What a waste of 90 minutes. I stuck it out and watched the entire thing because I wanted it to be a decent movie. It wasn't. To say this movie is dull and dry is really being generous. There's no plot. Nothing of any significance happens. It's not even funny. This seems like a movie where someone was trying way too hard to be sophisticated and ended up producing garbage as a result.

This movie belongs to the "film within a film" genre that opened up half a century ago with Fellini's 8 1/2. It features John Cusack and other American actors summoned to Buenos Aires to make a film that, we are told, experiments with cinematic language. The story is improvised (there is a script but nobody seems to take it seriously) and some scenes (like in Godard's La Chinoise) actually belong to the film within, as the point of view changes and we see the cameras rolling and the booms in place. Sequences are announced with title cards, also in Godard's style. The view of Buenos Aires and its people is that of an average American tourist; there are some comments about Peronism and the 1976-1982 military dictatorship but there is no depth or meaning in them. Everything we see or hear is capricious and at best whimsical, at worst pretentious and at times boring.

Al Pacino plays the mysterious (and somewhat devilish) long distance mastermind of the project, He gets the best lines and makes the most of them; the short time he is on screen is the best part of the movie.

The movie ends up saying nothing significant. Although some ideas may be interesting, it it difficult to gauge the intentions of the director. All in all, an unsatisfactory film.

Was far much better the version I saw in the BAFICI festival, I miss that music and some scenes that are not there. This is now a kind of "making off" of what had far more sense and story, plus atmosphere. But, anyway, even if is not a real work of Agresti, and the Americans touched it like know all-know nothing typical spoiled, colonialist kids some are over there, I still I enjoy the freedom that exudes from the director's original. Hope Netflix could show us the original!!!

When I first started watching this, I had my mind set to write a completely sarcastic review and summarize this as a tale of a man who once won a sizable amount of money on a popular game show while wearing his magical Wonder Woman wristbands, only to later in life be reduced to begging on GoFundMe for attorney retainer funds after being charged with methamphetamine possession following a Grindr hook-up gone wrong. But then something about this movie made me very sad, in a very deeply painful, aching kind of way. I can't completely explain it. Maybe if you have horrible attention deficit disorder like I do you'll sit through the whole thing while eating a large burrito. This movie might make you question your sanity, sort of like a psychopath or narcissist does when gaslighting a person, making them wonder what actually is reality.

I love Argentina, finally a film from that beautiful country discusses sad historical topics in a relaxed, humorous way, without making a pamphlet, or using so much suffering in a commercial way.

In a time when cinema is violence, rape, drugs or narcissistic pose, to see people like Cusack and Pacino so close to us and themselves, talking politics and art, with no fear of being disconcert by our times, makes of this movie something very special.