ROMA: Movie Review
5 stars out of 5( Outstanding, with rich potential to be a masterpiece)
Director, Writer, Cinematographer and Co-Editor: Alfonso Cuaron
Producer: A C, Gabriela Rodriguez, Nicolas Celis
Cast: Yalitza Aparicio, Marina de Tavira, Jorge Antonio Guerrero
DONALD TRUMP’S REVIEW OF "ROMA"
My dream to build a wall along the Mexican border made me think - why not watch this Mehican flick’Roma’? It may give me some valuable cultural insights to accomplish the above mission. Actually I wouldn’t be caught dead watching artsy drivel but someone( I would like to tell you who, but I can’t) put a bet and the ultimate deal-maker that I am, I won that bet too! No one needs an intro to’The Art of the Deal’ and this here was a shining example of art and deal in one awesome mix. Who knew that it would be this difficult to watch a whole movie like this?(no other president could have done it, certainly not Obama even though he is black-’n’-white). But guess what, I learnt something along the lugubrious way( that L-word is not m-, I mean sorry it IS written by me, trust me) and the pic even as we speak is growin’ on me.
Two things strike the asstute spectator emphatically. One - even though this film is set in brown country, the focus rests admirably on a white family. The legend of America - never mind which country comes to your mid - was established by hard-working white people and any story set in this half of the world would do well to remember and showcase that. Two - we see how poor Mexico is - I mean this whole film in shot in black-’n’-white by a Mexican film-maker who could not afford colour footage! No wonder I am building a wall to keep out riff-raff like this. The last poverty-stricken movie I watched in black-’n’-white was’Schindler’s List’( it was mainly for one character, but more on that later) but there that dude at least had some pennies stashed somewhere to throw in some orange and red in a couple of scenes - here it is just no colour at all from start to finish!
A good part of the film is set in a genteel house in Mexico City of the early 1970s. There is a family of seven( an old lady included) all pure-blood whites going by the look of it, although the CIA wire to my smartphone suddenly threw up a strange word "mestizzo" before dissolving into cyber-darkness. One husband who’s a doctor, four children, one housewife, one old lady. We see they’re so happy all cuddled up in front of the evening TV, but as my two divorces and innumerable flings have taught me, happiness is fleeting, a bitc in heat repeatedly done over by the hard dog of reality. Turns out the husband’s six month sojourn in Canada was not a career-sacrifice research project( there was only one spectator who knew this beforehand, having done the same thing himself).
Imagine my pity for the husband on knowing the shock turn of events! His house is in shambles after he returns from a hard day of doctor work( even if he was having sex the whole day, that is also hard work and you have to be a virgin not to appreciate that) and coming home to that truckload of Mexican children and a wife who’s not that hot in the first place! - even a feminist can imagine what it can do to the mind of a decent man. You can see how Nature provides for everyone when the deserted wife is the target of a sexual advance by a man whom she cruelly rejects! What the heck was she scared about - that Putin was video-recording the whole thing? Haha;), from my side I can certainly tell you Putin has no video whatsoever of me and urinating prostitutes in a hotel room.
I felt the movie lacked strong driven characters like me, and just when that feeling was intensifying, along comes a young man who’s a spitting good example of the fine folks who made Charlottesville great again last year. After mixing with wrong sorts, he sorts out his shtick by plunging into martial arts and the mass military drill of a cult. A wretch tracks him to the end of the world only to tell him again she’s pregnant with his so-called baby. While it may be true and it may not be true - we will never know! - it is impressive how he ruthlessly tells her to get lost and then returns rock-solid to his training goal. If only America had more focused youngsters like him. Cinema has its select list of Heroes who inspire us to be better human beings( Rick from’Casablanca’ from what I am told, but from what I can personally attest there’s Gordon Gecko from’Wall Street’, Amon Goeth in’Schindler’s List’ and Doug Strutt in’Beatriz at Dinner’). To this rarefied pantheon, belongs this young man. His story comes to a moving, magnificent end when he tracks down and shoots a cornered man. He does this with admirable dedication - there’s a room-full of screaming women to distract him but he ploughs right through and fulfills his duty. I have a hunch this would have been a much more powerful scene if set in a school, but that’s just me.
I explained this exemplary behaviour to my twelve-year young son Barron Trump hoping the little chump would learn something but he looked puzzled.
The villain’s role in this story is played by the native servant who does not bother to clean the house, studded as its drive-way is by dog-poop. My teeth are set on edge by this sloth and wickedness. I mean, we clothe them, we feed them and look after their every need and this is how they repay our kindness. You may recollect titanic villains like Anton Chigurrh and Lord Voldemort, but for my money, this right here is the kind of insidious villainy - we think they’re helping us but they’re merely ripping us off - that lies at the heart of intelligent cinema.
Talking about intelligence, have you heard about artificial intelligence? It is the same as Fake News! This load of incredible nonsense was trotted out to me by that moronic person who lost that bet in the first place by challenging me to see the film. I can’t tell you who she is( I can tell you how beautiful she is, I can surely tell you this is the last night I’m spending with her however gorgeous this fraud is, and I can certainly you Putin has no video of me with her) but imagine her cheek( actually please don’t) when she informs me how audacious and yet so humbling this film is in setting the focus front right and center on the brown servant girl Cleo!
I mean - did we even see the same picture?! This great critic also has the nerve to praise what she calls the film’s "70 mm magnificently widescreen compositions" and its "majestically glacial camera gaze" turned from the director’s previous outer-space "Gravity" into the "down-home confines of naked suburbia". She lost me at the start of that wet dream( and here you thought only males have it) but not for nothing am I a self-made billionaire( actually I am not, I’m just the greatest con-man the world has ever seen BUT I digress) so I managed to catch the gist behind her raving. When people are stuck with a black-’n’-white picture, minus the priceless insights I pumped out from it, in order to block out the trauma they have unwittingly landed themselves in, they fantasize in all kinds of lurid ways about technical grandeur, sublime shot-taking, heavenly monochrome landscapes, cloud-powered tracking shots and whatnot. For instance, she told me she was blown away by the 140 mm canvas( note the doubling of madness) etched large on the screen when the car pulls in front of the General Hospital of Mexico! I didn’t tell her but can she prove her delirious amplifications weren’t triggered by unwitting flashbacks of her own hospital trip for an unwanted baby?
Her ramblings reached an acme when she went on about the opening scene which looks at simple stone tiles that are set in a diamond pattern, about how water washing over it creates a reflected pool of white screen in which an airplane can be seen going across, about how successive waves of water wash over the tiles gently lapping and creating bewitching ripples and eddies all while the opening credits roll over this static frame before eventually looking up in that same take to frame the pic’s main character. About how that opener was a little masterpiece by itself before the larger monument commenced. Here I didn’t argue much with her - she might have been doped right from the start and enlightened souls know how a bit of grass can set afire simple hay into rapturous conflagrations.
That little detente between us was shattered when she further proffered how the film is a damning indictment of how we treat our servants. What peerless temerity! She luxuriously soaks in all the staff-services I lavished on her and now she says we don’t treat them well! Specific example: " Look how insensitively Cleo is treated when she has just about settled in after a hard day’s slog, to sit on the floor while the family sits on the couch and watches TV, when she is again sent off on an errand! " My logic is simple - we don’t pay them to sit and watch TV at the end of the day even if they are sitting on the floor. But my ex-fling just wouldn’t relent - accusing the doctor of shameless and needless questioning of Cleo’s personal life("how many sexual partners have you had?") - I must admit I found this part interesting although I don’t usually don’t pry into servants’ personal lives. Another finger was pointed at how Cleo’s sensitive medical disclosures are revealed by the cavalier doctor not in the privacy of a closed room but in the bustling foyer of a hospital with all parties present and that even an ill animal would be treated with more dignity by a veterinarian. Here I agreed with her - the doctor in question is a lady doctor and when they have their periods, they fall prey to all kinds of shocking, shameless behaviour.
I can see your patience is at its absolute end by all this fake news so I will just use this paragraph to explain my last favourite scene and then we segue into the finisher. It’s set on a tremendous beach, hang on it’s not the beach it’s the shot-taking that is tremendous(I think that lady’s fake-news virus is infecting my analysis). Two white kids are positively heroic in saving themselves from those enormous waves and we travel with them in a smooth immersive experience as if we ourselves are going deeper and deeper into the maw of the ocean. That’s not even the best part of this extended gob-smacking uncut scene. See beyond and just look at the sun-kissed nay sun-molested shoreline and imagine how row upon row of Trump Towers would look in that setting. Beach, Bikinis, Bobs, Booty! - those apartments would sell like hot salicious honey-cakes! I have dispatched my Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin already across the border to make them an offer they can’t refuse, even as we speak . Tillerson never liked these kind of missions, but look where he is now.
It is with triumphs like these that’Roma’ made me remember the Rome of yore where emperors like me flourished and noble ideas thrived. Giving white people the coverage they deserve, the single-minded resolve of a young man who shrugs off the paternity he’s deceived into and goes ahead bravely to discharge and uphold the Second Amendment, the promise of a mountain of condos ranged along golden shorelines thus creating so many jobs that make this the richest economy America has ever seen. I’m glad I saw this movie. 5/5= Masterpiece.
UPNWORLD