Mammoth (2009)

How sad is this?

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

Watching it is like watching the spectacle of a class clown at their best: you laugh at their jokes, instigate their defiance, and "ooooh" when they get in trouble.

Worth seeing just to witness how winsome it is.

Mammoth it's a smooth synopsis of the contrast between the societies that nowadays live on the same planet. On the movie we can see the life of two families from different levels: the life of and American rich family and the life of its maid, a thai family. The maid is an emigrant from Thailand that moved to US looking for cash to maintain her family. Despite the movie has a some criticism, it is extremely smooth compared with how much it can be. It's not a documentary, OK, but if you want to be criticize the differences between societies and make a drama, be truth and faith to the real world. Otherwise, the only thing you do is show the people the tip of the iceberg and they spectators continue being unworried about the problems. But the movie, instead of being focused on the society differences, it is more focus on one of the things that most really matters: the family. The movie is also critique with the people nowadays, they spend more time in their jobs working than with the family. , but when feeling bad or when need somebody, they feel alone, they need to share their sadness the only thing they have is the family, but it it's the last place they go to.

Well, I like all of the actors but let's talk about their characters in this movie. While Michelle Williams as mother/wife/doctor is trying to save a boy's life in NYC...the happily married man - her husband - gets bored waiting for a business deal to go through and has a beach vacation with a young prostitute (and I note he fails to tell his wife he might be HIV infected by the prostitute). Also, I don't think the nanny would have left the girl Jackie alone without calling to tell her mother...you don't ask a 7 year old to do that. And the nanny's mother blew it by telling her grandson that the kids go at night and get money "sleeping" with someone. (What an unfortunate reminder that it is Westerners who keep the child prostitution going there.) And to add to the dreariness of the characters,the pace of the movie was horrendously slow. There was a heaviness, too...so on my list to never watch it again.

This movie attempts to comment on the sorry state of parenting today. Unfortunately the characters are written and delivered in a ridiculously unbelievable way. I didn't buy one minute of it. The story is about how parents abandon their own children for ostensibly good reasons, but the results are always bad. There's a husband and wife who are high powered professionals. They have delegated their parenting to a Phillipino nanny. The nanny has abandoned her children to come to the U.S. so that she can send money back to the Filipines to pay for a cement house she's having built. This IS a story worth telling. Unfortunately these characters are presented in a TOTALLY unbelievable way. Mostly this flaw manifests itself through Michelle Williams and the Spanish guy from "E Tu Mama Tambien" who plays her husband. I don't think they give "bad" performances. I think they gave the wrong performances, for this story, and this film. And that, I will lay at the feet of the director, whoever he or she is. I could care less to look it up right now. It takes a lot to take the time to write a bad review for a bad movie after you've just wasted 2 hours of your life that you'll never get back. But if one person reads this two minute review and decides not to watch this movie, I'll consider my time well spent. The last thing I'll say is that this film could have been salvaged with a complete re-write from the scene at the dump through to the ending. They wouldn't have had to change the ending. Just everything in between those two points. Instead it just nose dived from there to the last frame. Don't waste your time.

Written and directed by Lukas Moodysson, "Mammoth" is a melancholic indie feature showing how both those who have money and those who don't can be equally unhappy. On a deeper level, it's also about how parents – mainly out of necessity but sometimes out of cruelty - often fail to provide their children with the care and nurturing they need to feel protected and loved.Leo (Gael Garcia Bernal) and Ellen (Michelle Williams) are a young married couple with a seven-year-old daughter (Sophie Nyweide) who live in a fancy loft in Soho. Though a self-described "hippie" in his younger days, Leo has recently made it to the "big time" by turning his nerdish obsession with internet video games into a multimillion dollar enterprise. But Leo can't quite adjust to being a part of the privileged classes, and he yearns for a simpler life focused on his family, something that seems to be becoming ever more difficult to achieve with his busy schedule. Ellen works nights as an emergency room surgeon, which prevents her from spending the kind of quality time she would like with her daughter, Jackie, who, in turn, is becoming ever more attached to Gloria (Marife Necesito), her Filipina nanny. Gloria, meanwhile, is heartbroken at the fact that she's had to leave her two little boys back in the Philippines to basically fend for themselves, while she earns enough money to build the house they will all one day live in.Leo and Ellen are united in their desire to do good in the world – Ellen, by patching up broken bodies and shattered lives, and Leo, by spreading his new-found wealth around to those in need. In a way, they're finding their own means of helping to bridge the gap between the haves and the have-nots in this world. But at what cost to their family unit? The movie draws a distinct contrast between life in Manhattan and life in the Philippines, where Gloria's children live with the everlasting threat of poverty hanging over their heads, and Thailand, where Leo goes on a business trip and where his attraction to a beautiful native girl may ultimately prove too powerful to resist.Though at times it may seem meandering and insufficiently developed in terms of its storytelling, "Mammoth" finds its own strength in concentrating on those little moments of truth that form the essence of real life. And even though there is a surfeit of musical-montage sequences running throughout the film, it is partly counteracted by a subtle, spare and haunting musical score that nicely accentuates the lyrical nature of the piece. The last half hour, in particular, becomes a poetic and powerful account of people learning to prioritize their own lives in such a way as to be of the greatest value to both themselves and those around them.