Wild Tales (Damian Szifron, 2014): Argentina, Spain

Reviewed by Ke Shen. Viewed in Hollywood at the AFI Fest 2014.

Great great comedy film! Best film in AFI festival in my point of view.

The whole movie was set in a blue and red theme. As you can see from the first scene. Color blue and red is coming to your eyes. In movie industry, colors always mean something. It is more than important that color doesn’t be there for no reason. Blue to me seems sad to me and for red usually represent blood or violence. These colors hold the whole movie together. All 6 little short stories in Director’s own word is about “Losing control”. It is more than obvious to say this is the real theme, but also the title Wild played a huge role. Not only all the stories contain some kind of wildness from human’s nature, but also how wild they react.

I believe this is a kind of movie that can make you laugh even you know what happened. During I watched movie, it is really interesting to see people have different ideas of humor. Some of them just laugh from the beginning to the end, they usually clapped really loud after one short movie. Some of them barely laughed, most of the time they will laugh for about 10 seconds and stopped, they are the people who clapped politely after one short movie. It is so interesting to see audience get into two groups automatically. I don’t think they did that on purpose, but they just don’t feel so much humors at all. I personally almost laughed from the beginning to the end.  In my point of view, you can watch this film even you don’t read the subtitles. Great acting skills tell you everything. Great using of color blue and red, as well as using of shadows. To many people, the thing shows on the screen won’t scare you, however, the things didn’t show on the screen, maybe it is hide somewhere or just shadow covers it. That is the most scary part. Using of the shadow is really good in this movie. Furthermore, unexpected but reasonable things happened is important.  I don’t think I can to specific about the movie. I will only say this, the best part of this movie, is at the last shot, characters learned to forgive. I believe that rises the whole movie from simple humor to life thinking.

In sum, a great graphic with great actors with great stories equals a great success. A great movie that can make you laugh even louder than you watch Hangover. A movie proves that humor is the universal language besides music. A movie so great that I couldn’t wait to see it again and again and again!