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March 29, 2024, 10:02:58 AM

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Diamantino (2018)

Started by Small Man Big Horse, September 19, 2021, 02:07:27 PM

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Small Man Big Horse

Offbeat and then some Portuguese comedy drama where the titular football player fails to score a penalty in the last minutes of the world cup final, his father dies seconds before this, his two mean identical sisters scheme against him, and after learning about the plight of refugees for the first time in his life he adopts one without realising that he is a she, and she's also a member of the Portuguese secret police who have been spying on him for a while now, suspecting him of money laundering. Diamantino's a sweet natured, simple type who imagines giant fluffy puppies are on the pitch when he plays, and completely in over his head
Spoiler alert
when he's involved with an advertising campaign led by a racist political party trying to persuade people that Portugal should leave the EU, while his sister's have teamed up with a genetics company which secretly wants to clone him and while experimenting on him cause him to grow quite large breasts.
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So yeah, there's a lot going on here, and having written it down like that it sounds ridiculous, but what makes it all work so well is the lead's charmingly innocent take on the world, and though it's undoubtedly a mad old thing it's one that worked for me. 8.5/10

Here's a Sight & Sound review which sums up why the film works so well far better than I have: https://www2.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-magazine/reviews-recommendations/diamantino-gabriel-abrantes-daniel-schmidt-carloto-cotta-ronaldo-sweet-fantasy

And here's a picture of a nice dog:


dissolute ocelot

I saw this a while ago and liked it a lot. For something that seems done as an art project by people with a conceptual art background, it works surprisingly well as an actual movie: good fun, visually inventive, and very cute. In some ways it feels like it's from another time or some weird European version of Walt Disney, with its wide-eyed innocence and sweetness and cartoonish plotting.

Small Man Big Horse

Quote from: dissolute ocelot on September 21, 2021, 10:29:29 AM
I saw this a while ago and liked it a lot. For something that seems done as an art project by people with a conceptual art background, it works surprisingly well as an actual movie: good fun, visually inventive, and very cute. In some ways it feels like it's from another time or some weird European version of Walt Disney, with its wide-eyed innocence and sweetness and cartoonish plotting.

I'm glad to hear you liked it as well, and that's a great way of describing it, the sweetness and fantastical elements do seem from another time, though I thought the satire on Brexit was very timely, for the film's release at least.