Tony Manuro

Well I enjoyed tonight and it was great to meet Caroline who was extremely entertaining. Dee is always good fun, but the night could have been a disaster....and so to the film....well good grief !!!! This is a first for the meetup as this film EARNS 0/10 and is damned lucky to get that. After an hour of tedium, Dee myself and Caroline left the film to its own devices and walked out, opting for a drink in the Royal Park instead, and provided it wasn't cyanide and coke it had to be a good choice. Its not often that I walk out of a film, the last time was The Phantom Menace and before that I think, The Color Purple. Not that we didn't have a good night you understand, its funny when a film gets given a consistent 8/10 by film critics, and it turns out to be utter tripe and you can laugh at it and them afterwards and we were very pleased with ourselves for abandoning it!! How did we hate it? Let me count the ways. Each and every character in it was hateful. There was no humour whatsoever, despite the film having a pre-installed comedic framework, namely Travolta's disco diva in Saturday Night Fever. The plot was flimsy and the characters unbelievable. The premise was that Pinochet's reign in Chile was forcing people to behave like this, self centred and dehumanised, but the reality is that in harsh times people pull together and you get to see the best of human nature, not the worst. And the story of the dictatorship in Chile was skirted over, even though this was the central message the director was probably trying to get over, it wasn't explored at all. The motivations of the characters were unrealistic, the members of the pathetic dance troup clinging on to Manero as though he was the last hope they had in this world, when it was plain he was a pathological insomniac lacking any kind of charm OR TALENT. I found this film to be insulting to the intelligence, and if I was Chilean I would be very annoyed because that generation was depicted as the worse set of losers in the history of mankind, lacking any kind of self-respect. The only thing worse than the dance scenes (which were plainly pathetic) was the terrible, excruciatingly bad sex scenes, as each of the dance troupe tried to prostitute themselves on Manero, which was ridiculous, he was clearly a total loser. Added to all this we had some needless murder scenes by Manero to further disengage the audience, disengaging the three of us to The Royal Park. A superb 0/10

aw dear

So good decision to stay home and watch the last 2 episodes of the Wire...

What a grubby little film.

It got good reviews!

I'm not picking one again!

Dee