Would anyone like to discuss Alejandro Amenabar's other films?

[celestina]

I just recently saw "Thesis" and "Open Your Eyes," and these films are OUTSTANDING. They impressed me because they require active engagement by the audience in different ways. One cannot sit passively back and just WATCH. I was shaking my head and arguing with the protagonist in "Thesis," and not to put too fine a point on it, I thought that "Open Your Eyes" is exactly what "The Matrix" should have been. I haven't seen "The Others," and I hear he has another film out in Spain. I think a rough translation of the title is "No one knows anyone." Anyone else seen "Thesis" or "Open Your Eyes"? What did you think?

[Chairman Pow]

On a whim, I scrolled all the way back to the oldest post in this thread and, not surprisingly, it was on a topic that few people would have any interest in/knolwedge of.

Except for film students of course.

Not having seen either of Amenabar's other films, Thesis was, quite possibly the most pretentious low-rent film I've ever seen. Had it not been required viewing for my Auteur Theory class, I'd have skipped it entirely. The production values were fitting for a first film (although if I remember correctly (going on three years now), but the self-reflexivity, winking at the audience and mixing the high concept attempt to reestablish a once-grand national cinema while hindered by a heavy-metal instant gratification exptreme pornographic voyeur audience didn't help. If that last sentence didn't make any sense, try watching the movie. At best, Amenabar was making a statement that popular culture had destroyed anything resembling a national cinema that could be solved if everyone stopped wasting away on vapid popular culture and collectively wished for the return of Bunuel.

Except of course that the only work Bunuel did his best work while not in Spain...