OVP: Wild Tales (2014)

Film: Wild Tales (2014)
Stars: Ricardo Darin, Oscar Martinez, Leonardo Sbaraglia, Erica Rivas, Rita Cortes, Julieta Zylberberg
Director: Damian Szifron
Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Foreign Language Film-Argentina)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

Occasionally films get nominated for the Best Foreign-Language film Oscar that never would be able to dream of being nominated in any other category.  This isn't a slight on their quality, but simply that this category, thanks to the way that the nominees are chosen, frequently has slight adventures in overall format and twists that it brings to form.  Even so, I was actually quite surprised when I found out that the film Wild Tales is in fact an anthology-style film, with six short movies strung together rather than a cohesive, larger plot.  It was a nice change of pace from the very dreary lineup of foreign-language nominees from 2014, though like all such collections, some stories stood out more strongly than the others.

(Spoiler Alert) Honestly, and I feel really weird saying this, but my favorite plot when I first saw it was the hilariously-paced opening scene, where I didn't know that this was going to be a series of films rather than just one 2-hour picture.  The reason I feel weird about it is that the opening scene is about a man who, after life has treated him unkindly, decides to randomly put everyone who has ever wronged him on a plane and then crash it into his parents' house.  Of course, this particular scene takes on a whole different meaning in the wake of the recent Germanwings crash, which is freakishly similar to the opening scene (to the point that they are now putting disclaimers on the film in some theaters that the plane sequence may be disturbing for some viewers).  Taken in that context it feels a little untoward to pick it as the standout, but I would be lying if I didn't think the opening scene was, at the time, quite amusing and pretty damn clever.

The movie goes back-and-forth in which scenes are the best (there's no really bad sequence in the picture).  I felt like one of the best was "The Strongest," which like several of the films, feels more like a fable (hence the title) than a true-to-life story, though you could honestly see something like this happening.  The film is a weird study in machismo, with two men elevating a simple slight (a man hurls an insult to a car he's passing who was going slow) to a cartoonish game of one-upsmanship in trying to insult the other person.  Throughout the encounter both men have myriad opportunities to be the bigger person, or to escape unharmed, but their egos get in the way and ultimately it results in their deaths, with an hilarious gay sex joke toward the end of the scene that becomes all the funnier when taken in comparison to the previous displays of "manliness."

All of the films seem to have a moral baked into them, but never in a way that seems preachy or overwrought (hence why this could never be an American movie).  "Little Bomb," for example, shows how people are constantly at the mercy of government bureaucracy and how we create folk heroes out of criminals who fight unjust laws.  "The Proposal," shows how money can buy you almost anything, and how greed and doing the wrong thing can result in really unintended consequences.  Even the final scene, "Until Death Do Us Part," asks us to take a look inside a wedding and an affair, examining exactly where the line is for a scorned woman.  The film in many ways resembles the 1990's hit TV series Tales from the Crypt, though never with quite the gore.  Overall it's slightly more than a trifle, as some of the messages resonate in a pretty dramatic way, but it's hardly a film that you'd consider particularly great movie-making, even if it is highly enjoyable.

Those are my thoughts on this film, which is currently rocking it in Art House cinemas.  Have you seen it yet, and if so, what were your thoughts?  Where does it rank on your 2014 Oscar ballot?  Share in the comments!