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hyped garbage

It’s an especially fun movie from a director and cast who are clearly having a good time allowing themselves to let loose.

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

I didn’t really have many expectations going into the movie (good or bad), but I actually really enjoyed it. I really liked the characters and the banter between them.

At a deposition, the son stares into the whites of the camera and informs on his father. When we first meet Pablo(Juan Jose Ballesta), he's playing a daredevil game by the track with some other boys. The possibility of a miscalculation with the oncoming train and their mad dash across the railway is what concerns us. That's what we fear may kill the boy, not his father. In the hardware store, Jose(Alberto Jiminez) talks to his blood employee with a terseness that puts a damper on the moment, but the boy seems to have grown accustomed to these severe exchanges. Pablo walks and talks around the store freely enough, without a quiver or hitch in his voice, or an eggshell in sight. Pablo doesn't act like a child who's been burned with cigarettes and forced to drink his own urine. In the deposition, he lies about his brother; the son that dad loved the best, the ghost that Pablo competes against. He tells the camera "that I should have died, and not my brother," which suggests the father's golden boy didn't perish before Pablo was born, contrary to what he told his schoolmate Alfredo(Pablo Gallan).In essence, Pablo is talking directly to the audience, his witnesses to the brutal beating that Jose dispenses after the boy lies about his whereabouts for a second time. Playing on our sympathy, Pablo makes claims against his father that "El Bola" fails to support, as evidenced by the boy's relative ease around his father. With great subtlety, when the fourth wall is broken, "El Bola" transforms Pablo into a narrator, a fallible one, because the father seems more like a taskmaster than an incorrigible child abuser.Perhaps "El Bola" was too overly concerned with presenting the father as a flawed man, a man still grieving over the death of his first-born, rather than an irredeemable monster like the Robert DeNiro character in "This Boy's Life". If he purportedly tortured his son with lit cigarettes and ridiculed him with names such as "idiot" and "f*****", however, Pablo wouldn't think twice about challenging the authority of such an unpredictable parent with a tendency to shoot first and ask questions later. At the dinner table, Pablo's reaction time is somewhat slow when he's asked to refrain from playing with a ball; and at the front door, his conversation with a friend continues long after he's told to either come inside, or continue gabbing out in the hallway. This show of defiance suggests that a stern lecture, not horrifically violent retribution is the more likely end result for such insubordination. Even the film itself, on a subconscious level, knows that Pablo's father is hardly the man that Pablo describes to the off-camera interviewer. When Jose approaches Alfredo's family to help him search for his runaway son, there's no accusatory outburst about the bruises on Pablo's face and body. If somebody felt that their son's friend was a battered child, the father wouldn't be accord him any cordiality or unconditional respect as they patrol the streets at night in the tattoo artist's car(Alfredo's father).But "El Bola" wants to end on a stirring note, so out from the mouth of a babe, pours out all this stored-up vitriol towards the man who always treated him like a consolation prize. If the film truly believes that Pablo's testimony is factual, then it misses the mark, because there's not enough supporting evidence to back up the boy's claims. The cynic who understands that children lie to get what they want(Pablo probably wants to live with Alfredo's family) will find "El Bola" more rewarding than the viewer with a bleeding heart(like the person who cries out "but what about the children?" as a response to any social ill). Be a cynic: be aware that "El Bola" switches from third-to-first-person narration when it matters the most.

There is a gaping flaw in the plot of this otherwise fine movie. The abused boy, Pablo, is taken to a hospital emergency room and his injured eyes stitched up by a doctor. In the real world, the examination of this beaten boy would immediately trigger an investigation of "trauma X". The hospital and the doctor are legally (and ethically) required to report all cases of potential child abuse.Perhaps Alberto's family may fear that they will be accused. X-rays can reveal prior healed fractures, and the pattern of healed scars and of the present injuries would reliably point to abuse predating Pablo's acquaintance with Alfredo and his family.It is very strange to watch a movie that unfolds with realistic portraits of the two families and their social milieus and then jump to a completely implausible ethical dilemma of whether or not Pablo should be returned to his abusive father.

One of the criticisms lodged against this moving film is that towards its end the actions of the adults are not believable. I actually found it very believable. The best friends' parents are advised that if they do not either return the abused boy to his parents or go to the police they could be accused of kidnapping, or even worse, the father could say that when his son left the house he was fine, and it was they who inflicted the marks on his childs' body. shocking and unjust as this may seem, the reality is - and, as a victim of child abuse, i feel quite qualified in saying this - that even though the law states otherwise, children are often powerless to fight abuse. For instance: once when I was beaten by my stepfather I ran to the police station and told them what had happened. The police called my parents, asked them if what I was saying was true, my staepdad told them i was making up stories, that i had fallen off my bike and was lying because I was angry about having to do my homework. The police took me home and I was promptly beaten for almost getting him into trouble. So... in Pellet, the best friends fathers fears of legal repercussions for intervening were actually, in my opinion, justified.

This film breaks no new ground and yet it is a very worthy example of a kind of cinema that very slightly fictionalizes a subject so that something like child abuse can be explored without it seeming like an out and out docudrama. But that's essentially what it is. Here, the filmmaker unfortunately shines no real light on the subject of child abuse; other than to say--its bad. Yet, there are some very fine subtle performances. On display are adult sensibilities. Things are not oversentimentalized.