Monos (Alejandro Landes)

[Grouchy]

[Grouchy]

This is a quite impresive Colombian movie about the guerrilla outfits that famously took hostages and kept them prisoner for years inside the Amazonian jungle. Shot in a micro-budget with specially trained teenage non-actors (cast together with a real ex-FARC soldier who has one of the most distinctive face and body types in recent cinema) and showing parts of the jungle and Nature which are practically virgin to cameras due to being previously guerrilla infested outfits, Monos does a good job of stripping a 50-year long political and military conflict to its bare human essentials. The narrow focus on the foot soldiers and their prisoners allows them to talk about the conflict without delving into its overwhelming political complexity. In fact, it's hard to even figure out the decade where the story takes place.

However, there's an almost fatal flaw in Monos - there's a key scene of character development between prisoner and guard which is so poorly conceived and shot it seems to belong to a soap opera and shoe-horned into the film. I'm serious, it almost kills it. I feel like it's better if I don't put it in spoiler tags and let everyone who watches it see if they identify it and agree with me.

[Ivan Drago]

Loved the experience of watching it, but it's due to be revisited. Go ahead and spoiler tag it.

[Grouchy]

Loved the experience of watching it, but it's due to be revisited. Go ahead and spoiler tag it.

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Show Spoiler

Inmediately after the mushroom scene the camp is under fire and the girl takes the hostage underground. The hostage starts bargaining with her, asking her if she wouldn't want to get out of the jungle with her, and the kid inmediately falls for it and tell hers she'd like to dance on TV. A bomb falls and they get swept through the air. The kid just happens to fall on top of the doctor, who hugs her and they start making out until the doctor reacts. It was just all together too much to ask of my suspension of disbelief. I was supposed to accept plot twists of an Almodóvar film inside a tone that didn't really support them.

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