Una Obra De Arte / Fantastica!
Added 5/20/2009
Simplemente una pelicula inolvidable, la catedra de actuacion que dicta Catalina es un legado para generaciones por venir. El talento de esta chica, el director y todos los protagonistas crean un drama tan real como el que viven sus contrapartes en la vida real.
La version en DVD tiene los comentarios del Director... realmente es la UNICA vez que he visto una pelicula en su totalidad escuchando al director haciendo la narrativa, CADA escena, tiene una historia!!
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"If you don't do this well, we'll stop right now..."
Added 5/8/2009
Stopping isn't an option, really.
Maria has a problem: she finds it difficult to conform to stupid conventions. But she ends up making a terribly wrong choice in her desperation to get out of the rut she is in. She's given the feeling that it's about easy money. Once she has made that wrong choice, she finds herself in situations which she wasn't warned about.
Having gone through the reviews, I find come common complaints in the negative ones: that it's like a documentary, that critics are partial to foreign films, that there's no story.
The fact is that this is a simple and moving tale, and it's told well, without fireworks. Apart from Catalina Moreno's wonderful performance, I liked her interview in which she says, "It's not about the drugs, it's about the girl". Equally important, the core of the story can be very close to you, if you look around.
The one problem is that some of the characters are a bit cheesy, like the gangsters in New York. For me, that didn't really dent the gracefulness of the movie much.
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Outstanding
Added 4/8/2009
A PC movie that is actually good, for once. The phenomenon of drug 'mules' from places like Colombia probably doesn't get enough attention. I imagine this is still going on every day. This film shows the difficult lives of immigrants, as well as the cheapness of life in places where it's difficult to earn money. The focus is narrow here, but that's an asset to the filmmaking.
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Pleased with movie. It arrived quickly and was in excellent shape. Thanks amazon.
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Absorbing Drama
Added 1/23/2009
Maria Full of Grace" is an absorbing drama that telescopes a singular component of the supply-side of immigrant drug-running. It shows how destitute young women from poor countries like Columbia are lured into becoming "mules"--illegal importers of high-value drugs like cocaine and heroin into the United States--with (often false) promises of instant wealth and relative safety. As such, the 17-year-old Maria (played by Catalino Moreno) is the flawless prototype. She's a poor, ill-educated assembly-line worker who is also her family's main breadwinner. Maria is clearly smart and intuitive but, saddled with an unplanned pregnancy, she's also a bit feisty and somewhat sullen, longing to escape the dullness and drudgery of her Colombian village. "Grace" revolves around Maria's decision to join the drug-running trade--for the lack of other viable options--and her efforts to avoid detection (after having ingested 30 or more pellets of drugs) by US Customs, outlast the middlemen, and find a way to survive the strange urban jungle that is New York. The film effectively communicates the social and economic desperation that often drives such women to risk life and liberty for a relatively small return. It also depicts the callousness and the (sometimes deadly) indifference of the middle-men who chaperone the girls and ensure--by whatever means necessary-- that they deliver the goods. What holds this truncated film together is Moreno's fragile yet hard-edged affect. Director Joshua Marston's economy of style is well-matched by Moreno's performance. She's a stunning, dark-eyed beauty, whose young-old face alone tells Maria's story. Her Maria is defiant yet quietly desperate, bold yet cautious, naïve but distrustful--she immediately pulls us in and makes us care about this girl-woman's fate. The film is in Spanish, with English subtitles.
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