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Pedaço de Mim (2024)
A Globo-like production on Netflix
Globo aesthetics, with a lot of mistakes taking into account current state-of-the-art on series productions. For example, soundtrack doesn't match Brazilian cultural mainstream at the mid-2000s. Also, when someone sings, fake ambience is applied with autotune. Tomás and Oscar characters are poorly depicted, in a Manichaean way when their personality should be nuanced, and vice-versa. Plot twists are erratic to the detriment of character construction or, on the other hand, most characters aren't developed at all and don't get any depth even after a lot of episodes. Sadly, the plot has a good starting point, but it couldn't get rid of the "novela" aesthetics.
Narcos (2015)
Don't review Narcos unless you watched the entire season
I see a lot of people posting reviews based on the first three episodes, which don't do justice to the production's quality. The first three episodes look a bit like Padilha's Robocop remake, posing a geopolitical context which can feel slow or "documentary-esque". The next episodes produce that addictive effect that occurs in the good TV shows.
Agent Murphy (Boyd Holbrook) resembles a lot Capt. Nascimento (Wagner Moura) from Elite Squad I & II: he's completely taken by his job, and sometimes he's not so fond to the human rights agenda. The spectator tend to forgive the latter aspect due to the atrocious way drug traffickers treat their opponents, but sometimes we stay confused about who are the good guys here. Anyway, it's good seeing a TV show which avoid a Manichean point of view.
The season ends leaving room for another one season, or perhaps even a third one, functioning like Elite Squad II, which was a sequel, but with an entirely different approach, deepening the political axis of the drug traffic business.
RoboCop (2014)
Great if you hate classic superhero movies.
I really don't like movies like LOTR, Star Wars, Iron Man, Spider Man, Batman and all stuff that nerds usually love. Actually I'm a master degree student in computer science, but I hate the geek-nerd culture shared by a lot of computer scientists. I prefer watching nouvelle vague movies than poor, non-emotional sci-fi ones. That's why Robocop 2014 seemed promising to me.
Directed by José Padilha (Elite Squad 1 and 2), I had high expectations on seeing an ambiguous hero as portrayed in the Captain Nascimento from Elite Squad. Padilha's heroes are not cool or of the kind we would like to imitate. They're just humans: sometimes we like their attitudes, sometimes not. They're dystopian heroes.
The original Robocop is in some sense dystopian through today's eyes: it was basically a more productive Paul Kersey from Death Wish. However, if you remember well the crime movies from the eighties, it was pretty common this kind of "vigilante" character who kills evil criminals that haunt the American middle class. It was very easy pointing the good and the evil parts from the original Robocop. We loved that. In the latest years of cold war we liked these characters like Rambo and which portrayed a plain dichotomy between totally good heroes and totally evil enemies.
In the 2014 version, the manichaeism is not as clear. If you planned watching a protagonist like Batman or a Gran Torino's Walt Kowalsky on Robocop 2014, prepare yourself to watch a Blade Runner's Rick Deckard or a Capt. Nascimento from Elite Squad.
Probably the big marketing mistake from Robocop 2014 is being a superhero movie for people who don't like superhero movies. It belongs more to the drama genre, but not without a lot of stunning action scenes.