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The Last Circus

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The Last Circus (2010)

August. 19,2011
|
6.5
|
R
| Adventure Drama Horror Comedy
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A trapeze artist must decide between her lust for Sergio, the Happy Clown, or her affection for Javier, the Sad Clown, both of whom are deeply disturbed.

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Reviews

Alicia
2011/08/19

I love this movie so much

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KnotMissPriceless
2011/08/20

Why so much hype?

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Philippa
2011/08/21

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

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Marva
2011/08/22

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

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JOSE MANUEL LADRON DE GUEVARA G.
2011/08/23

There is no doubt that when a film has a script, costume, photography, makeup, direction more than good, and a plot that really immerses you in the story, it is something that has to be seen.A script with a historical touch, since it focuses the plot during the Franco era, in the Spanish dictatorship, something very original to center the story in the life of a circus as well as its characters, playing from romance, jealousy, envy, hatred, resentment, loneliness, but above all the struggle for a revenge of a love that is unique as that of a father or a mother.excellent direction of photography, good angles, lighting, movements, very good editing, music always ready with the scene, a good performance, but what it takes for me the best of the best is the costumes, and especially the characterization makeup-costumes of the protagonist the clown, javier. I can say that in the history of cinema, this clown in his whole (makeup, costumes, and acting), is one of the top 5 in the history of cinema.

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Tor Johnson-Lugosi
2011/08/24

Beautifully rendered and splendidly unique. There is almost no way to fully describe it; but THE LAST CIRCUS is a love it or hate it movie. I loved it.The performances are top notch; the script is sharp; every scene is unpredictable, the way a high wire trapeze act is.Perhaps I'm generalizing too much, but I don't want to add even a specter of a spoiler. I grabs you from the first frame and never lets go. The director never tinkers with emotions, he plays them out grandly with a magnificent cast - like a juggler or a knife thrower. The circus itself is a perfect metaphor.Buy it see it, but with this caveat - the film is grotesque and quite gory, but not for exploitation. You're not being snookered. Buckle up for one of the greatest shows on earth.

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SnoopyStyle
2011/08/25

In 1937 Madrid, Republican militia conscripts circus performers to fight against the fascist forces. They are overrun and captured. The funny clown tells his son Javier to only be a Sad Clown because there is no happiness. It's 1973. Javier joins a ramshackle circus as a Sad Clown. He falls in love with the wildly beautiful aerial silk acrobat Natalia. Only she's the girlfriend of the volatile possessive owner lead clown Sergio.This is a wild outlandish movie. It's got great stuff but rambling and uneven at times. It opens with a crazy machete wielding clown action scene. That sets up a surreal violent horror but then it turns into something slightly different. It becomes a romantic melodrama with violence. Then the last act turns back into more surreal violent chaos. The changes in the style does hold it back but this is a movie of an original vision.

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Agnelin
2011/08/26

"Balada triste de trompeta" (Sad trumpet ballad, in Spanish -I have no idea why they translated it as "The last circus", as it's much poorer) is none short of a masterpiece, in my opinion. It is also a 100% Spanish film, meaning it is a tragicomedy, a totally Spanish genre and it also expands between two crucial moments of Spain's recent history, full of tragic events -the Civil War, the killings, Franco's repression and dictatorship- but also full of grotesque details, situations and characters that were real and now, in retrospect, feel utterly ridiculous, much more so than they were at the time -e.g. when the dictator went hunting, they really prepared the prey for him so that he would look as a great hunter- or are just seen as a byproduct of the times that Spain had to live. Director Alex de la Iglesia also cares to sprinkle the movie with historical events that are apparently disconnected to the main story -like the assassination of Franco's hard man and presumed heir as the new tyrant, admiral Carrero Blanco- but which I believe serve a function to the main metaphor that this movie is.The movie starts in 1937, in the heat of the Spanish Civil War. A clown is recruited by force to fight with the Republican side, and manages to slaughter quite a lot of Franco's men. His young son, Javier, is traumatized by the whole event and later, in 1973, we meet him again as the new recruit in a circus, the Sad Clown. He can only be the sad clown because he is sad himself, and cannot make children laugh. They pair him up with the Funny Clown, a ruthless but charismatic man called Sergio, who turns out to be the partner to a beautiful trapeze artist, Natalia. Javi falls in love with Natalia and thus starts a rivalry between the two men for the love of a woman, with unforeseeable consequences.The narration is so filled with colorful characters, crazy comedy, crazy violence mixed with comedy or with surreal elements, historical references, and an underlying sense of tragicomedy, and it is so excessive and full of surprises, one can't help but keep watching, much as it is over the top in many an occasion. You can enjoy the movie at face value and ride the wave of the story for what it is, but you can also watch this movie as a summary and insight into the recent Spanish history and how Spain seems doomed to always be split in two, similar people, brothers, always rivalling and even hating each other, seemingly beyond reconciliation, connecting episodes of sheer senselessness and absurdity with spine-chilling episodes of hate and violence, and all of it boiling down to a tragedy that you can only laugh at because it makes no sense.I'm not surprised that Quentin Tarantino himself was so taken with this movie, and I wouldn't be surprised if an adaptation of this movie was made soon in an American context.

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