megadiego

Plot: 5/10. Average. That same story has been told, written and recorded 1000 times before but with different characters. Most of the times the outcome is better than 'Wolf': A struggling mid-class Average Joe dives into illegal games in order to escape his financial shackles, at first he seems successful, then he succumbs into excess an debauchery and finally he gets caught by his own game and ends up in jail. Better examples of this exact same plot are: 'Scarface' (1983), 'Carlito's Way' (1993), 'Blow' (2001), 'The Queen of Versailles' (2012) and even DiCaprio's 'Catch me if You Can' (2002).

Narration: 3/10. Bad. The story was on speed while the visual narration was choppy. Dialogues constantly crashed into each other or into shopped down scenes that played some kind of nonsense 'strobber' action. The story was too long, to discontinuous, full of unnecessary details and lacking essential info about the characters, their personal life and theirs business. The constant soft-porn and drug scenes added nothing to the story (but the girls where actually cute). Leo's (Jordan's) off-voice narration was totally expendable. The visual narration of this film may serve young directors as a catalog of all of Hollywood's clichés in a single film.

Sound: 5/10. Average. While the music score was great, the audio mixing and the dialogs where terrible. The constant breaking, hitting, crashing and thrashing along with the excessive screaming followed or preceded by whisperings have a very unbalanced outcome in the audio levels.

Characters: 5/10. Average. I generally like Leonardo's acting and what it ads to the films but in this case not.. Probably the shallowness of his character didn't help him because there are no real insights into his internal emotions and sufferings. In general, the characters in this film have no evolution, they are the same at the end as they where when they first appeared and it is safe to say that there really is no other important character other than Jordan, it feels like all of the others are fillers.

After all it is not that funny, not that great and not that bad... just below average and in my opinion anything below average is bad. Im glad I didn't pay for this, otherwise i'd be really upset.

3 years went by since this doc was announced in its post production stage. 3 long years of waiting, asking, browsing, reading about it. 3 years in which the atmosphere of the long awaited film about south America's best thrash metal act ever was constantly building up.

3 very, very, very long years. And then, suddenly, there it was. It finally came out to the light, and for me as a big fan of the band, it was a big deception. So much time had gone by that the almost-complete line-up had reunited and toured south America before the launching. But lets get to the movie:

1. The narrative was very choppy, it is hard to guess at what point in time the interviewees are referring to.

2. The transition tittles are confusing, difficult to read and their screen time requires constant pausing.

3. The absence of an Off-voice narrator really hurts the movie.

4. The musical review of their albums was overlooked, short and almost inexistent, which is a big flaw in a doc about a rock band.

5. The musical score was pretty poor -which is really really bad in a movie about a rock band- I can recall no more than 4 songs being featured throughout the whole film. Most of them where very poor live recordings or cover versions that did not feature the original singer. It reminds me of the Biography Channel's Guns n' Roses documentary that features no GNR song in it.

6. Footage other than the recent interviews is also very poor.

7. I've gotta admit that the way in which the director handled the absence of Ricardo (band leader and founder) was very professional. ----------------------------- ----------------------------- CONCLUSION:

Still, this is not as bad as 90% of VH1's behind the music. Its the best and most professional film about a Latin rock band that i've ever seen.

But if you really want to know interesting stuff about this Heavy Metal band you'd be better off by buying a record, listening to it, browsing the web for related stories and reading Jedbanger's Magazine articles.

I've gotta start by saying that I've got nothing against Sam Dunn or his intention to approach metal-heads and non metal-heads (in fact I really enjoyed his first release). However, There are plenty of areas in which this film fails to reach its objective.

The first and most obvious flaw is that this movie is not really about how the world assumes and adapts heavy metal to a wide variety of cultural, demographic, economic and geographic situations, but rather spends a vast amount of time capturing the way in which geographically separate nations digest American and British Heavy Metal bands.

The second big flaw of this film is the lack of prior info and investigation on local metal that is evident when Sam arrives to foreign lands, which is why he decides to twist the local metal into something he is more likely to recognize. Seriously: Marty Friedman(former Megadeth) interviewed in Japan? Sepultura (probably the most North-Americanized band in south America) as the only Brazilian exponent? Would't standing in front of and interviewing 'Angra' members be a good reason to feature some of their music (Brazil's most locally influenced and internationally acclaimed band)?

The third, and probably biggest blunder, was the election of the places he decided to visit. Israel? India? There is so much innovation and interesting things to show in Easten Europe. Argentina has a huge reputation and respect all across America(not north America, but America) for breeding top-class Heavy Metal bands that do not respond to North American Metal trends and refuse recording in English while still maintaining a huge die-hard fan base. Mexico is a huge Metropoli that is constantly releasing socially aimed thrash/death at its finest.

Although the graphics may seem crappy at some parts and the characters intentionally look like others (the movie poster and DVD read: "From the same directors that watched Shrek") the story is really interesting.

Unlike many previous comments, this story makes a lot of sense and even has some literature jokes in it. But since this is NOT the story "Don Quijote" some narrow-minded people may find hard to understand a story based on one fairly complicated book that they have NEVER READ BEFORE.

These characters won't stop the movie to explain you what went before it in what is known to be one of the most popular pieces of literature in the world, they assume that you at least know what its about.

And for those of you that criticized the plot line and the story, it is way better than some other very linear and predictable movies like "Planet 51", "Antz" and Pixar's "UP" and its characters have a better development throughout the movie.

If your 8-year-old offspring does not understand this movie, it is nothing to be alarmed, but if you are a grown-up person and didn't understand it....... well... "Man of La Mancha" is something of universal cultural knowledge

That pretty much wraps it up: "All action, All fun" This is the kind of film you should watch if you really want to have 15 minutes silly sarcastic boy-toy fun. Lots of action, wild animals, guns, fast cars, some rude boys and lots of explosions (rush hour, rambo, cops styled) in a world fully made out of logos.

You wont learn any positive message in any way, maybe no message at all. Its just a cool action/persecution story with extremely funny animations, but then you might just spend 15 min on an entertaining story than wasting 1.4hrs in an ultra positive badly forced like Pixar's Up.

Then, even if you don't like it you would have wasted that much time

***In this review I will not rate special effect because(they are great) a really good movie should be able to stand on itself(the story) without any decoration and still be good enough. If you wanna see special effects then buy a video game or another really lame movie with great animations(UP).***

This movie (excuse me all of those die-hard fans) is basically a remake or an adaptation of Hayao Miyazaki's 1997-multi award winning- "Princes Mononoke", which by the way is a mixture of many of the ancient culture beliefs. So in conclusion: nothing new in this plot line/story.

The story from the beginning is very, very, very predictable as to what will the conflict be and how it will be solved, even more predictable than Disney's "Tarzan". However, the story has a fair amount of bright moments, like the technological projection of humanity and its blending with machines or the connection between all living creatures or the American army messing up with a foreign twin tower.