The Crime of Padre Amaro
|
List Price: Our Price: $11.45 You Save: $8.54 (43%) Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Buy Used: from $4.99 (click here) Category: DVD See more DVD releases |
|---|
Canada
Movie Reviews of The Crime of Padre Amaro
Movie Review: una historia muy dura de creer
Summary: 5 Stars
, bueno esta es una histora, que creo que le podria pasar a cualquier padre.Movie Review: Black eye depiction of Catholic Church
Summary: 4 Stars
This is definitely a controversial film, especially for Catholics both practicising and those with a less than a traditional belief system. Given the current problems of the church with molestations etc. this is something that only adds to the fire. Current Mexican heart throb Gael Garcia Bernal is in the lead role as Padre Amaro who begins the movie as a naive young priest and finishes the movie as a ruthless man who is no longer offended by the politics and wicked ways of some churches. Other notable actors and characters include the veteran Spanish actor, Sancho Gracia, who plays Padre Benito who is having a less than secret affair with a woman and who may have fathered a lovely daughter named Amelia. Amelia is a dedicated Catholic girl(in her teens?) but her love of Jesus has carnal overtones in the guise of the young padre Amaro who has entered the parish. The plot has been outlined various times so I'll deal with some of the controversey but begin with my own problems with the movie. First of all I believe Gael Garcia Bernal is less than credible in the lead role; however he does have an audience and sells tickets and DVD's. Don't get me wrong I can appreciate an attractive person in the lead but that doesn't mean that I'd like to see Madonna or Cameron Diaz portraying a young Mother Theresa! I can live with the choice for lead actor but some of scenes are worth bringing up if for nothing else to add to the controversy. There is an old woman in the movie who is one of the best characters, she is an eccentric, has her own brand of Catholicism, has a bit of a following, the local gossip and who steals many of the scenes beginning with her introduction where she is "singing" in the church. There is one of her scenes that was particularly troubling and definitley controversial in which she takes her communion home after acting like she accepted it in church. This grossed me out and I found it sacreligious. She took the host, the blessed symbolic body and blood of Christ home and fed it to her cats!! Is nothing sacred? I know cats are Gods creatures too but please this is pushing the limits of tastes, no pun intended. What's next? Someone swindling a few bucks from the Sunday collection and siphoning the money off to have stray dogs and cats spayed and nuetered because there are so many roaming the streets? Or a renegade priest taking a few bottles of the church wine to the local street alcoholics so they can have a drink? This particular scene was one done to just push peoples buttons. Some of the other issues " brought up" include the priests involved in sexual situations, contrary to their vows of celibacy as though this were the norm. The point here being the hypocrisy that exists, hardly hidden and accepted by parishiners as fact. Naturally the priest suggesting and condoning an abortion to cover his sins and the resulting cover up was the main issue but there were others. There is a priest, Padre Benito who brings the Padre Amaro's conscience into question by practising liberation thelogy. The fact that he helps the guerillas,even at the risk of excommunication speaks to the greater issue of the role of the priest and the question of good verses evil. There are many other more settle messages brought up for the pensive viewer to contemplate but viewer beware. The directors commentary, which essentially was a conversation between Carrera and Bernal, further pushing an agenda, was less than enlightening as they both were unfocused and constantly going off on tangents. Besides they both made it clear in the beginning that they were less than happy about doing the commentary and that it was a requirement. All in all this is a movie deserving of your viewing so that you can be the judge and pull the redeeming qualities from this beautifully filmed thought provoking movie.Movie Review: Mexico's official entry for this year's Foreign Film Oscar nomination consideration...
Summary: 4 Stars
For many priests, celibacy is a true vocation which liberates them... For others, it is a lifelong struggle... If celibacy was made voluntary, not only would many priests be happier, but the Church would be richer... Above all, it might decide the only way to restore the numbers of the priesthood, and that seems to me not a bad idea...
As I understand, a Catholic priest must clearly know that he belongs body and soul, with all that he is, to the church, to her task, to her mission, her work, and her destiny... He must be a public icon of strength, virility, honesty, and dedicated service...
But in 'The Crime of Father Amaro,' the top film in Mexican box-office history, Carlos Carrera shows that even a man with morals and scruples betrays the nature of his profession, mostly when he brazenly criticizes the priesthood, and questions the Catholic Church's representatives on a variety of charges like illicit love affair, corruption, drug dealing, and hypocrisy...
The story takes a liberal priest Father Amaro(Gael Garcia Bernal), protégé of a repulsive obese bishop (Ernesto Gomez Cruz), to the remote dusty village of Los Reyes to assist the older priest of the parish Father Benito (Sancho Gracia) in his daily work...
Amaro quickly realizes that virtually every fellow priest is involved in something immoral, and that his aging superior is receiving financial help from the region's drug lord for the construction of a new church-run hospital, and is secretly spending his cold nights with the proprietress of a local restaurant Augustina (Anjelica Aragón). He also discovers that Father Natalio (Damian Alcazar) is suspected of aiding the revolutionary factions in opposing the drug lords and mobsters...
Amaro's own weaknesses is put to the test when he finds himself led into temptation by Augustina 's extremely sensual teenager Amelia (Ana Claudia Talancón) a relationship that eventually goes way outside the bounds of his priestly oath... and, without any sign of inner turmoil, he embarks on a passionate affair with the devout catechism teacher...
Amalia - for whom loving a young priest serves as an extension of her deep piety - decides that the good-looking priest is the one for her and rejects her disappointed boyfriend, the aggressive reporter Ruben (Andres Montiel) who wrote an article alleging that the hospital is a front for laundering drug money...
The most over-the-top performance is provided by Luisa Huertas as the town frightening parishioner Dionisia who takes great delight in exposing heretics... This malicious lady (who, apparently, knows absolutely everything there is to know about anyone...) pretends to put coins in the collection plate but cleverly palms paper money back...
Gastón Melo plays the tender lay-assistant to the elder priest, who cares for his invalid-epileptic daughter, and carries many secrets but tells none..
"The Crime of Father Amaro" is polemical today as Martin Scorcese's 'The Last Temptation of Christ.'
The film focuses on blasphemous scenes as on a vicious priest who stops at nothing, even by continuing the lies and hypocrisy to protect his career... His value system is completely corrupted... Father Amaro's ability to stand behind his beliefs extents to nothing... His generosity and wealth of spirit becomes selfishness and bitterness... His ambitions to rise in the church hierarchy clouds his judgment...
Mexico is in the middle of a film renaissance which is wonderful if they come up with a new wave of irreverent movies thundering forward juicier targets than the church's vices... sex, abortion, abuse, witchcraft, betrayal, and political corruption...
Movie Review: Underrated, and seemingly misunderstood.
Summary: 4 Stars
El Crimen del Padre Amaro (Carlos Carrera, 2002)When you want to make a name for yourself, take one of the most controversial books ever released, update it, and make one of the most controversial films ever released. It helps if the film is really, really good.
Carlos Carrera's fourth feature-length offering is El Crimen del Padre Amaro, and it has the potential to knock the unsuspecting right off their feet. Not necessarily because of the subject matter, but because the trailers, and the reviews, I saw of the movie before I actually got there oversimplified it to the point of ludicrousness. Sure, okay, a young priest, Father Amaro (Gael Garcia Bernal, who has very quickly stamped himself a major player with this, Amores Perros, and Y Tu Mama Tambien), gets himself involved with a sixteen-year-old girl, Amelia (Ana Claudia Talancon, one of the main reasons Univision has such great ratings in America). And their hooking up is the main device on which the second half of the movie turns. But what everyone seems to have failed to realize is the irony of the title; in the general scheme of the diocese of Los Reyes, the crime of Father Amaro is pretty small potatoes. The diocese of Los Reyes is awash in corruption, from the bishop on down, and the first half of the film is spent establishing that corruption. Even after Amaro and Amelia hook up, not an insubstantial amount of time is devoted to Amaro's struggles between acting on behalf of the diocese and doing what he things is the right thing for the church to be doing.
Perhaps the most amusing thing about El Crimen del Padre Amaro is that the original novel, as the preface to the film tells us, was published in 1875. Carrera had to do little other than introduce motor vehicles into the film to make a relevant contemporary piece of work.
Many of the reviews I've read of the movie, aside from oversimplifying the plot, also seem to be missing some major points of how the movie transpires. Yes, there could be a good deal of information given that never shows up (the beginnings of the relationship between Amaro and Amelia, especially, seem to be filmed in stop-motion animation; she flees his advances, then a few frames later is confronting him in the confessional offering her own affections, for example), but that method of operation isn't true of all the characters herein. Amaro, especially, is unjustly accused in review after review I come across. Yes, he does accept the first obviously corrupt task the bishop sets him to without any real inner struggle. That's the point; at the beginning of the movie, he is naively attached to the church and thinks it capable of no wrong; it is only after being in the field and seeing the corruption he encounters that he develops enough of a conscience to start wondering if the bishop is always right. As to the seduction of Amelia (or vice-versa, a point that is open to large amounts of interpretation), that is set up throughout the first half of the film, and (especially if seeing it with subtitles in an American theater), a (re)viewer would have to not only be deaf, but illiterate not to have noticed.
There is a great deal to enjoy in this film. Best viewed as a double bill with Rabbit-Proof Fence, as Amaro starts out light and airy and descends into tragedy, where Rabbit-Proof Fence starts in tragedy and ends triumphant. That way, you're only depressed while in the theater. ****
Movie Review: Fiction can barely keep up with real life
Summary: 4 Stars
"El Crimen del Padre Amaro" would have been considered far more controversial just a few years earlier. The current high profile scandals in the Catholic Church, however, now make the events of this story line appear like nothing out of the ordinary. A young priest, Father Amaro (Gael Garcia Bernal), is assigned to a small Mexican village. Many of the faithful adhere to a personal theology bordering on the heretical and superstitious. One woman even gives her sick cat consecrated communion wafers. Priestly celibacy is a take it or leave it proposition. The parishioners long ago learned to look away while their pastor Father Natalio (Damian Alcazar) pursues a sexual relationship with his housekeeper. They are treated like immature children and readily accept their role as mere lay people who should merely pay, pray, and obey. A large clinic is being built with funds from a local murderous drug lord. Hypocrisy and lying for the alleged sake of the Church are the norm. Father Amaro is soon confronted with the pious Amelia (Ana Claudio Talancon) who adores the very ground he walks on. She also tells him during confession about her lustful thoughts and desires. Amelia will gladly do his bidding and Fr. Amaro is more than willing to take advantage of the opportunity to debauch her.Father Amaro is a weak and manipulative creature unworthy of any respect whatsoever. We are soon nauseated each and every time he appears on the screen. He has no backbone and will do virtually anything to make his life easier. Father Amaro is both a coward and a cad. It is soon obvious that some sort of tragedy will occur. Should you see this movie? The themes surrounding priests who abandon their vow of celibacy have been worked to death in previous films. The fictional "El Crimen del Padre Amaro" can barely compete with real life. I can only give it four stars. Graham Greene's "The Power and the Glory" concerning the "whiskey priest" is over sixty years old. There's simply nothing all that new here. Nonetheless, the soundtrack of "El Crimen del Padre Amaro" is utterly fantastic. I enjoyed it immensely and have already ordered a copy from Amazon.com