Viridiana (1961)

1/5

Buñuel's Viridiana is poorly-made nonsense. Nun-to-be Viridiana (Pinal) is invited back to her uncle's mansion before she takes her vows before God. There, she discovers that her uncle (Rey) wants to marry her, and he enlists the aid of his maid (Lozano) to force her to stay with him. Things don't go as planned and the rest of the movie diverges from acceptable storytelling and just kind of bumbles around into chaos. The film is not really about the story at all, so I won't bother telling you any more of the plot. Suffice it to say, it's incomprehensible (in purpose) and more than a bit frustrating.

Nothing feels believable, including any supposed satire. The writing is poor. The filmmaking is poor. This is essentially a student film, complete with above-average actors made to perform stilted and staged dialogue by a pretentious director who thinks he knows better than everyone else. Buñuel's tunnel vision disdain for the church (and apparently kindness in general) borders on offensive. But more insulting than the content itself is Buñuel's use of overt imagery and obvious symbolism, because nobody could have figured out his genius strokes without having him graciously dumb it down for all us idiot audience members. If I wanted to watch a feel-bad movie where well-intentioned people are made to pay for their beneficence, I would have watched the equally terrible Au Hasard Balthazar and walked out halfway through. But who does? Avoid this movie unless you like being sledgehammered in the face with negative sentiment.

IMDb link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0055601/

Los Olvidados (1950)

4/5

Luis Buñuel's Los Olvidados, which translates to The Forgotten, tells the story of a young boy named Pedro who is caught up in a life of crime in the festering slums of Mexico City. He is friends with a gang of ragamuffins, including the recently escaped Jaibo, but wants to go straight. He tries returning to his mother for help, but she doesn't believe he has good intentions. Still, he presses on, finding legitimate work at a blacksmith, and then at a carnival. But at every opportunity for success, Jaibo is there to pull the carpet out from under his legs and flip his life upside-down again.

You feel for Pedro, you root him on, and you feel the pain he feels every time he bumps into Jaibo and things turn from bad to worse. It is gripping and depressing; it is not, as the intro tells us, optimistic. In fact, the intro tells us that there is no hope for the characters because there must be social change to cure the ills depicted in the film. But it failed to convince me of that premise because every obstacle Pedro encounters originates not from society as a whole, but from Jaibo as an individual.

The film is fairly mediocre on technical terms. The shots were conventional, the editing was shoddy, and the sound seemed perpetually off. Everything felt somewhat staged. The strength is in the film's quasi-surrealist images and ideas: a boy throwing an egg at a chicken to make it go away, a boy sucking milk straight from the udder of a donkey, a group of boys tossing mud and stones at a blind man. They are images that are difficult to ignore or forget. But they are images that hold power, value, and meaning. And they are images you should see.

IMDb link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0042804/

L'âge d'or (1930)

1/5

L'âge d'or is a terrible movie. To even call it a movie is an unwarranted compliment; it is closer to an arbitrary collection of absent-mindedly captured light, haphazardly arranged and perversely thrust upon unsuspecting viewers. Being a surrealist film by Buñuel and Dalí, there is little plot to speak of. Scenes are sometimes held together just barely by threads, sometimes by nothing at all. There are a very very few visually arresting scenes, and that is not enough for 60 minutes. Buñuel and Dalí's earlier work, Un Chien Andalou, is far superior because it had 4x as many shocking images and took 4x less time, which made it a total of 16x more interesting. And that movie was just barely enough to sate me. While L'âge d'or touched on some interesting thematics, they were isolated and incoherent, and altogether frustrating to pick apart. All in all, this is by far one of the worst films I have ever seen. If you want surrealism, or if you want early Buñuel or Dalí, then check out Un Chien Andalou. But pass on this dreck.

IMDb link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0021577/