Sadly Over-hyped

It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

A clunky actioner with a handful of cool moments.

Sorry but this film it's so bad. The direction is very poor, the camera shots are so "amateur", like a beginner cameraman, the rhythm of this movie is very slow making it boring of watch.The worse is the monotone performance of the principal character (Alicia Rodriguez) who don't show any emotion, and her narration (Voice off) is so flat, you can listen clearly that she is reading the lines and no acting. The script is full of bad words and explicit sexual references (Chilean argot) which don't have any purpose just for make "polemic" the film, and not rise the lazy plot.

Ever since the surprise success of "Y Tu Mama Tambien", Latin American filmmakers have realized they can compete with Hollywood, and even successfully export Spanish-language films to North America, if they make films that contain a strong dose of the kind of sexual explicitness their more Puritanical northern neighbors tend to shy away from. Unfortunately, few of these films are nearly as good as "Y Tu Mama Tambien" and are more likely to approach the dismal depths of something like "Night Buffalo".This Chilean movie is about a girl in her late teens who is kicked out of her evangelical school for having sex and decides to start a blog to rebel against her community and overbearing religious mother. Her blog involves her talking about having all manner of sex (oral, anal, you name it) with partners of both genders. And, not surprisingly, a lot of this sex occurs on camera. The problem with this movie is it is neither fish nor fowl. It kind of wants to be a serious art film, but the character is just not particularly believable. Nothing that happens to her really justifies her rather extreme rebellion. The movie wants to take it as a given that religious repression will inevitably result in promiscuity and jaded sexual attitudes, but it doesn't SHOW how it happened with THIS character very convincingly. I would compare this movie--unfavorably--to the excellent Argentinean film "The Holy Girl", which much more believable portrays the nexus between religion and sex.The lead, Alicia Rodriquez, is definitely very cute, and with all the graphic sex scenes this movie could have at least been solid exploitation. But while it definitely has enough hot sex scenes to qualify, to really do this it would need to make the character LESS realistic and sympathetic and much more satirical. An example of this would be the recent US indie film "King Kelly" about very hot, but very stupid, fame-obsessed young woman who sets out to become an internet porn star. This movie is only slightly more realistic than that scathing satire, and it is also not as much fun.

YOUNG AND WILD (dir. Marialy Rivas) A sexy and thought provoking film from Chile about a young woman's journey to sexual maturity and the problems posed by her domineering and overbearing family. Because Daniella receives nothing but banal Christian platitudes about her emerging sexuality, she shares her private anguish and confusion with friends on the Internet in her blog entitled, "Young & Wild". The film makes the point that evangelical acculturation is only psychological coercion sweetened with biblical aphorisms, and offers no real answers and only false comfort. Daniella comes to reject the relentless dogma of her parents, and learns to accept the undetermined nature of life. She seems to realize that it's healthier to embrace an uncertain existence without doctrine than to be conned with pious nonsense, and Daniella's family inadvertently prods her into an acceptance of a more secular humanistic world-view. MUST SEE

Young and wild is a film about adolescence, self-imposed boundaries, religion, and spirituality. Perhaps the unique hitch is that, rather than being told by a mature and seasoned (read curmudgeonly) adult, it is told unflinchingly through the eyes of its protagonist, a seventeen- year-old Chilean girl named Daniela. A local legend, even in real life, Daniela maintains a detailed blog of her sexual exploits and deepest thoughts. Through a creative use of Chilean pop-music, graphics, and editing, the audience is let into this world. The content of the film is shocking, explicit, and (at moments) even pornographic. Thus with a surface level look, it would be easy to condemn it on this basis, However, writing it off wholesale would risk losing the truth depicted in Daniela's personal spiritual struggle. Here we experience, as much as we can, what it feels like to be a teenager under the iron thumb of mature Christian shame (not Daniela's, but her mother's). While it is true that director Marialy Rivas goes over the top to be outrageous (I could not help but avert my eyes at certain moments), it is also true that if it wasn't explicit in some ways, it couldn't claim to tell Daniela's actual story from her perspective. Aside from my shock at the graphic sexuality, my primary emotional response to the film was sadness. As a human being, I too have lived in the tension of knowingly, willingly, happily stepping into wrong/unhelpful behavior (we call it 'sin' in the Christian world-view) and yet believed in and tried to follow a God who is not OK with that. I too have lived in the tension of being in a community in which I assumed that I was the only one to have shameful secrets. It is a lonely place to exist; and I don't think it has to be that way. Thus my sadness is twofold: for Daniela's despair and isolation (she eventually fully embraces her wild side admitting "I am Lost, I am Lost, I am Lost"), and for the ineptitude of the church to teach an open and humble path of living for real people who make mistakes that run the gamut of human experience. As a Christian pastor, it is on me to demonstrate authenticity and the kind of truth that Young and Wild explores.