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So much average

Sadly Over-hyped

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

The acting in this movie is really good.

One of Bunuel's most rare and amazing , ¨The Exterminating Angel¨ is packed with surreal moments , criticism , absurd situations and astonishing nightmares . This is one Buñuel's best , including characteristically scatological satire , fierce as well as surreal nightmares and surprising events . Dramatic film about strange relationships among various members of higher class when they remain locked into a mansion . As a luxurious mansion is the place wherein some dinner guests find they cannot for any definable reason leave the dining room . This is weird story about a group of higher class , a drama with surrealism and sour portrait upon social stratum , catholicism , with plenty of dream imaginary and many other things , being stunningly realized by the Spanish maestro of surrealism , the great Luis Buñuel . This is a typical Buñuel film , as there are a lot of symbolism , social critique , including mockery or wholesale review upon religion , especially Catholicism . Luis Buñuel was given a strict Jesuit education which sowed the seeds of his obsession with both subversive behavior and religion , issues well shown in a lot of films and that would preoccupy Buñuel for the rest of his career . Here Bunuel gives a perverse studio about wealthy people , desire and tension when a misfit bunch is closed for any inexplicable reason ; and even being strongly cut and banned by Russian censorship because the idea of people not being allowed to "leave a party" was considered offensive and anti-government . The scene where a bear and two sheep appear during the dinner party was based on a real incident at a dinner party that Buñuel once attended in New York . In his autobiography Luis Buñuel claims he was asked by Warner Brothers to work on a story that eventually was filmed as The beast with five fingers (1946) , it contains many of the elements of the earlier film including the large mansion, piano recital, and stabbing of a disembodied hand . Interesting and thought-provoking screenplay from the same Luis Buñuel and Luis Alcoriza, Buñuel's usual screenwriter ; they pull off a straight-faced treatment of shocking subject matter .The movie script was original and early working title "The Castaways of Providence Street" , then Luis Buñuel took the title The Exterminating Angel from his friend José Bergamin, the Spanish poet, who had mentioned it the year before for a play he wanted to write . Out of all the films in Luis Buñuel's Mexican/Spanish film period, this is the only film he had complete creative control over . Nice acting by all-Mexican-star cast such as Claudio Brook , Jacqueline Andere , Enrique Rambal and Silvia Pinal of Viridiana , among others . The film relies heavily on the relationship between them , as are developed love-hatred conflicts . Furthermore , Buñuel satirizes and he carries out outright critical to aristocracy , bourgeoisie and attack upon religion . Atmospheric as well as evocative cinematography by Gabriel Figueroa , Buñuel's ordinary . This thoughtful and dramatic motion picture was well produced by Gustavo Alatriste and compellingly directed by Luis Buñuel who was voted the 14th Greatest Director of all time . This Buñuel's strange film belongs to his Mexican period ; in fact , it's plenty of known Mexican actors . Born in Calanda , Aragon (1900) , Buñuel subsequently moved to Madrid to study at the university there, where his close friends included Salvador Dalí and Federico García Lorca. After moving to Paris , at the beginning Buñuel did a variety of film-related odd jobs , including working as an assistant to director Jean Epstein . With financial help from his mother and creative assistance from Dalí, he made his first film , this 17-minute "Un Chien Andalou" (1929), and immediately catapulted himself into film history thanks to its disturbing images and surrealist plot . The following year , sponsored by wealthy art patrons, he made his first picture , the scabrous witty and violent "Age of Gold" (1930), which mercilessly attacked the church and the middle classes, themes that would preoccupy Buñuel for the rest of his career . That career, though, seemed almost over by the mid-1930s, as he found work increasingly hard to come by and after the Spanish Civil War , where he made ¨Las Hurdes¨ , as Luis emigrated to the US where he worked for the Museum of Modern Art and as a film dubber for Warner Bros . He subsequently went on his Mexican period he teamed up with producer Óscar Dancigers and after a couple of unmemorable efforts shot back to international attention with the lacerating study of Mexican street urchins in ¨Los Olvidados¨ (1950), winning him the Best Director award at the Cannes Film Festival. But despite this new-found acclaim, Buñuel spent much of the next decade working on a variety of ultra-low-budget films, few of which made much impact outside Spanish-speaking countries , though many of them are well worth seeking out . As he went on filming "The Great Madcap" , ¨The brute¨, "Wuthering Heights", ¨El¨ , "The Criminal Life of Archibaldo De la Cruz" , ¨Robinson Crusoe¨ , ¨Death in the garden¨ and many others . After returning his native country, Spain, by making ¨Viridiana¨ this film was prohibited on the grounds of blasphemy as well as ¨The milky way¨ or Via Lactea , both of them were strongly prohibited by Spanish censorship . Most Buñuel's films were surreal black comedies , parables that satirized moral hypocrisy , social moral , artistic pretension, and , of course , the Catholic Church . In French-Spanish final period the collaboration with producer Serge Silberman and writer Jean-Claude Carrière gave notorious as well as polemic films such as ¨Viridiana¨ , ¨The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie" and ¨Belle De Jour¨. His last one was the notorious ¨That obscure object of desire¨ (1977

Perhaps I was born too late to appreciate this film; perhaps I was born on the wrong side of the Atlantic. In 1962 (three years before I was born), this may well have been scintillating, cutting-edge film making. By 2012 standards, "The Exterminating Angel" holds up only as a period piece. It represents its era well much the same way George Melies' "A Trip to the Moon" represents its era. I selected the Melies film for comparison because it is widely regarded as a watershed achievement for 1902. I can think of no other reason why "The Exterminating Angel" should be heaped with such praise by modern audiences - because it shaped what followed it. That alone does not make it a great film.Other better and more enjoyable watershed films include "Lost Horizon," "Metropolis," "Citizen Kane," "2001," "Nosferatu," and "Casablanca." "The Exterminating Angel" is an unfinished thought, too conventional to be considered much of an experiment; it wants to be a thought-provoking message movie, but it doesn't have anything to say and the only thought it provoked for me was "how much longer until I begin to care about what's happening?" Is "The Exterminating Angel" a bad movie? No, but nor does it represent the best that cinema has to offer and deserve to populate so many the top 50 or top 100 lists.My review may very well be derided for being too narrow-minded, ethnocentric, and corrupted by CGI. Trying to learn about the history of film, I looked forward to "The Exterminating Angel" and was more than willing to view it in its own terms. Days after watching this film, however, I still can't shake my conclusion that, even this agonizingly overlong movie was trimmed by three-quarters, the storyline and resulting tele-play wouldn't even make a memorable Twilight Zone episode. Hoping to see a bit of film history, I could find little reason to care about the characters or their plight, its causes and resolution. The film seemed less like a movie than an exercise. In what I have no idea.

Surrealism has amongst its artistic goals, a revolutionary destruction of the social forms that stand in the way of the "creative", and instead, are moribund in their repetitive rigidity. The arch villain in Bunuel's Book of Social Crimes is the exploitative institution of the bourgeois. This, ruling class, is held in contempt in most of Bunuel's films, but most notably in this movie.The movie opens with a Catholic Cathedral, funereal music, and sheep as the congregation. Bunuel's bourgeois are Catholic adherents of Karl Marx's "Opium of the People" {his description of the role of religion in society}.The scene then shifts to a plutocratic mansion, where a gathering of the rich and cultured is to take place, in which one of the most holy sacraments of bourgeois society is about to begin. The social ritual in which assorted bourgeois people sit at a large banquet table and are plied with different courses of elegantly prepared food by foot servants, which had been anxiously and expertly prepared by the chef and his kitchen staff.Bunuel alerts us {the viewers} early as to the incipient chaos to follow by having the kitchen staff abandon their conventional order of events by unpredictably walking off the job. This strange/peculiar juxtaposition of that which is predictable sets the stage for the arrival of the Exterminating Angel, whom we never see physically, but are made aware of as the movie progresses. The evening progresses as the depleted staff serves dinner to the narcissists gathered at the table. The central theme in this movie is reached when Bunuel applies a primitive form of magic and superstition to the apparently "modern man", represented at the bourgeois dinner party. This tradition often described in Frazier's "The Golden Bough" is the drawing of a circle around a primitive victim by a shaman from which there is no escape. The victim will not, {because of fear and superstition}, step across the line and break the circle. The result is a lingering death paralyzed within the chalked circle.At the end of the dinner, and after pleasantries and some cultivated appreciation of classical piano playing, the invisible circle is chalked at the exit to the dining-room leaving the assorted guests unable to perform the act of taking their leave and departing.Here you have the central issue of the film, as the bourgeois guests descend into a nightmarish hell of inertia, apathy and utter lack of resourcefulness, so that the typical bourgeois traits of herd-like conformity, self interest and alienation become stumbling blocks to the simple human capacity to act. No action is possible as the vile, dark side of the inner bourgeois personality is slowly revealed. They sleep, they dream, {often surrealistically}, they harbour murderous resentment {as scapegoats for their dilemma are sought}. Everything is in stasis, nothing can break the spell { a magic ritual with chicken legs is attempted, but fails}. People die, lovers commit suicide, sheep {the lamb of God?} are eaten as civilization, of which the human social phenomenon of the bourgeois can be considered to be its apex, crumbles back into the cesspool of primal soup from which it developed.The spell is eventually broken when one of the guests remembers the alchemical and ancient magical practice of reenacting the events that led up to the circle being drawn but then changing its chain of magical order by leaving, {like an automaton}, at the usual time and mannerThe movie then reverts back to the prologue with the sheep entering the Cathedral, in order to worship. An utterly amazing movie!!

Reading these reviews I notice that people keep making the mistake of judging a film by the intentions of its creator. So, if Buñuel says that TEA doesn't have a meaning we got to believe him so. That's wrong. We have to understand that what distinguishes an artist from the rest of us is his/her capacity to bring to the open in a orderly, harmonic fashion what lies hidden in his/her--or in the collective--subconscious mind, many times without even being aware of its meaning. For that reason his/her opinion on the finished artwork is just as good as ours. Now, in what most of us agree is that there's a metaphor here somewhere; and knowing about Buñuel's rather poor opinion of the upper crust it's just too tempting to jump into the "useless-without-the-workers-loafers" wagon. But I find that just too easy; as that is something we would see anyway in any of his movies, even if the subject was an extraterrestrial invasion. The anti-bourgeoisie angle was something to be expected of him, which doesn't mean it has to be the central, or unique, topic of this film.What I think Buñuel's dealing with here, more than anything else, is mental traps; or rather mind prisons. Mental prisons in which people fall, for reasons that may have their origin in circumstances, traditions or in simple mindsets. Now, if you think I'm talking theory, let me mention this most famous ex.: Einstein was able to discover the Theory of Relativity mostly because of his faith in Mathematics, as he thought that everything in the physical world comes codified in numbers and so each one of its mysteries could be likely solved by putting numbers in it; i.e. by putting it into mathematical form--in equations & formulas. That seems logical and sensible. But then to his surprise, came the Quantum Mechanics revolution--which has given us computers, Internet, DVDs, etc--but which states that the physical world is much weirder than what he ever thought & that many things in it happen randomly, by mere probability. Einstein never accepted that--God doesn't play with die, was his famous reply. He never accepted the laws of physics that have given us much of what's part of our daily lives, including Ipods, Tweeters and cell phones. For him, his own image of the world was more important than all what was happening around him. He had fallen in a mental prison, just like the characters in TEA. These people have all come to believe they can't get out of that room simply because that idea has gotten stuck in their heads, is part now of their mental reality, which is confirmed to them every time one tries, unsuccessfully, to do so--or rather the room embodies the idea, mindset in question in the metaphor).I know this explanation won't satisfy those who look for the anti-bourgeoisie angle, but I think I can fill up that hole. These people have lost their freedom of movements because of the mental trap they have fallen into, I said. Now this can only be conceived if they are otherwise able to move freely--or the thing won't fly. And the leisure class is the only one that fills such a condition. They are the only people who may get out of bed, or not, next morning simply because they are not forced to earn a living. With any other social class--middle, lower--this plot wouldn't work. In that case people would have simply broken out of the room because if they are not at their desks, production lines, kitchens, early next morning they'll be disciplined or fired. So this plot is only possible with people who does have usually the freedom of doing whatever they wish next morning and the upper crust is the only one capable of doing that. Buñuel may have been all anti-elite you want but he was above an artist and for him was foremost to put the right characters into the right plot--not that he didn't enjoy throwing more than a few jabs to the gold laden in this one anyway.Besides that, most of what we see here is filling: bits of personal experiences, of dreams, of social meetings. For all I said, I don't think the house workers' flight means the loafers' dependence on them. Anyway, as a leftist, Buñuel preferred to paint workers in a more proactive way, I imagine, and in his world they deal with reality, with practical things, so at the time of the metaphors they must be out of the picture.Good cinematography; the B/W is perfect here for the mood and the atmosphere. I love how Buñuel can make his actors say the most unlikely, absurd, things without flinching. And see how self-conscious these slackers are, compared to the European bourgeois in Discreet Charm (far more relaxed & désinvolte) because of their perennial Third World complex, always striving not to bee seen as "Indians with bows & arrows" (that, Buñuel never got it: that his Mexican actors were doing a good job, but impersonating their own upper crust, not the European, as he wished).