Just perfect...

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

Spanish production with fine acting , colorful cinematography and rousing score by Alberto Iglesias . Julio Medem directed the film for Sogetel and Lolafilms and it was released in 1995 . Set in the Aragon region, this interesting and thought-provoking film dealing with a story of a solitary man named Angel , a strange young who comes to rid a small Spanish town of pests in the lands . The local wine-making industry has found these bugs responsible for giving their product an "earthy" taste that has worried local opinion . Meantime in the little town , Angel becomes involved with two gorgeous and very diverse females , the simple and shy Angela (Emma Suarez) , and the sex-hungry Mari (Silke) , both of whom impact deeply on his life . Furthermore , other rare characters such as Patricio (Karra Elejalde) and a Pub's owner named Alberto (Nancho Novo) appear in his life . This is a slow-paced , deliberate though magnetic rural drama .It contains marvelous cinematography , breathtaking musical score and enjoyable production design . It is a riveting film though sometimes a little boring and overlong . Anyway, the film is interesting , thematically intriguing and strange ; Medem has his own style of telling a story . It is excellently played by a magnificent plethora of main actors such as Carmelo Gomez , Emma Suarez , Silke and Karra Elejalde , Julio Medem's ordinary . Very good acting by Carmelo Gomez as Angel, unsettling with a "ghost" of himself , he is a tiny grubs exterminator recently released from a mental hospital ; however , Antonio Banderas was supposed to play Ángel in the film, but due to schedule problems, director Julio Medem replaced him with Carmelo . Excellent performance by two beautiful women -Emma Suarez , Silke- who impact on a great scale about Angel/Carmelo Gomez life . Good support cast gives right performance and full of prestigious players such as Nancho Novo as Alberto , Txema Blasco as Tomás , Miguel Palenzuela as Tío Ángel and Pepe Viyuela as Ulloa . Intriguing as well as evocative musical score mirroring well the scenery, its people and the story line, it was superbly composed by several times Oscar nominated Alberto Iglesias , Julio Medem's usual . In addition , a spotless pictorial cinematography by Javier Aguirresarobe and a willingness , almost perfect of the elements of each shot , every sequence , every space ; being rightly filmed in Calatayud, Cariñena, Cosuenda , Paniza , Zaragoza, Aragón . Aguirresarobe subsequently would make a prestigious career in Hollywood such as ¨Fright night , ¨The twilight saga: eclipse¨, ¨The road¨ , ¨The others¨ and many others .The motion picture was well produced by Manuel Lombardero and originally directed by Julio Medem , this his third movie, "Tierra," released in 1996, was selected for the Cannes Film Festival . Medem had been making short movies with a super-8 camera owned by his father until he received a call from a new production company called Sogetel and executive producers Fernando de Garcillán , José Luis Olaizola , Enrique López Lavigne . They were interested in his script titled "Vacas" . It won the Goya Award from the Spanish academy for best new director, and won prizes in the festivals of Tokyo, Torino and Alexandria. In 1993 Medem made his second movie, "The red squirrel¨. It confirmed Medem's talents and won prizes in Fort Lauderdale, Bogota and Bucarest. In 1998 Medem released " The lovers of the Polar Circle ," considered his best movie by most of his fans . It also became a box-office hit with more than one million spectators in Spain and was also released worldwide. In 2001 his fourth movie, "Lucia and sex ," became a huge hit and began the career of actress Paz Vega who won the Goya for best new actress . Although in 2003 failed with the release , "The Basque ball" , a documentary that portrays the phenomenon of nationalism and terrorism in the Basque Country of northern Spain , it was very polemical and partial . In 2007 directed the flop ¨Caotica Ana¨ and in 2010 , ¨Room in Rome¨, a successful though with not sense film , plenty of nudism and only starred by two gorgeous naked girls . Julio Medem is for sure one of the the most important and original Spanish filmmaker. Well worth watching if you get the chance .

At first it looks like a very unusual movie. The main character's Voice-Overs, etc.. But the movie gradually gains very strong ideas. Great photography, great actors and actresses... It's just amazing. I don't know much about the Spanish cinema but this is my favorite spanish movie so far. Definitely.

"Tierra" is an interesting metaphysical Spanish fantasy with an unusual central character called Angel who by his own admission is half man, half angel, and he also admits to a turn in hospital to cure his hyperactive imagination. What's more , he's a first class fumigator who with the help of casual gypsy labour rids the soil of woodlice. The story opens in vineyard country, red dry undulating fields of gnarled vines, swirling red dust before an approaching storm, a lightning strike that splits a tree in half and kills a shepherd and some of his lambs. A great dramatic introduction that sets the scene for what is to follow. The film does not explain how the presence of woodlice gives the wine an earthy flavour which is said to be most desirable. The camera work is great, especially in the fumigation scene where the recruited workers dressed in white protective clothing move methodically through the red vineyards with their probing tubes, the white fumes swirling around them. They look like extra-terrestrial beings. There are numerous references to the dimensions of the universe, to the spaciousness of creation. The film starts with a panoramic vision of the stars and ends with a flight of birds wheeling in the sky. Yes, producer Medem works on a broad canvasa with incredible artistry. The love interest in the film is provided by Angela, a farmer's wife in love with the newly-arrived Angel, and Mari a sexy little thing in tight Spanish leather who frequents the bars and is quite a deft hand at billiards too. Her snake-like movements are very seductive and Angel begins to admire them, too,but being half angel has its own special problems. I like particularly the hospital scene where Angel's uncle says there is a charming girl waiting to see him. Is it Angela or Mari? We are teased for quite some time before her identity is revealed. I liked too the stark white hospital room- such a contrast to the red sweep of the Spanish countryside. Most of all I liked Gomez as Angel. What a charmer!

If you tell a story through a certain protagonist's mind, your film is going to take on the qualities of that mind. Medem's typically ambiguous TIERRA, is one of the masterpieces of 90s cinema, and has not so much an open ending as an open beginning and in-between as well. Its hero is either deranged or a heavenly spirit, and, seen through his eyes, the world, and the film, take on an otherworldly strangeness.As with all Medem's films, TIERRA operates on two levels of meaning - the surface narrative, and the underlying composition of image and form. Both levels interact much more fluidly, though, here, creating a work that always seems to make enough sense, and yet, when you think about it, only increases in bewildering enigma. The film starts with a voiceover talking to someone called Angel through the cosmos, informing him of the job he has to do, showing him the island he will be working on, and warning him of the mysteries riddled therein.Angel turns out to be an insect fumigator, come to destroy the woodlice that are infesting the island's vineyards. On the way he comes across gypsies minding sheep, and the shepherd who was struck down by lightening, momentarily resuscitated by another volt before dying again. Angel hires the gypsies, and visits the first farmer, Tomas, in mourning for his recently deceased wife. He has a daughter, Angela, with whom he falls in love. Angel later befriends her husband, Patricio, who nearly kills him while out shooting the equally pestilant wild boars, but they come into conflict when Patricio's sex-mad mistress, Mari, shows insatiable interest in Angel.The never resolved crux of the film turns on whether Angel is really an angel, or, as his history of psychiatric care would suggest, a madman. Once we find out that he was once mad, we assume that all his visions and heightenings of reality are the effects of a troubled mind. Angel himself yearns for simplicity and unity, but is constantly being torn apart. Despite the vast expansiveness of the land he finds himself in, he is continually hemmed in, by repetition, patterns. The woman he loves, and her daughter share his name, the latter's teacher has that of her husband. He has a constant feeling of deja vu though he denies ever having been in the place before, even if it's some coincidence that his psychiatric warden should have a new job here. Events throughout the film repeat and turn in on themselves - the bug fumigation and boar-hunt, each evincing different levels of Angel's control. His persistant attempts to master his environment, his mind, his desires, the universe, are like the preposterously intricate patterning of a mad man. His self literally divides in front of him, he talks to himself.The status of the image in front of us is always unstable - we don't know whether he's imagining it or not. His mental troubles extend to physicality, and the film seems to adopt Bunuel's tactic in THAT OBSCURE OBJECT OF DESIRE, with two different women representing different elements of sexuality open to Angel - quiet, maternal, nurturing on the one hand, and red hot sex on the other.But even this misogynistic dichotomy is complicated - the two women are separate, independent beings in their own right, not 'aspects' of woman; and whereas Fernando Rey was an image of besieged masculine unity, Angel is, as I have mentioned, completely at odds with himself. It is he who becomes Bunuel's woman, he who is split. The women refuse their stereotyped roles - the 'quiet' one is desperate for sex, after years of loveless marriage, as well as warmth and sympathy, while the nympho is trying to find love after years of promiscuity. Angel's troubles extend to his control over his narrative, his switching back and forth between times, spaces and realms; his splitting between narrated and narrating self; his adding new elements and information to past events, playing with both ellipsis and excess of point of view, rendering all information deeply unreliable. All of this would be quite conclusive proof of madness. Even his facility with the dead could be simply imaginary. But what of his reuniting Tomas with his dead wife - can this JUST be empathy? Ditto the profuse Biblical symbolism and allusionism. What about his transformation of the mere EARTH into an otherworldy planet, with its Martian red surface and spacemen fumigators? Maybe madness is otherworldly, acccessing the madman to plains of insight and experience inaccessible to the ordinary person. This isn't a crass way of saying that the 'mad' are more special than the 'normal' are - maybe we castigate as mad anyone without our tunnel vision. Angel is the director of the film - his formal ordering is the film's - as VACAS suggested, maybe the only way to see anew is to cast off the normal.If I've made TIERRA seem like too much of a riddle than a film than I'm an idiot. Its brilliance lies in, as the title suggests, grounding such wispy concerns. Every character IS a character, with their own sadnesses, failures, lusts and needs - Angel's vision, though repeatedly self-serving, is always empathetic. The film is also wonderfully funny, with one excellent sequence of sex farce, mixed with some blacker, more brutal comedy.One sits in awe at Medem's cinematic mastery, his adept handling of both long shot and extreme close-up, the wider view and the crucial detail. He plays with narrative like it is plastercine, the seemingly solid infinitely pliable, like the earth covered with louses. In a film obsessed with death, he assserts life and the comic spirit, accomodating, not refuting, the abyss. Human beings, like Angel, are too complicated to 'understand' - we must simply accept and enjoy the confusion.