19 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
In the World of the Young and Damned, February 26, 2007
This review is from: Los Olvidados Aka The Forgotten and The Young and the Damned (DVD)
The story of troubled youth and urban violence has been told many times, but this is, perhaps, the best film on the subject ever made. This is an unblinking look at the hell on earth that looks like slums of Mexico City. It is also a masterful combination of gritty realism and Buñuel's surrealism like in the scene of young Pedro's dream of Virgin Mary with a face of his mother whose love he desperately needs but never knows.
All the characters, including a young boy caught up in a criminal world but trying to be good, his tired mother who does not have time to love her children, the brutal and cruel gang leader with his own story that breaks your heart are not just wonderfully written and acted, they are absolutely real and would stay with you long after the film is over. Shocking, erotic, and sad, this is a masterpiece - the perfect film from the beginning until the harrowing and devastating end.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
I wish Bunuel had done more realism - the best of his Mexican period, April 19, 2011
This review is from: Los Olvidados Aka The Forgotten and The Young and the Damned (DVD)
This is a deeply affecting film about the poor in Mexico City, in I believe about 1950. The principal protagonist is a young boy in a large disordered family, whose promiscuous mother oversees alone; he is unloved, but struggling to do the right thing and full of rage. One of his friends is an evil young criminal, whom a gang of kids looks up to as someone who controls his own fate. He is one of those destructive personalities that, if you have the misfortune to encounter intimately, will leave his mark. There are many other characters, all finely drawn and relentless in their brutal realism, including an abandoned peasant boy and his abusive caretaker, a blind musician full of hate.
The young boy is seeking to find what to do with his life and even gets some help from an institution run by a good man, who gets him a job as an apprentice in a silver smith's shop. It is a way ahead for the boy and he takes to it with great energy and hope. Of course, things don't work out the way they should, in what can only be called a catastrophe that no one will ever know about. I don't want to reveal the plot, of course, but Bunuel serves up an awful tragedy with total honesty and an utter lack of sentimentality. I almost wept at the end.
Bunuel adds many subtle twists to the film, such as the criminal's affair with a woman, perhaps a passing on of his bad genes. There is also the blind musician, exulting in death, a laugh that entered my nightmares when I first saw the film 30 years ago. The images are unforgettable, such as the dream of the boy with his mother, when she is offering him meat only to have the criminal emerge from under the bed to take it.
REcommended with enthusiasm. This is a great, even pioneering film that does not end with a happy ending or indulge in any hollywoodian moralizing.
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3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Los olvidados, December 15, 2008
This review is from: Los Olvidados Aka The Forgotten and The Young and the Damned (DVD)
This is one of Buñuel's best films, and one of the most unusual because of its "realistic" characteristics. Its impact remains intact after decades, the images potent, and there are gems to be discovered every time one sees it. Try to count how many times roosters, chickens, and even baby chicks appear in the film, for instance, and why. Or how many visual echoes there are (repetition of particular frames, for instance). The dream sequence is still as searingly beautiful as when I first saw it (gapingly, at age 16!). Not to be missed.
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