nolwd Well, here again we have a variety of reactions to a movie. I found this film brilliant. Of course it was slow but that was a main point. But boring?..For me, not at all. I acknowledge that others have found it boring, but I most certainly did not. For me, it was a deep insight into our society and the shallowness of some of those in it, and into a man's mind as he is so ignored by it. No-one around him recognizes the humanity under his exterior...and certainly would not expect, understand (or care) about what lead him to implode. It is a brilliantly executed film...in my opinion. The superb acting in the film of the main actor reminds me of the acting of the Secret Policeman in the recent German film, The Lives of Others. ...So much is conveyed by few words and movement..but what emotion there is! I highly recommend both films to readers here.

tsasa198 What bugs me more than anything about my job is how everybody I work with views their profession as two to three pay grades below them. They, unknowing or uncaring about the rest of the world who live with dirt floors and without hot showers, feel crushed under the weight of their own disappointment. Why they, special as they are, have to serve coffee is a grand mystery to them because clearly they deserve so much more. And it is that mentality there that drives "El Custodio," a film from Argentina about Ruben, a bodyguard to a politician and emotional ticking time bomb. He too feels entitled to more of life's riches and to have to play tail to a man who truly does live in the lap of luxury only serves to rub his nose in it. Ruben takes his job seriously and yet is a joke to all those around him. His passion for art is turned into a cheap party trick by his owner, and he has to play chauffeur to the politician's daughter while she services her boyfriend in plain view. In other words his job sucks.This all has a very authentic feel to it. Work is either hard or boring (that is, after all, why they pay you) and here we certainly suffer the latter. However, as it usually is, if you tell a boring story you end up with a boring movie, and that is exactly what we have here. His mundane professional experience is our mundane viewing experience. It is not like the guy is protecting his boss from assassination attempts at the UN, more like carting him around town so that he can spend some quality time with his goomah. Michael Mann has made a career out of showing men at work, but he has yet to capture the true feeling of his audiences work day. Most of us aren't driving a homicidal Tom Cruise around LA in the middle of the night. Here we get realism and that comes with it. There is some subtle humor mixed in, mostly dealing with sex. But the tricks director Rodrigo Moreno plays on us are so mild and inconsequential that they are instantly forgettable.As we learned many moons ago, when Hollywood does bodyguard movies they can't help but dose the whole thing in sap. We do tag along with Ruben as he takes his whole family out to dinner, and while they are supposed to be funny and/or eccentric they don't come off as any more crazy than your family or mine. Well except for the part where he brandishes a gun, but hey, maybe you're from down South. Romance arrives in the form of a prostitute but even that is handled with stone cold seriousness. Since this is not a Wolfgang Petersen/Clint Eastwood movie don't expect anything as over roasted as a slow mo shot Ruben taking a bullet for his master. Quite the opposite in fact. And even though the film does take a populist turn towards the end I can't forgive them for how much the first 2/3 of it felt like a chore. If you've ever worked in your life you'll feel for this guy, but you will also recognize that most of us swallow our pride every day when we wake up and go off to bake bread, drive cabs, or serve coffee. But apparently poor Ruben was incapable of that. **1/2

jpschapira "Extraño" is the name of the film I saw last year with Julio Chávez in the starring role. Directed by Santiago Loza, it followed the life of a mysterious man and the woman he fell in love with. At eighty minutes or so, the picture seemed too pretentious and desperate to achieve its hour and twenty minutes of duration…With a heavy and repetitive piano as the soundtrack, "Extraño" has a lot of similarities with Rodrigo Moreno's "El Custodio".It's definitely a less pretentious project, but nevertheless risky. It's hard to get people and critics to like this type of contemplative cinema today, mostly in Argentina. Because contemplation is the best word that suits "El Custodio"; a very strong observation of a minister's (Osmar Nuñez) bodyguard's life. This man is Rubén, a character more silent than Chávez' "Extraño" and "Un oso rojo" together.If you remember well, Rubén was also the name of the actor's role in the latter movie, a fabulous tale by Adrián Caetano. However, this Rubén required more commitment from the genius, because the mesmerizing portrayal is focused on the patience and the body movement almost completely…Truly; his character barely speaks.There we arrive to the director's script, which shows the minister Chávez protects discussing politic issues that we don't even pay attention to; since Moreno's writing is more about the environment than about the situation. To be honest, nothing really deep happens in the movie; everything is routine as the main character's life, except for a visit to a country house, where the minister invites a French politician and asks Rubén (who draws) to make a portrait of him. "Very good", they tell him. "Thank you", he says, and he leaves.Moreno's direction is also about the environment. The man's picture has the biggest count of still shots I'll probably see this year. The repeated frames of Chávez drinking water and following the minister everywhere got him recognition in the festival of Berlin and a lot of nominations to Argentina's most important awards.What happened is that Moreno's father in-law became a minister, so he decided to join his bodyguards on their daily activities, filming them. "The bodyguards follow the minister; they don't know where he is going…They don't care", Moreno says in a short documentary about "El Custodio". "What happens inside their minds? What do they feel? This is what this movie is about".The ending is as mythic as the rest of the movie. Something to think about for a while and maybe watch the slow film one more time.

jruvira Do you enjoy being transported to the scene? If you answer 'yes, I like to be transported to -say- Wonderland', then you should go somewhere else. This movie develops in the painful, ordinary, real world. Most people will find this movie annoying and somewhat boring. Some of us will regard it as an experience on its own. Rubén's some minister's minder, a bodyguard. His own life must leave room, be replaced by minister's. His life revolves around the minister, must follow him everywhere he goes, must wait for him while he's at work. Does nothing but waiting for him, reminding us of some kind of dog provided with some sort of self-awareness, feeling how left aside he is. His life's worth nothing. And that's where the point of the movie is. The goal is to make you experience his life, to share a piece of such empty existence. Julio Chávez (Rubén, the bodyguard) is a superb actor. I'm impressed by his ability to perform with everything except words. He doesn't need to talk to transmit feelings. And I've recently seen him on stage performing a word-based comedy, and he proved -to me- to be extremely ductile and flexible. He uses every "tool" available for his performance. You're warned. This movie deserves a 9 out of 10 for performance, 9 out of 10 in terms of psychological study. The only thing I didn't like is the final twist of the story. The rest is quite enjoyable. Julio Chávez... you're awesome!