Add puzzlement to the topics of anger, laughter and tears of previous blogs this week when discussing movies/performance art. Your puzzlement since today’s title suggest that I am talking about a movie I cannot possibly have seen. My puzzlement about what possibly to expect from a director who manages to either really hit or really miss in whatever he produces.

 

I am talking about Alfonso Cuarón whose movie Roma is about to arrive in Portland in early December, and also to be launched on Netflix at the same time. The film is a portrait of a maid’s life in an upper-class Mexican family against the backdrop of the 1970’s, a psychological study of human relations. It also is:

“…. a kind of snapshot Marxist adventure told from a family-eye view. It takes us to a corrupt hacienda at Christmas time, with “Jesus Christ Superstar” on the turntable, where the decadent bourgeois swells toasting their good fortune seem to be whistling past the graveyard of the land grabs that are being whispered about; or out into the streets on June 10, 1971, with the audience plunged into the roiling fear and bloodshed of the Corpus Christie Massacre, the state-sanctioned attack on student demonstrators that heralded a new era of clampdown in Mexico.”

Seems to be an Oscar contender, according to the reviews below.

Film Review: Alfonso Cuarón’s ‘Roma’

https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/roma-2018

 

I will report, when I’ve seen it, but here is my real question: Have you watched some of Cuarón’s movies before?

 

Great Expectations  (1998) was a failed film (unless you like the color green which suffused it to no end), an assessment notably shared even by the director.

“Y Tu Mamá También”  (2001) was brilliant brilliant, brilliant. If you ever need a spark to feel alive, go see it.

Gravity (2013) really re-inforced gender stereotypes despite Sandra Bullock’s heroine being hailed as an exceptionally strong woman. It was an inane, sappy, boring, sentimental movie. One could say I didn’t like it.

And now comes Roma, which everyone is hyping to the high heavens.

 

How to account for such a trajectory? You tell me! If a surgeon would show an equal distribution of one death per life saved, or an engineer had one building collapse for everyone that stands, they’d be soon disbarred, or whatever the equivalent professional demise is called. How can an artist survive this?

 

Photographs were taken in Mexico City, from the Colonidad Roma neighborhood of the movie’s title and adjacent quarters where I stayed last year.