★ 6 / 10
An introspective and interesting portrait of the most rebellious and unusual film critic.
ma-cortes
Carlos Boyero is one of Spanish cinema's most followed and feared figures. Controversy has hounded him since he published his first article more than forty…
Carlos Boyero is one of Spanish cinema's most followed and feared figures. Controversy has hounded him since he published his first article more than forty years ago, and he has remained in the eye of the hurricane ever since. Boyero is a peculiar person, and a phenomenon in film criticism. We are faced with a raw, frank, charismatic figure, without disdain for drugs and alcohol, a young hedonist, who came to the fore with his short, concise sentences and his painful but pure honesty, and at the same time became the most person loved and hated, feared and respected. Boyero is unique, determined, powerful, unbreakable, but not for everyone. It cannot provoke neutral reactions: either you love it or you hate it, there is really no intermediate state. Those who lived through his heyday are convinced that the new generation does not understand, love, know and cannot truly appreciate all that he means. For Spanish film critics, however, Boyero is a milestone, an origin, however the latest generations either do not understand him or do not know him.
Taking the background and personality of this very controversial figure as its basis, The Critic will also endeavor to reflect on the enormous changes taking place in Spain in the field of film criticism. The questions are the following: is he the last representative of a disappearing time?. Has social media put an end to the traditional influence of the critics?
The film follows the life of this famous Spanish film critic, his hectic and rebellious life and his end and retirement in his old age, when he did not know how or did not want to adapt to the new modern changes brought about by the Internet and the social networks that he doesn't know how to use. I praise the independence and objectivity of criteria without being influenced by changing fashions, this is a self-made person, whose independence led him to have many enemies, and one of them is the all-powerful Pedro Almodovar, who according to Boyero's own confession He has continually tried to get fired from his job at el'Pais' for the simple fact of negatively criticizing his films, which he considers artificial and manipulating ridiculous emotions for the masses.
What's in his sentiment is rarely in line with political correctness, and despite not having planned a brilliant career as a critic - in fact, he had no professional goals in mind at one point - he has become a genuine, self-identifying genius who does not shy away from attacking what he does not like, without letting himself be carried away by any type of bribery or patriotism towards Spanish cinema, in the case of Almodóvar, or internationally with director Abba Kariusmaski, whom he considers an extremely boring director, which earned him other enemies among the thoughtful official criticism. Carlos Boyero is real loner whose only family is his intimate friends as the also critic Oti R. Marchante, with whom he has used to coincide at international festivals and with whom he has used to stay and dine in luxurious restaurants paid for by the editor of the newspaper, a situation that today for the new critics no longer exists.
Several directors: Álex de la Iglesia, Icíair Bollaín, Antonio Hernández, Nacho Vigalondo, Fernando Trueba; producers Enrique López Lavigne, Enrique González Macho and actors Antonio de la Torre, Luis Tosar, Blanca Portillo give their opinion on this peculiar critic, giving generally positive observations of the same.
Directors, Javier Morales Perez, Juan Zavala, stated that his film was very Spanish localist, but that its message was universal. In principle, this is nothing more than a crisis of art criticism in a digitalized world, where a tweet is enough for consumers to complement their personal interpretation and assessment. In the Internet age, professional and lay opinions, characterful and shoddy, come crashing down the necks of media consumers in chunks, often without undergoing any private filtering system. In practice, this thread fades in favor of the glorification of the central figure.
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Boyero is probably the worst critic there is. A complete scam. He's like a cow in a cowshed, no one knows how he got there.