A Movie a Week will keep Boredom away.

Hi,

I think that as a friend i should share the good things with all.
I strongly believe that one's mind needs to be constantly stimulated to keep it from stagnating.
It is like a muscle and the more you work it the stronger it becomes. One source of widening our minds are movies and i think we should catch atleast 1 good movie a week. Once a week i get ready by about 7pm and after a nice warm bath and armed with a nice indulgent snack and a glass of whatever, i dim the lights and settle down with a nice dvd (even though it is pirated) and spend 2-3 hours lost in another world.
So beginning today i am starting a new feature called "Vishal's DVD of the Week" (notice how i manage to insert my name randomly within the blog) with excerpts of reviews by major critics.

The first title is "Y Tu Mama Tambien"

It is a mexican film directed by Alfonso Cuaron, whose earlier english credits include Great Expectations (Gwyneth Paltrow, Ethan Hawke) which was a visually stunning but vastly underrated movie and the little seen or heard A Little Princess which is the most charming (without being cloyingly sweet) children's movie ever. Sample a bit of dialogue.
(Sara is tracing her father's face with her finger]
Capt. Crewe: What are you doing? Memorizing me by heart?
Sara Crewe: No... I already know you by heart.
(much later after her father is presumed dead and she is put in a "home")
Miss Minchin: Don't tell me you still fancy yourself a princess? Child, look around you! Or better yet, look in the mirror.
Sara Crewe: I am a princess. All girls are. Even if they live in tiny old attics. Even if they dress in rags, even if they aren't pretty, or smart, or young. They're still princesses. All of us. Didn't your father ever tell you that? Didn't he?

And he also directed "H.P The Prisoner of Askaban"

Coming back to Y Tu... The title translates as "And your mother too.." but dont get swayed by the profanity laden title or some sexually explicit scenes. It is a coming of age story like no other. All the American Pie movies seem like farcial goof-ups (which they actually were).
At the end of the movie, as Roger Ebert says; "Y Tu Mama" is one of those movies where 'after that summer, nothing would ever be the same again.' Yes, but it redefines 'nothing'".

Some excerpts of some major reviews.

1) Roger Ebert - Chicago Sun Times and arguably the world's best movie critic
"Y Tu Mama Tambien" is about two teenage boys and an impulsive journey with an older woman that involves sexual discoveries. But it is also about the two Mexicos. And it is about the fragility of life and the finality of death. Beneath the carefree road movie that the movie is happy to advertise is a more serious level--and below that, a dead serious level. Like "Amores Perros," which also stars Gael Garcia Bernal, it is an exuberant exercise in interlocking stories. But these interlock not in space and time, but in what is revealed, what is concealed, and in the parallel world of poverty through which the rich characters move.The surface is described in a flash: Two Mexican teenagers named Tenoch and Julio, one from a rich family, one middle class, are free for the summer when their girlfriends go to Europe. At a wedding they meet Luisa, 10 years older, the wife of a distant cousin; she's sexy and playful. They suggest a weekend trip to the legendary beach named Heaven's Mouth. When her husband cheats on her, she unexpectedly agrees, and they set out together on a lark.This level could have been conventional but is anything but, as directed by Alfonso Cuaron, who co-wrote the screenplay with his brother Carlos. Luisa kids them about their sex lives in a lighthearted but tenacious way, until they have few secrets left, and at the same time she teases them with erotic possibilities. The movie is realistic about sex, which is to say, franker and healthier than the smutty evasions forced on American movies by the R rating. We feel a shock of recognition: This is what real people do and how they do it, sexually, and the MPAA has perverted a generation of American movies into puerile masturbatory snickering.Whether Luisa will have sex with one or both of her new friends is not for me to reveal. More to the point is what she wants to teach them, which is that men and women learn to share sex as a treasure they must carry together without something spilling--that women are not prizes, conquests or targets, but the other half of a precarious unity. This is news to the boys, who are obsessed with orgasms (needless to say, their own).The progress of that story provides the surface arc of the movie. Next to it, in a kind of parallel world, is the Mexico they are driving through. They pass police checkpoints, see drug busts and traffic accidents, drive past shanty towns, and are stopped at a roadblock of flowers by villagers demanding a donation for their queen--a girl in bridal white, representing the Virgin. "You have a beautiful queen," Luisa tells them. Yes, but the roadblock is genteel extortion. The queen has a sizable court that quietly hints a donation is in order.At times during this journey the soundtrack goes silent and we hear a narrator who comments from outside the action, pointing out the village where Tenoch's nanny was born and left at 13 to seek work. Or a stretch of road where, two years earlier, there was a deadly accident. The narration and the roadside images are a reminder that in Mexico and many other countries a prosperous economy has left an uneducated and penniless peasantry behind.They arrive at the beach. They are greeted by a fisherman and his family, who have lived here for four generations, sell them fried fish, rent them a place to stay. This is an unspoiled paradise. (The narrator informs us the beach will be purchased for a tourist hotel, and the fisherman will abandon his way of life, go to the city in search of a job and finally come back here to work as a janitor.) Here the sexual intrigues which have been developing all along will find their conclusion.Beneath these two levels (the coming-of-age journey, the two Mexicos) is hidden a third. I will say nothing about it, except to observe there are only two shots in the entire movie that reflect the inner reality of one of the characters. At the end, finally knowing everything, you think back through the film--or, as I was able to do, see it again.Alfonso Cuaron is Mexican but his second and third features were big-budget American films. I thought "Great Expectations" (1998), with Ethan Hawke, Gwyneth Paltrow and Anne Bancroft, brought a freshness and visual excitement to the updated story. I liked "A Little Princess" (1995) even more. It is clear Cuaron is a gifted director, and here he does his best work to date. Why did he return to Mexico to make it? Because he has something to say about Mexico, obviously, and also because Jack Valenti and the MPAA have made it impossible for a movie like this to be produced in America. It is a perfect illustration of the need for a workable adult rating: too mature, thoughtful and frank for the R, but not in any sense pornographic. Why do serious film people not rise up in rage and tear down the rating system that infantilizes their work? The key performance is by Maribel Verdu as Luisa. She is the engine that drives every scene she's in, as she teases, quizzes, analyzes and lectures the boys, as if impatient with the task of turning them into beings fit to associate with an adult woman. In a sense she fills the standard role of the sexy older woman, so familiar from countless Hollywood comedies, but her character is so much more than that--wiser, sexier, more complex, happier, sadder. It is true, as some critics have observed, that "Y Tu Mama" is one of those movies where "after that summer, nothing would ever be the same again." Yes, but it redefines "nothing."

2) Laura Bushell - BBC
Smashing all records at the box office in Mexico, "Y Tu Mamá También" (And Your Mother Too) is Mexican director Alfonso Cuarón's triumphant return to his roots after ten years in Hollywood. Witty, vibrant, and intelligent, it's not hard to see why audiences have loved the film.
Combining elements of a road movie, love triangle, and coming of age tale, the film follows Tenoch (Luna) and Julio (García Bernal), two teenage best friends from Mexico City whose girlfriends have just gone travelling. Left at the peril of their hormones, the boys lure beautiful Luisa (Verdú), the discontented wife of Tenoch's cousin, away on a trip to an imaginary beach. In the process they discover things about themselves and each other that they least expected. With a voiceover that enriches the story with socio-political observations, Cuarón has fashioned a movie that is specific in its personal and national character, but which negotiates issues relevant to everyone. Entertaining and enlightening.

3) SEAN AXMAKER - THE SEATTLE POST
"Y Tu Mamá Tambièn" (which translates to the adolescent insult "And your mama too!") is a vivid, thoughtful, unapologetically raw coming-of-age tale full of sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll. Two sex-obsessed, dope-smoking teenage boys, Julio (Gael Garcia Bernal) and Tenoch (Diego Luna) head for a hidden Mexican beach with a sexy, worldly young Spanish woman -- reads like a transplanted American teen sex comedy on the surface.
Luisa (Maribel Verdu), the restless, unhappy wife of Tenoch's insufferably pompous cousin, is an erotic fantasy to these boys and who, true to the genre, will take them both in hand for brief encounters.
Neither comic nor romanticized, the couplings are physical and sweaty, more like a sporting event than love making. Bernal's working-class Julio and Luna's rich kid Tenoch are utterly unself-conscious in their portrayal of boys on their last blast of irresponsible fun, bringing just a touch of tension to their screen friendship.
Verdu's Luisa emerges as the heart and soul of the picture. Under her smiling front of confidence and fun-loving impulsiveness, Luisa is sad and lost, and she thrives on the unbridled energy and naive innocence of the immature, cocky, sex-mad boys. Her sexual favors are not favors at all, but a desperate attempt to lose herself, if only for a few moments, in simple physical pleasure (and brief it is, much to her unfulfilled frustration).
Alfonso Cuaron, the director of such elegant, visually sensuous American films as "A Little Princess" and "Great Expectations," finds a different kind of sensuality in the sun-blasted rural landscapes and the paradise lost of the third act. Framing the giddy teenage explosion of energy are the comments of an omniscient narrator, whose ironic insights offer background color and flash-forward reality checks, and the political and social tensions of modern-day Mexico in the periphery of their road trip.
That's a lot to cram into a coming-of-age film, and Cuaron does it deftly, thoughtfully and with sharp, aggressive style that makes it feel honest. Like all road movies, this is a journey to self, and Cuaron both celebrates and mourns the passing of youth.

I hope you will all make some effort to watch this movie and with piracy being so open and available i hope you will ask your local DVD 'dealer' to get you a copy. Worth adding to your collection.

Happy Viewing.

Vish