+ Best Argentinian Movie of the Year
+ Best Anthology of the Year
 |
| Three of the main characters of Damián Szifron's Wild Tales act out their inner animal in three situations from the film on this poster |
Wild Tales presents six wild tales, fateful or karmic stories of uncommon yet still more or less realistic circumstances, wherein modern life seemingly pushes characters to act out in impulsively animalic, violent ways.
The three first stories of this anthology, SPOILER (the passengers stuck in the airplane; the restaurant murder and the strife between the two motorists), are only so-so successful, but they do establish the pitch black style of Wild Tales effectively. - And the following three tales are excellent; SPOILER the parking dogmatist, the DUI death and finally the wedding story, which must surely rate as the year's movie wedding. This story is especially memorable and hilarious; a bizarre example of how you absolutely will not want your wedding to pan out.
Wild Tales is self-assured and playfully made; it deliberately tricks our expectations more than once and also throughout denies us the luxury of having characters to feel bad for, which is rather smart of its Argentinian writer-director Damián Szifron (The Bottom of the Sea/El Fondo del Mar (2003)).
Wild Tales is a dark, funny, cheeky anthology of what could be termed someone's worst home-videos, presented cinematically.
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Watch a trailer for the film here
Cost: 4 mil. $
Box office: 30.6 mil. $
= Huge hit
[Wild Tales premiered 17 May (Cannes) and runs 122 minutes. Szifron based his script on a series of short stories he had begun writing in 2007. 70 % of the financing came from Argentina and the remaining 30 % from Spain. Filming took place in Argentina, including in Buenos Aires. The film opened #42 to an 85k $ first weekend in 4 theaters in North America, where it peaked at #20 and in 122 theaters (different weeks), grossing 3.1 mil. $ (10.1 % of the total gross). The film's biggest market was its native Argentina with 11.7 mil. $ (38.2 %) (although another source claims it made as much as 17.5 mil. $ in the country.) It broke the opening weekend record with sales of 450k tickets there, which grew to reportedly 3.9 mil. tickets, becoming the most seen Argentinian film in the country to date. The 2nd biggest market was Spain with 4.3 mil. $ (14.1 %), and North America was the 3rd biggest market. The film was nominated for the Best Foreign Film Oscar, lost to Pawel Pawlikowski's great Ida. It won a BAFTA, 10 out of 21 nominations at the Argentinian Motion Picture Academy, a David Di Donatello nomination, 1 win out of 9 Goya Awards nominations, a National Board of Review award and many other honors. The film currently stands at #186 on IMDb's user-generated Top 250, between Life of Brian (1979) and Platoon (1986). Wild Tales is certified fresh at 95 % with an 8/10 critical average at Rotten Tomatoes.]
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