Miss Bala (Friday, February 24, 2012) (17)

The title to the Mexican drug gangster film Miss Bala is rather clever. "Bala," of course, means "bullet," and, furthermore, the main character in the film is a contestant in the Miss Baja beauty pageant. This near-homonym is the core of the story, although it might also be as interesting as the film itself.

Laura Guerrero (Stephanie Sigman) and her best friend enter themselves in the Miss Baja California competition, rather on a lark. The night before the event, the friend, who is dating a drug dealer, takes her to a nightclub just as the Federales get there to arrest everyone. Laura gets away, but her friend does not. As a witness to the events, and knowing what she knows about the identities of the leaders of the gang, she becomes an important witness in an elaborate game of back-and-forth between the police and the cartel. The drug lord insists that she remain in the pageant as a way of keeping an eye on her and not drawing too much attention to them, but it also puts her in a gray position of appearing to work with them... which is the wrong place to be when the cops are rounding up all the associates of the gang.

This is a fun movie, but not really particularly emotional or gripping. As much as Sigman is gorgeous, I never really found it easy to connect to her, either because of her acting or the script. She's mostly a weak pawn through the film, which is particularly frustrating because she seems to be a smart cookie. She's so unaware of her situation in the greater game that the only makes one bold move through the whole event.

Still, it's an entertaining story and has a nice gritty look. It was only a matter of time before the ever-increasing Mexican drug war would hit the big screen, and I'm happy enough with this. Still, I hope that the next effort would look more at the corruption on both sides of the battlefield and how the cops and the system are dirty as the cartels (in fairness, we get a certain amount of that here, but it's a bit secondary to the action and the gunfights).

Stars: 2.5 of 4

We Are What We Are (Friday, February 25, 2011) (9)

A few years ago I was really impressed by the Swedish film Let the Right One In, a vampire movie like I had never seen before then. The melancholy of modernity and the sadness and isolation of a vampire girl's life, come together for a sympathetic and interesting tale that would be considered a horror movie in most situations. But it is not really horror, it's the shell of the genre with the guts of an interesting think piece about being a kid, having hopes and desires and being in (puppy) love.

We Are What We Are is very similar to Let the Right One In both in style and look as well as what it is trying to convey emotionally. This is not a horror movie, really, but an interesting look at Mexican culture and the craziness of the urban setting (in one of the biggest cities in the world). Writer-director Jorge Michel Grau does a good job showing us an interesting view of modern life, but his script is too crowded with unnecessary junk to be as good as it could have been.

The film opens with an old man walking through a shopping mall and falling over dead. When the police do an autopsy on him they find inside his stomach a human finger (with painted finger nail). Back at his house his family is wondering where he is. They are cannibals and he has been out looking for food - that is, another person they can cut up to eat. Once they find out he is dead his teenage kids (two sons and a daughter) and his wife must go out to hunt for their next human meal. They have to figure out if they will continue to live the way they do or if they want to give it up and become 'normal' people.

They try to get prostitutes back to their place (which had always been a go-to method the father used), one son goes to a gay bar to pick up a kid to bring back to the house. At some point the police catch on to what's going on and try to stop it.

There is a lot of interesting information here about the roles of fathers and mothers in Mexican families and how the father never showed his kids how he did what he did with luring the people back their house to be killed. Once he's gone, the mother gains power and standing in the household and has to fight against her sons to keep that status. The cops move slowly but effectively through the investigation, ultimately finding out what is going on.

The overly complicated script is the worst part of this film. At some point there were about three possible victims in the house, the cops were on their way and there were a few prostitutes angry with what had happened to one of their prozzie friends earlier. Considering the basic story is simply that four people go out to find a person to kill, then kill that person and then the cops come, there are too many other layers that complicated the impact of the story. I appreciate the subtext of the son's homosexuality (is he really gay or does he just use it as a way to get young men to follow him home?), but as a plot tangent it is a bit unneeded. The story is paced so slowly, also, that it's hard to pay attention to what is going on, because it's rather dull through the first act and a half.

The look of the film is very nice and rather reminiscent of Let the Right One In. Every interior shot is filled with stuff and there's constant noise and commotion from the outside world. There are few pretty and easy shots in the film - almost everything is difficult and dirty. Just as George Romero used zombies to criticize our culture in his Living Dead movies, cannibals seem to have a symbolic meaning here. I'm interested in how they can represent the roles of consumerism, manufacturing and big business.

I particularly like that this movie uses the "cannibals-live-next-door-to-us" story as an entrance into an examination of modern culture. There is blood and violence here, but it's not really about this gore. It's about fairness and decency in society.

Stars: 2.5 of 4

Nora's Will (2010) (Saturday, January 1, 2011) (171)

Mariana Chenillo's Nora's Will is a lovely dramedy about the obstinacy of religion and old lovers. In it, Jose (Fernando Lujan) finds his ex-wife Nora dead from suicide in her apartment. The two were married for 30 years and now have been divorced for the past 20 years. They remained friendly over those years and he lives across the street from her in Mexico City.

As he begins to make arrangements for her burial, he gets wrapped up in the politics of her conservative synagogue. He has been particularly atheist and does what he can to thumb his nose at the rabbis and helpers who come to take care of her body. Meanwhile his son Ruben is caught in a messy situation with his father-in-law, a powerful man who is his boss and an important man in the synagogue.

This is a funny movie, with Jose acting the perfect devilish prankster. He orders a pizza with ham on it to annoy all the kosher men around the apartment. He tries to bury her in the Cemetery of Jesus and orders a gigantic cross-shaped casket as well as several floral crosses into her apartment. He does this as a passive aggressive act to combat the passive aggressiveness his ex-wife treated him and her family with throughout her life (and even in death).

In the third act, the film changes directions a bit and becomes more serious when Jose has to face facts and figure out a way to bury Nora. Many conservative cemeteries won't bury her because she committed suicide and Jose has to straighten up and figure out a way to make it happen, playing into the baroque politics of the occasion.

This is a lovely and small movie, but it allows Lujan to give one of the best performances of the year. He moves from being very silly to very sensible, always with a wink in his eye. We are delighted by his connection to his grand daughters and how he uses them to annoy his daughter-in-law and son. He is also very powerful as a hurt ex-lover when he realizes his wife might have cheated on him at one point during their marriage.

Chenillo has a very good, smart script here and also employs wonderful the cinematography of Alberto Anaya. This is a sweet little movie and one that packs a stronger punch than I was expecting it would. It is a much deeper film than it would appear on the surface and shows a lot of maturity on Chenillo's part. This is a grown-up movie in somewhat silly clothes.

Stars: 3 of 4

Biutiful (Wednesday, December 29, 2010) (167)

Biutiful gets its name from a moment in the film where Uxbal (Javier Bardem) is helping his son with his English work. Rather than knowing the exact spelling of the word, the father lets the son get it wrong and moves on to some other catastrophe in his life without correcting it. This is exactly what this film is: a dirty collection of broken stuff, generally taped together, but mostly ugly and aesthetically unpleasant. This is not at all to say that I don't like this film. It is a good movie, but is totally challenging and sometimes repulsive.

The film is about Uxbal, an unusual man with a dark life in Barcelona. He's a black-market hustler, a loving, devoted, if imperfect father and a medium who speaks to the dead. We see him going about his every-day life, struggling to keep it together through mundane things and exotic things. He hatches a get-rich-quick plan with Chinese gangsters and tries to keep his fucked-up family from totally crumbling. He sorta fails at both, but not for trying his hardest.

Director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu constructs a beautiful tale that keeps us always on our toes and on the edge of our seats. His style is always uncomfortable and always beautiful... if beautiful is unsettling and uncomfortable. There are things that don't really work, like the Chinese gangsters...and things that work beautifully, like their guest workers' deaths and them later washing up on-shore. I rally like that he presents Uxbal as a man who straightforwardly talks to the dead, but is not really thrilled with his "gift". (This is treated differently here than in Clint Eastwood's recent Hereafter... a film about talking to the dead. Here, the talking to the dead is just one of many things that Uxbal does.)

Uxbal's relationship with his wife is both very painful and very beautiful. She doesn't know how to deal with normal life with her kids and family, and he doesn't know how to deal with her sensibly, and how to protect their kids from her, but also make sure they have a relationship with her. He doesn't want to cut them off totally from her, but also doesn't want to expose them to her corrupting influence.

He is able to make money in many ways, but still insists on living in poverty and squalor because, like Jesus, a poor life is a comfortable one for him. It is this Jesus life that makes him feel good. This film feels a lot like the Leonard Cohen song Suzanne. Dark, melancholy, stormy.

I like this film, but it doesn't all totally come together for me. Somewhere between the talking to the dead and the sadness it just feels like a bunch of parts that never totally feels complete.

Stars: 3 of 4

Rudo y Cursi (Tuesday, December 22, 2009) (205)

Rudo y Cursi is a totally fresh and funny comedy from writer/director Carlos Cuaron, brother of Alfonso Cuaron and co-writer of Y Tu Mama Tambien. For this film, Cuaron teams up with the two actors who made Tu Mama so good, Gael Garcia Bernal and Diego Luna.

Here they play brothers in a poor Mexican town who play soccer on the weekends. One day, a scout for major league soccer teams visits their town and offers them the chance to play professionally. The brothers ultimately move to Mexico City and play for two different clubs, Luna as a goalie and Bernal as a forward. Both get wrapped up in off-field silliness (Bernal in a ridiculous Pop music singing career and Luna in gambling).

The two lead actors are fantastic. They are silly and work well with the rather gonzo nature of the story. They wear the ridiculous costumes well and are both totally believable as country bumpkin rubes lost in the big city with millions of dollars (tens of millions of pesos) at their fingertips. They work well together and it seems clear that the actors are friends off-screen and enjoy working next to each other. They really seam like competing brothers and that connection helps to push the story along well.

The writing is also hilarious and has a nice, easy, tight story. I smiled basically the whole time I watched the film and really like the simple device at the end, which could be a bit too neat, but worked well in this small movie. I give Cuaron all sorts of credit for writing something so fresh in a genre (sports, family comedy) that could be otherwise so overdone.

Stars: 3 of 4