Congratulations to Richie for being such a stud and having all 6 posts in February thus far. I'm about to weakly attempt to steal your spotlight. Ha.Meanwhile, I love MU Spanish classes and here's one reason why: we watch lots of movies, and they're almost always really good ones and sometimes they have awesomely-low vote counts on imdb. I love seeing stuff that hardly anyone else has. Anyway, this year my class is Hispanic Lit II, a.k.a. Hispanic Poetry. Naturally one of the first people we are studying is one of the first important writers to come out of America, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Yo, La Peor de Todas is a movie about her life. Obviously some liberties have been taken with the story, since it's a movie and writers do that. Considering it only as a film, however, I thought it was pretty good. One of the few things that bothered me was the style of acting. It seemed a little unnatural at times - too much silent-movie-esque hand gesturing - but when that wasn't attempted it was pretty solid. The actress who played the Vicerine, Dominique Sanda, did a particularly good job and I think her relationship with Sor Juana was my favorite part of the movie.
I'm not sure how I feel about the lighting in this movie. I can't tell whether or not it is an attempt to be artistic or just a result of a horrifyingly low budget (I was shocked to find out that this movie was made in 1990). The ever-present darkness works in some scenes (for example, it was very appropriate for the mis-en-scene of the convent), but not as well in others. It could be that director María Luisa Bemberg was trying to direct our focus, but again, it's not consistent enough for me to be sure.
I guess the final verdict is that this is a great story with some wonderful characters, and that part was very well carried out. It is by all means worth at least one watch. Just don't expect much on the technical side.
Re-reading that sentence makes me realize exactly how attentive using a real video camera myself has made me to technical things.
