Mammoth
Mammoth
NR | 23 January 2009 (USA)
Mammoth Trailers

While on a trip to Thailand, a successful American businessman tries to radically change his life. Back in New York, his wife and daughter find their relationship with their live-in Filipino maid changing around them. At the same time, in the Philippines, the maid's family struggles to deal with her absence.

Reviews
Inclubabu Plot so thin, it passes unnoticed.
UnowPriceless hyped garbage
Smartorhypo Highly Overrated But Still Good
Mandeep Tyson The acting in this movie is really good.
Armand like many others. a trip . like a lot of movies. a new Babel. but in specific way. a poem. about maternity, search of sense and broken bridges of soul. nothing more. story of three mothers in different places of world. and same problems, answers and tragedies. like game of mirrors. like hided arena.a young man in Thailand. his questions, quests and discoveries. and a strange pen. nothing else. a puzzle and definition of globalization fruits. or only reflection of same need of sense who makes heart of every society. who makes hours, months, years, decades of each man and woman.the axis of that heart is always the child. a child. who may be promise for better life. who must be legitimation of present sacrifice. who gives force in every difficult moment. a prey, a pray, a promise and perfect victim.so, the virtue of film is game of nuances. delicate. subtle. cruel. and wise. far from a moral lesson. but, with a very good cast, a letter to public.
choden There are many aspects that make this film special starting from the its use of clichés and the extent it destroys the popular images of this millennium. One significant and courageous point is the way it tears down the adorable Internet geek image. Recently, Hollywood has produced a great number of youngsters, a generation of movie goers who want to become a Mark Zuckerberg or Steve Jobs one day. Nonetheless, the other side of the coin is not that bright or desirable. Mammoth introduces Leo Vidales, the millionaire geek with all his immaturity and weakness, with his ultra shallow personality and his conscience per diem. Globalization rapes the world, devastates the life of the nanny, and enables a heartless brat like Vidales a millionaire live his life with a descent surgeon wife and a pretty kid. Actually, he is a kind of rapist when he talks about doing charity, when he talks about his fantasies of going to India or Africa with Cookie, when he wants to act like a free - souled hippie who he could never be. He rapes other people's dreams and innocent public images. However, after 2 hours we see him at his Manhattan home, safe and sound, enjoying the peace he himself never deserved.Mammoth of Lukas Moodysson runs for the cold truth. Except one detail, Salvador would have known. He would have known what could happen to kids when they talked to white foreigners out there. Every Filipino kid know without their grandmas telling. They watch the news on TV, they read the papers, and yes they have friends with sad and scary stories. Moodysson skipped this fact. Maybe despite all his good efforts, he is still too white for the realities of East Asia.
Roland E. Zwick 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.
julianj-1 As an avid cinephile I am reluctant to submit a rollickingly bad review, but I find it necessary to counterbalance the favourable ones.This is a tedious, almost plot less, farrago of rich Westerners patronising impoverished third-worlders. I was waiting in excruciating boredom for something to happen. It doesn't.The cinematography is nothing to write home about, score is poor and the acting OK. The script is dire - mixed metaphors about a Mammoth (v expensive) pen and also astronomy. Probably the idea for the film comes from the pen, and it's too thin a peg to hang an entire movie on. I would say this was, for me, one of the top five most boring films I have seen in my life.