No

Take the backroom political machinations of "Lincoln," add in the showbiz sleight of hand of "Argo," and you’ll get something like No, a cunning and richly enjoyable combination of high-stakes drama and media satire.

The best movie ever made about Chilean plebiscites, NO thoroughly deserves its Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Film.

No is an exploration of the power of the media to manipulate hearts and minds. The moral of the story: Always go positive.

The result is the most unexpectedly riotous comedy in years — one with more bite than usual.

The movie needs one or two central characters directly affected by the dictatorship, in order to create more tension around a conclusion that's already known.

No uses the actual commercial material the opposition created for its anti-Pinochet campaign and—re-creating the behind-the-scenes filming—deftly appropriates mediated history for fiction.

No, which has been nominated for this year’s Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, is largely a gimmick picture: At all times, it looks like hastily assembled news footage shot on grainy videotape in 1988. That means light flaring up to spoil the image, bumpy camerawork, a nearly square picture and all-around grubbiness.

Interesting movie, about an important event in the history of democracy, it shows the heroes beside the tv, politicians, etc, with this movie we can learn the power of communication of the journalism, deserve an Oscar you must see

It's slow, it's dry, it's deliberately ugly, and you know how the story will end. If you grab some popcorn and expect to be entertained, No will bore you to death, but if you have any interest in the mechanisms of democracy, marketing, and the ways they intersect, the film won't disappoint you. Just treat it as a quasi-documentary meant to educate, to portray the events Wikipedia-style and nothing more.

For a historical drama about a brutal dictator, this film sure lacked suspense or a sense of the terror that Pinochet was. Maybe that was the essence of the "NO" campaign but it surely was not was the dictatorship represented. If you knew nothing about Chile under Pinochet, this film did little to educate you. I was also disappointed in the low key, nonchalant approach Garcia to his character,. Maybe that was accurate but he was so passive as to be unbelievable to me. I did learn something but I felt like I got only the tip of the iceberg.

Gael Garcia Bernal is the only pro of the entire flick. The movie has a good premise, and a strong story, but at the begining of the second act starts to fall apart, and the characters feels less and less important. At the end the movie is a mess.

After 15 years of a dictatorship Chilean Augusto Pinochet, due to international pressure, was allowing the people to vote in an upcoming plebiscite, an expression of the people’s will, as to whether they favored, voting ‘yes’ or not, voting ‘no’ as to if Pinchot should remain in office. There was no doubt, legally or not, that the majority of people would vote ‘yes’. Director Pablo Larrain has made this docudrama regarding the election with a screenplay by Pedro Peirano based on a play by Antonio Skarmeta called “The Referendum” and retitled it “No”. Each side of the question had 15 minutes a day to run an ad on television for 27 straight days with most of the ‘no’ ads regulated to the late hours. Rene Saavedra (Gael Garcia Bernal) is a hot shot ad executive who is put in charge of the No vote and tackles it like he was selling a previous product he handled which was a soda called Free. He uses marketing for politics as most ad agencies use it to sell cars, vacation spots or anything that uses balloons, rainbows, kids, blue skies and, in this case a mime that is a running joke throughout the movie. Rene is prime custodian of his son Simon (Pascal Montero) while his estranged, activist wife Veronica (Antonia Zegers) accuses him of working for the Pinochet regime. He is the son of an exiled Chilean dissident and Rene dresses in jeans to work and skate boards all over town. He also doesn’t hesitate to send his kid to bed so that he could play with Simon’s train set. It is an old friend of his father’s, socialist politician Urrutia (Luis Gnecco) who talks Rene into taking the ad campaign while Rene’s boss Lucho Guzman (Alfredo Castro) takes the opposing campaign. While it may have been in keeping with the time I found the direction, camerawork and editing to be very distracting, in some spots amateurish, and didn’t really add anything to the film. Gael Garcia Bernal has a very interesting face, penetrating eyes and, if you have seen him in any other film, you know he is a fine actor who needs that breakout role but this isn’t it. After watching “No” for an hour and fifty-eight minutes I have to get corny and end with say no to “No”.