Has Anyone Else Seen This?

I had never even heard of this movie when I picked it up on DVD at my local video shop, but being a fan of foreign movies, or usually anything produced/distributed by "Madman entertainment", and having read the brief synopsis and recognising some of the stars of the show (especially Hugo Weaving), I felt compelled to give it a shot.

I think anyone who watches this movie expecting your typical cliche of man hunting killer beast that's going around picking off one main character at a time will be greatly disappointed. Clearly the aim of conquering the beast is merely second to the main focus that is simply the life that this "old man", Antonio, has lived in the jungles for forty years where he has encountered and lived with the natives, learning their ways and rituals and adopting many of them which seems to have further distanced him from the typical culture or lifestyle of the wester world. His passion for reading love stories, or learning to read them and slowly understanding them is admirable and endearing, especially given that a lot of it is reflected in the wife that he lost when he was young.

The movie was indeed slow-paced but this only added to the feel of the extremely slow jungle life that Antonio would have lived all these years.

I thoroughly enjoyed the performances by Hugo Weaving and Timothy Spall as well. I found it amusing that the three main characters were not of any South American background, where you had an American, British, and Australian actor who played their roles well.

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I had seen two other Rold de heer films that I really enjoyed and I had heard of this one so when I saw it at the video store I rented it and I really liked it as well.

I'm Australian by the way so I'm not sure how many people from other countries would know of it.

Great movie. I saw it in a cinema and loved it. It's tragic its distibution got mucked up.

It's like a lot of Rolf de Heer's films: strange, and at first it seems a little bit clunky, but then you realise you're actually in the hands of a great filmmaker who just happens to approach things a bit differently. I had the same experience with "The Tracker", "Bad Boy Bubby" and "Ten Canoes". They sneak up on you, these films, working almost indirectly on your emotions until you find yourself quite powerfully affected. It's like their mood seeps into you. And they stick with you, too. You find yourself thinking about them days, weeks, even years after seeing them.

This guy is a great storyteller and a great craftsman. His movies are all incredibly different and this is because, I think, he's an experimenter/innovator, interested in using all the limitations, possibilities and nuances of the form. The idea behind "Alexandra's Project", for example, was, "How do you make an ultra-low budget movie? What implications does that have for the location, the story, the film medium you use?” One of the inspirations for "Ten Canoes" was to throw out every film making lesson he'd ever learned. Each film is a new exploration and one of the reasons for doing it is precisely that. See all of his work, if you can. It's so refreshing to find someone breaking new ground!

Nice movie. Dreyfuss was great.Pitty the DVD turned to 4:3 ratio after the starting credits. Idiots.