Now Over 5500 Reviews and (near) Daily Updates!

WELCOME! Use the search engines on this site (or your own off-site engine of choice) to gain easy access to the complete MAKSQUIBS Archive; more than 5500 posts and counting. (New posts added every day or so.)

You can check on all our titles by typing the Title, Director, Actor or 'Keyword' you're looking for in the Search Engine of your choice (include the phrase MAKSQUIBS) or just use the BLOGSPOT.com Search Box at the top left corner of the page.

Feel free to place comments directly on any of the film posts and to test your film knowledge with the CONTESTS scattered here & there. (Hey! No Googling allowed. They're pretty easy.)

Send E-mails to MAKSQUIBS@yahoo.com . (Let us know if the TRANSLATE WIDGET works!) Or use the Profile Page or Comments link for contact.

Thanks for stopping by.

Wednesday, April 10, 2024

DESCANSAR EN PAZ / REST IN PEACE (2024)


From Argentina, director Sebastián Borensztein lays out a glossy old-fashioned soaper of a type rarely seen outside of tele-novelas these days.  None the worse for it, too, though they miss too many ready-to-go melodramatic opportunities.*  Handsome Joaquin Furriel (one of those lucky actors who can pass for 25 to 55) is the proud papa whose wealthy lifestyle is a facade for crippling debt owed to friends, relatives & threatening loan sharks.  It’ll take a financial miracle to save him!  Instead, he gets a lifeline from a real life tragedy, the 1994 Buenos Aires bombing of an Israeli Community Center.  (Kinda tasteless for use as a story trigger, no?  Especially when the family is Jewish, and the film opens with a Bat Mitzvah the guy can’t afford.)  But when the smoke clears, Furriel is unaccounted for, listed as missing, presumed dead.  Debts cancelled, he’s secretly off to start a new life in Paraguay.  Then, 15 years later, the internet opens his eyes to his old family now and he’s compelled to return incognito hoping to reveal his true identity to the beloved family he saved from financial ruin by disappearing.  Fun!  Of course, we know how these things must end: a sacrifice to save the people he’s never stopped loving.   Or, if not that, having his grown son, unaware the ‘dangerous’ man following his family is actually his long lost father!  Unbeknownst to him, he’s shot his own Papa and is now being forgiven & blessed by the dying man.  What, no amnesia?   Alas, neither scenario gets followed.  That’s okay, instead we get Furriel showing the passage of 15 years by suddenly looking like Al Pacino as Silas Marner.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: * If you do this sort of thing, you can’t be ashamed to get a little dirty.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *Back in 'Golden Age' Hollywood, when they still shot everything on soundstages & in b&w (unintentionally making it all slightly abstract & stylized), they knew how to get the most out of these things.  Let Ronald Colman & Co. show you how with RANDOM HARVEST/’42.  (And no skimping on the amnesia.)  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2018/09/random-harvest-1942.html

No comments: