VividSimon
Simply Perfect
Ginger
Very good movie overall, highly recommended. Most of the negative reviews don't have any merit and are all pollitically based. Give this movie a chance at least, and it might give you a different perspective.
Geraldine
The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.
lauren
A beautiful tribute to Pina Bausch, a German dancer choreographer who pioneered the modern dance genre. The film consists of Pina's troupe of dancers performing several of her dances on stage and in real world settings. The dance numbers are segued with close-ups of each dancer and we hear their voices dubbed in telling stories of Pina and how she inspired and shaped them.
Edgar Soberon Torchia
I saw Wim Wenders' «Pina – Dance, Dance, Otherwise We Are Lost» after watching the fine documentary «The Salt of the Earth (A Journey with Sebastião Salgado)» (which he made three years later), and the inversion proved disappointing. When Pina Bausch died unexpectedly, without the dancer and choreographer by his side (as he projected the film since the 1980s), the end result is only fair. I do not know why Wenders thought that 3D could be the "solution" to film dance, when in the past this performing manifestation has been registered in more than adequate ways, without relying much on visual technology: for instance, Norman McLaren made his shorts «Narcissus» and «Pas de deux» with less resources, just as Carlos Saura did «Bodas de sangre», without diminishing the beauty of dance or making its filming less effective. In the end, the majority of living beings who will watch «Pina» will do so in two dimensions. On the other hand, I did not see the need to move the choreographies to exteriors, sometimes in ugly locations (a quarry, for example, or the urban streets with signs of drug stores, lottery or the "big M"), when the best images and moments are those registered in sets of ambitious (and achieved) expressiveness, decorated with few elements, as the sets for «Le sacre du printemps», «Café Müller» and «Vollmond». Beautiful testimonies by Bausch's dancers, come from all corners of the world, and the choreographies rescue this documentary, which goes on for 100 minutes that sometimes seemed endless to me. Yet I would not tell anyone not to see Wender's film: more for dance reasons than for cinematic value, «Pina» is a registry of the work of a great artist, of a daughter of two centuries. It deserves to be recommended, the more so because there are many persons who will enjoy it to the fullest.
Mike B
This film did not really click with me. The dance style is like a pending apocalypse. It becomes very dreary sometimes. One wants to yell "Lighten up – have a drink!" Some excerpts brought to mind Monty Python – a woman dancing on a bench in a stream (And now for Something Completely....).There is hardly any exuberance and joy expressed in the dance sequences. Even when the music is bubbly, the dancers seem to have a forced smile.Perhaps it was too avant garde for my taste as well – in one arrangement a dancer is shoveling dirt unto another dancer, in another a dancer performing by a public pool. It all comes off as not only pretentious – but cold and icy. Many of the dancers expostulate rapturously on Pina – but I also got the feeling of someone who was not communicating effectively and hard to reach. Overall I was not impressed. Some of the musical pieces were interesting (The Rite of Spring by Stravinski), but the choreography overwhelmed the rigid dancing.
tangojazz
So this is the future of dance? Then I won't dance. I'm kidding, but this dance choreographer takes her art above and beyond the avant- garde, maybe.I especially like the one dancer with the leaf blower. Very imaginative, but also very weird. The two guys spitting water on each other was strange. I almost wanted to walk out of the theater on that one. Even crazier was the ten to fifteen guys feeling up and touching up one woman (who had her clothes on). A good thing the police weren't there to arrest them. I really cracked up on the one dance where the guy kept on body slamming the woman into the floor. Is this dance plus MMA? The 3 D visual effects weren't so hot. As a matter of fact, they really didn't exist. Maybe this choreographer (Pina) got tired of doing the Cha-Cha or something.
