Jean-Paul’s rating: 2/5 stars

Bottom Line: The recurring theme of airplanes flying overhead symbolizes my wishing I were anywhere else except watching this movie.

Ok, I will admit to “Roma” being a technically spectacular movie. Each background, each camera angle, each musical choice is painstakingly and lovingly chosen. It is a masterpiece in movie making. Cuaron, in this movie, emulates Michelangelo carving out the statue of David if he instead used all of his masterful talents to carve a turkey made of marble. What a turkey it would be! But it’s still just a turkey.

Here’s the main problem; the story is so incredibly boring. The action, the storytelling, the suspense is as thrilling as if you watched me typing out this review for an hour, only it goes on for two hours and fifteen minutes, two hours of which is looking at dog poop. The other fifteen minutes tells the story of a middle class family and their domestic worker who loves the children as her own, whose lives get turned upside down by the father abandoning them and the domestic worker becoming pregnant by her boyfriend who abandons her, all under the backdrop of the Mexican Dirty War with the Massacre of Corpus Christi playing a pivotal role, though none of it is mentioned by name. The Dirty War, by the way, was funded by the CIA, shocking no one. So what we have here is an everyday family’s everyday problems being told during an incredibly volatile and interesting time in Mexico’s history, of which we learn almost nothing about.

The acting in the film is wonderful. Or so I’m told. I’m not sure how one can measure the acting abilities of actors when one is busy reading the subtitles of a language one doesn’t understand. Yes, one can tell a lot from body language, but I don’t really much recall a lot of body language in Cuaron’s sweeping wide angle constantly moving and rotating around scenes, which I admit was a beautiful way to unfold scenes.

“Roma” probably deserves the Oscars that it won. Well, except maybe for Best Foreign Film, as I plead ignorance having not seen any of the others, but I have to assume at least one of them was a better film if not as technically masterful. If you get off on all those fancy movie making techniques, there’s a lot to love in this movie. Other than that, though, there’s not much there. Unless, I guess, you like watching paint dry.