Y Tu Mama Tambien [Mexico, 2001]

Nine Things About the Movie Y Tu Mama Tambien [aka And Your Mother Too]

1. This is a rare “coming of age” film that dares to explore the topic of young adulthood in a deeper way than most such films do. Honestly, when this movie was released in 2001, I don’t think America was ready to handle it. It’s too truthful.

2. It stars Gael Garcia Bernal and Diego Luna as Julio and Tenoch, two horny teenage boys who are best friends. The movie opens with two sex scenes - each of the boys is giving a special goodbye to their girlfriends before the girls take a trip to Italy.

3. Once the girls are gone, the boys are bored, so they convince Luisa, the hot wife of Tenoch’s cousin, to go with them on a road trip to a beach - even though they made the beach up in their head. Their plan is to sleep with Luisa during the trip.

4.The boys’ plan begins to work, and of course both boys start falling in love with Luisa. This opens a much deeper well of sexual angst and tension than they are ready to deal with. Emotions become raw and secrets come out.

5.  Every now and then a narrator jumps in to give some background information, or to tell the audience things that the characters don’t know. It’s a weird touch.

6. There is some political subtext to the film, which I admit I didn’t really understand.

7. Bernal and Luna positively shine as the friends who love each other more deeply than even they know. The movie would have been an awkward flop without their emotional commitment to the roles.

8. The movie won a number of international awards. Unfortunately, the films explicit sexual content prevented it from getting a wide release in America. Which is stupid. Yeah, there is a lot of sex, and a lot of nudity (male and female) but it’s not pornographic or gratuitous. It is an integral part of the characters’ development. Anyway, once again, very few Americans saw this film.

9. Even today, there are people who will not be comfortable with this movie because of the open sexuality of the characters, and the way the movie sensitively exposes secret (but common) characteristics of close male friendships. And that's too bad. This is a touching and honest portrayal of young adults figuring out that their emotions are a lot larger and less logical than they expected.

Amores Perros [Mexico, 2000]

Nine Things about the Movie Amores Perros [aka Love’s a Bitch]

1. This movie is the first of director Alejandro González Iñárritu’s “Death Trilogy”. Don’t take the word “death” literally here - there are different kinds of death. 

2. It consists of three separate stories in Mexico City that intersect in one random, life-changing moment. 

3. The first story is set around the dogfighting culture. A young man is obsessed with his sister-in-law, and attempts to win her away from his brother who is an abusive, small-time criminal (this story was Gael Garcia Bernal’s first film role, who is one of the best actors to come from Latin America in a long time).

4. The second story is about a supermodel and her secret boyfriend, who is cheating on his wife. When things go bad for the supermodel’s career, and her dog gets trapped under the floorboards of the apartment, the stress on the couple reaches a breaking point.

5. The third story is about a homeless man who collects stray dogs, follows people around the city, and sometimes shoots them. When he collides with people in the other two stories, he begins to question what he’s doing.

6. The script is engaging and well-constructed; the choices a character makes in one of the stories cause consequences in the other stories. But none of the characters ever actually meet each other. It’s like a chain of dominoes that you didn’t even know was set up.

7. Dogs play a significant symbolic role in each of the stories, and serve as metaphors for the deeper themes of love, loyalty, freedom, exploitation, and violence.

8.There are a lot of graphic depictions of dogfighting and other cruelty to animals. Iñárritu was heavily criticized for this, but he wanted to give an honest depiction of the underground economy in Mexico City, which includes dogfighting.

9. “Amores Perros” is an examination of different forms of love, and different ways that love can cause chaos in life. It’s a smart, original drama that makes you care about the characters. And in the end, it makes you reflect on your choices, and how those choices may impact people you’ve never even met.

We Are What We Are [Mexico, 2010]

Nine Things about the Movie We Are What We Are

1. The idea for this movie is pretty interesting, but it doesn’t play out quite as well as I hoped.

2. It’s about a family that stays close by performing cannibalistic rituals.

3. The movie starts out with the death of the father. Then the eldest son, Alfredo, decides he must take over as head of the household. He plans on proving his worth by finding the next human to bring home to eat.

4. The bulk of movie follows the escapades of Alfredo and his brother trying to capture various people to kill. They visit homeless kids, prostitutes, and gay bars. But their quest doesn’t work out quite as well as they planned.

5. There are a couple of cops that are trying to figure out who the family is, and catch them, so that they can be famous.

6. The family is so weird that it’s hard to really relate to anyone in the film. You watch the movie, but you don’t really feel it.

7. The biggest problems in the movie are the uneven acting, and the fact that some parts don’t really make sense. Characters seem to know where to go without being told, and they don’t always seem to have a reason for doing things.

8. There are some pretty violent and gory scenes. It is a cannibal movie, after all. But it’s not as gory as you might think. It could have been much worse.

9. The moral of the story seems to be, if you are going to kill and eat someone, get it right the first time. And don’t ever swallow a whole finger.

Here Comes The Devil [Mexico, 2013]

Nine Things About the Movie Here Comes the Devil
1. This Mexican horror film could have been really good. But I ended up being pretty disappointed with it.

2. Unfortunately, this movie doesn't know what it wants to be - a serial killer movie, a demonic possession movie, a psychological thriller, or "Paranormal Activity" (I mean, can we stop with the levitating-above-the-bed thing?).

3. It starts out with a lesbian sex scene that has nothing to do with the rest of the movie. Then one of the lesbians gets her fingers cut off. A few minutes later, a mom has sex with her husband in a car while her kids disappear.

4. When the kids come back, they're acting all weird. Like they have either been molested, or possessed. The parents try to solve the problem by taking the matter into their own hands. It doesn't work.

5. There are little clues all the way through to hint at what's going on. The problem is, the clues don't make any sense, either.

6. You know the old horror movie truism that if you have sex, you get killed? This movie teaches something similar, except the lesson is that if a woman enjoys sex, she will either be mutilated or put she will put her children in mortal danger.

7. On the plus side, it does dare to take on subjects that American movies won't. Like middle-school siblings having sex with each other.

8. It's got a nice film style, and some individual scenes are chilling. It just doesn't add up to anything, because it doesn't even know where it's heading.

9. I have no idea what the ending means.

Post Tenebras Lux (Mexico, 2012)

Nine Things About the Movie Post Tenebras Lux

1. This is one of the most abstract films I've seen in a long time.

2. The director, Carlos Reygadas, made this film based partly on things that happened to him in his life. 

3. The movie is really not much more than a random collection of scenes from a man's life in the hills of Mexico, mixed with a contemplation of desire and fantasy.

4.  So we have scenes of a girl wandering in a field, a demon moving into a house, a rugby match, a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous, a sex spa, and other disconnected events.

5. Reygadas said he wanted to make a movie where you feel life experiences more than understand them rationally. That's an understatement. Not very many scenes in the movie make much sense or seem to have a point.

6. Reygadas is onto something; there are some individual scenes that are very well done, and fascinating to watch. They touch on such deep life truths that you can only stare in awe.

7. But then there are other scenes that are pretty damn boring.

8. The movie is so "artistic" that it almost implodes. It is filmed in a 4:3 aspect ratio, like an old-fashioned TV. There is also a distortion effect around the edges of the screen, like you're looking through a window or something.

9. In the end, the only person that can really relate to what's going on is probably the director himself. And he's not explaining anything.