Wild Tales (Damián Szifrón, 2014)

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#1 Post by **mfunk9786** » Tue Apr 07, 2015 4:42 pm

01. Til Death Do Us Part
02. Road to Hell
03. The Rats
04. Pasternak
05. Bombita
06. The Deal

Y'all?

I thought this might be a fun way to jump start conversation about this inventive and enjoyable film on this forum. I realize that it is entirely counter to what should normally start a thread for a film. Thank you.

#2 Post by **swo17** » Tue Apr 07, 2015 5:24 pm

Um, the segments have actual names:

1. Road to Hell/El más fuerte
2. Til Death Do Us Part/Hasta que la muerte nos separe
3. Pasternak (the one on the plane)
4. The Deal/La propuesta
5. The Rats/Las ratas
6. Bombita

I thought the first four of these were excellent, and the last two still mostly very good.

#3 Post by **mfunk9786** » Tue Apr 07, 2015 7:12 pm

They do? I had no idea. Updating.

"The Deal" was the one I struggled with most. I thought it just didn't really fit in the film, and felt the most like it could've been padded out to be its own 80 minute feature-length farce moreso than the others. It was really well staged and scripted, though, and I adored the turn it took at the end.

#4 Post by **swo17** » Tue Apr 07, 2015 7:31 pm

Spoiler

Yes, I mostly love the ending, which really--ahem--hammers home how trivial all the squabbling inside the house has been.

I think I agree that it's the one that would most easily translate into its own feature. I wouldn't mind an expansion to "The Rats" either, though that's more because the ending, though perhaps inevitable, wasn't as clever as it was for all of the other stories.

leo_floyd · #5 Post by **leo_floyd** » Wed Apr 08, 2015 7:25 am

I'm pretty sure nobody would agree with my order, but here it goes,

:

1. The Rats/Las ratas
2. Pasternak (the one on the plane)
3. The Deal/La propuesta
4. Til Death Do Us Part/Hasta que la muerte nos separe
5. Bombita
6. Road to Hell/El más fuerte

Liked all the segments to varying degrees, though. And it was a shame it didn't take the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film.

rohmerin · #6 Post by **rohmerin** » Wed Apr 08, 2015 8:38 am

If you can get the previous Szifron's movie, do it.
Tiempo de valientes is a very good action- comedy film. Very funny, extremely funny.
Apparently, there's English subtitles in the blu ray.

http://www.amazon.es/Tiempo-Valientes-B ... +valientes" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

#7 Post by **mfunk9786** » Wed Apr 08, 2015 2:23 pm

Thank you for the recommendation, I will absolutely check that out.

leo_floyd · #8 Post by **leo_floyd** » Thu Apr 09, 2015 5:48 pm

rohmerin wrote:If you can get the previous Szifron's movie, do it.
Tiempo de valientes is a very good action- comedy film. Very funny, extremely funny.

Agreed. I'd also recommend his first film, El fondo del mar. His TV series, Los simuladores and Hermanos y detectives are great too (Los simuladores being probably my favorite Argentinian TV series of all time), but I wouldn't know if any of these things are available with English subs.

rohmerin · #9 Post by **rohmerin** » Sun Apr 12, 2015 10:44 am

I disagree with El fondo del mar, I watched it yesterday and I think it was a good idea for a short but not enough for a whole movie. It's like a draft for what Szifron made later in several sketches of Wild Tales.

Red Screamer · #10 Post by **Red Screamer** » Sun Apr 19, 2015 3:39 am

I liked Til Death Do Us Part, Road to Hell, and Pasternak, with only Pasternak truly surprising me the way the film is advertised to. The other three sections were fairly predictable and uninteresting. As a whole, Szifrón comes off too pleased with himself and often slips into reveling in violent revenge, while leaving behind the wit that makes up the best moments in the film. What he does achieve in the good segments has me looking forward to his other works, particularly how he develops stylistically; the shot of the bride spinning in TDDUP is stunning and unlike anything else in the film.

#11 Post by **Finch** » Thu Jun 18, 2015 11:06 pm

01. Pasternak
02. Bombita
03. The Deal
04. Til Death Do Us Part
05. The Rats
06. Road To Hell

hollis · #12 Post by **hollis** » Fri Jun 19, 2015 3:03 pm

I'm surprised by the lack of love for "Bombita," I thought it was the sharpest, funniest one in the bunch. "Until Death Do Us Part" is deservedly the fan-favorite, but to me it was overlong and had a few too many stretches in logic. I enjoyed it but I didn't love it.

"The Proposal" sticks in my mind for being the most morally complex of the bunch--it keeps flipping who the victim and the victimizer are so by the end when the revenge is taken, it's not clear if justice was actually served.

"The Strongest" is on-the-nose and juvenile but so what, I am too.

I loved the film overall. One of the most purely entertaining flicks I've seen in forever.

1. "Bombita"
2. "The Proposal"
3. "The Strongest"
4. "Pasternak"
5. "The Rats"
6. "Until Death Do Us Part"

Zot! · #13 Post by **Zot!** » Fri Jun 26, 2015 9:39 pm

Great fun. Not sure if I got the joke of The Rats, but none of them were bad.

1. "The Strongest"
2. "Pasternak"
3. "The Proposal"
4. "Until Death Do Us Part"
5. "Bombita"
6. "The Rats"

#14 Post by **swo17** » Fri Jun 26, 2015 9:57 pm

This is getting dangerously close to giving me something else to tabulate.

#15 Post by **domino harvey** » Fri Aug 07, 2015 2:10 am

01 Hasta que la muerte nos separe
02 Pasternak
03 Bombita
04 La Propuesta
05 Las Ratas
06 El más fuerte

Wildly overrated film, though, and the last two as ranked above are just awful. I don't think the connective idea, as fuzzy as it even is here, is sustainable for a feature film compilation, at least not based on this evidence. Most of these work on an "Oh, I get it" level, except "Til Death Do Us Part," which seems genuinely concerned with being unexpected. "Pasternak" is the shortest and best of the one joke/ideas here because it does what it does quickly and then moves on, aware that it isn't capable of outlasting a couple minutes. This film's over two hours though...

colinr0380 · #16 Post by **colinr0380** » Mon Aug 31, 2015 12:49 am

Spoilers. I'll join in on this ranking game too:

1. The Deal - I loved this, mostly because it feels like a satirical take on The Headless Woman, just with the victim of the hit and run accident being someone that society at large actually cares about! Although I concede that may just be because I was glad to see the star of that film, María Onetto, in here as the mother. The class themes are similar, if heightened here. Although the ending was never in doubt (never underestimate a media frenzied crowd whipped up into demanding justice!) I had assumed that the patsy would be blithely betrayed instead, but at least this provides some sudden closure!
2. Pasternak - I'm slightly relieved that I haven't quite yet gotten to the stage where I could fill a plane with all the people who annoy me! (Maybe a light aircraft or small private jet? :-k ) But it's a novel method of dealing with all the baggage in one fell swoop without getting too many 'innocents' caught up in the collateral damage. This segment reminded me a little of the Ten Little Indians/House on Haunted Hill idea of everyone being brought into a confined space for an undisclosed reason.
3. Bombita - Ricardo Darín is great as expected in the main role of a man's life unravelling after his car gets towed away. It sort of boils down to the moral of the tale being that you shouldn't attempt to destroy someone who has access to high explosives (similar to the way you shouldn't upset people with access to cockpits of airplanes, or who prepare your food, either!), although I did spend much of the time thinking that the main character should just have copied that Jam sketch and hired someone able to win arguments for him! I do have issues with the ending though, which is by far the happiest ending of all of these stories following one of the more protracted downward spirals into despair, and feels almost delusionally upbeat for that. I kept expecting the reverie to get broken as at the end of Terry Gilliam's Brazil, though it seems to play quite straightly here. Albeit all the people who abandoned our main character suddenly turn all chummy towards him once he has become a media hero! (Maybe that's why people get involved in such kinds of campaigning, in the forlorn hope that perhaps winning their cause will change things back to how they used to be, or at least give some meaning, or closure though achieving a small victory, to their lives?)
4. Til Death Do Us Part The most drawn out of the segments, though I also felt that this was the most visually interesting of all of them. I liked that the little band of best bros and girlfriends to each of the married couple gets replaced by 'his and her' matching paramedics near the end! It also felt to me a tiny bit like The Taming of the Shrew at the end, as the terrible bride and groom end up putting each other through hell before having a concilliatory (for the moment) shag on top of the wedding cake, as the more staid partygoers beat a hasty retreat to the exits! It did make me think though that we are living through a strange cultural moment as gay marriages give two people legal rights and help them to reinforce commitments to each other, while heterosexual couples seem to be bludgeoning each other (in films at least!) with the horrors of marriage as they make threats of taking everything from the other and exposing their vulnerabilities to the wider world. I also agree with the point that Superswede11 made above that violence is too often used as an easy crutch for all of these stories, though the mirror moment here is the best of all of the shock moments.
5. Road To Hell/The Strongest The purest version of the idea in the rest of the shorts. Two people clashing against each other and unable to just leave each other the hell alone, until they end up permanently locked together in a tight embrace.
6. The Rats I did like the idea that whatever your issues with someone, you should be more concerned about the person who wholeheartedly and proactively takes your side! A nice parallel with The Deal in the way the final images involve two contrasting characters in police custody.

It's an amusing if broad (very broad) film, though I'm in agreement with domino's assessment that it eventually outstays its welcome and uses maybe too obvious well worn topics to show people getting worn down by societal pressures and conventions. I think my biggest issue with the film though is the way that each of the various tales are self contained, which creates a stop-start sense to the film. Maybe a bit of finessing in terms of creating a wraparound story or Amicus anthology-type throughline plot (let alone anything even more ambitious such as an Altman-esque interweaving narrative structure) in between the stories might have kept my interest higher than just waiting to see how each discreet, individual story wrapped up before moving on to the next. There feels like some interesting interconnections that could have been made between each of the stories, with one maybe helping to illuminate another, and perhaps some connecting material could have helped to emphasise that.

I liked the theme of the film being about small situations spiralling out of control, and the way that the 'hero' (or rather the main character) often commits worse acts than the 'villain' initially does. Some vulnerability gets revealed but then that gets pounced upon by unconnected other people to capitalise on the weakness (which is presumably the reason for the title and the wild beast imagery over the opening credits. It's a jungle out there!). Officiousness and cashing in (whether as a lawyer, a disgruntled driver, a car towing company, or cook, or a crime investigator) is often worse than the initial crime.

The best aspect of the film was the great use of space on show. Of course the supreme (and funniest!) moment of that is the shot of the slowly approaching plane, but I really liked the way that there was always some interesting contrasting deep background action against which the foreground takes place (say the way that we get the shot looking all the way down the passenger cabin in the first story, which kind of subliminally prepares us for everyone 'being in on the joke', as otherwise we wouldn't have been shown so many people!) It seems that surprisingly few comedies use depth of field for their jokes or even just to open their action out wider but, for all of the obviousness elsewhere, this film had a few great shots. I thought that the Till Death Do Us Part story was particularly good for this, with its shot of the wedding banquet with the person answering their telephone in the far background and later the rooftop shot with the nighttime city (and its planes travelling to and fro) laid out behind the bride.

colinr0380 · #17 Post by **colinr0380** » Mon Feb 15, 2016 9:19 am

Wild Tales beat out strong competition (The Assassin, Force Majeure, Theeb and Timbuktu) to win the BAFTA for Best Film Not In The English Language last night.

leo_floyd · #18 Post by **leo_floyd** » Mon Apr 03, 2017 2:14 pm

rohmerin wrote:I disagree with El fondo del mar, I watched it yesterday and I think it was a good idea for a short but not enough for a whole movie. It's like a draft for what Szifron made later in several sketches of Wild Tales.

Sorry to bump this, but I've just finished listening to this podcast where two screenwriters review and desconstruct films and in this episode they talk about El Fondo del Mar, and they put in much more articulated way everything I think it's good about the film:

https://audioboom.com/posts/5283636-el-fondo-del-mar" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false; (go straight to 11:00 after they finish talking about recent films they've seen and when they start revisiting the film).

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