Amores Perros
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Movie Reviews of Amores Perros
Movie Review: "Amores Perros" certainly lives up to its name
Summary: 5 Stars
There have been many movies where it seems obvious that the director has been inspired Quentin Tarantino's "Pulp Fiction" but few of those films live up to that standard as well as Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's 2000 film "Amores Perros." The title translates as "Love's a Bitch" and there is an intentional irony in that because dogs are a crucial element in each of the interwoven stories. However, saying this is "Pulp Fiction" with dogs misses the point."Amores Perros" begins with a frantic car chase in which two men with a founded dog in the back seat of an old car are being pursued by guys with guns in a souped up pick up truck through the streets of the city. The prologue ends with a scene that is the nexus for the three stories written by Guillermo Arriaga, although we will not know that until we return for the second of three visits to this particular moment.
The first story is about "Octavio and Susana." He (Gael García) is a young man who is love with the teenage bride (Vanessa Bauche) of his brother Ramiro (Marco Perez), who is a thug. Octavio has dreams of taking Susana far away and when an opportunity comes to make money off of the family pet Cofi in dog fights, he takes advantage of it. Of course his complex plan comes down to one last big chance to score, which is just another way for Fate to play with him.
"Daniel and Valeria" is about a television producer (Alvaro Guerrero) who has left his wife and children for the young and beautiful Valeria (Goya Toledo). Their happy home starts to fall apart when a small part of their living room floor gives way and Valeria's little dog end up underneath the floorboards.
In the final segment we finally find out about a bearded, scruffy looking street person that we have seen throughout the film. In the final segment, "El Chivo and Maru," we find out that El Chivo, "The Goat" (Emilio Echevarria) is living in an abandoned building and is a hit man for hire. In addition to ending up taking care for one of the main characters from the first story, El Chivo is hired by a man who wants to have his business partner killed. However, El Chivo discovers one interesting fact about his victim that makes him decide to play out this job a little differently.
"Amores Perros" is two-and-a-half hours long, which is a long time to read subtitles, but worth it. Arriaga creates characters with substantial depth and first time director Inarritu invests the stories with flair. The result is a compelling combination of visceral violence and passion, neither of which comes across as being gratuitous. The violence here matters, as compared to the bloodfest in "Cidade de Deus," where all the killing is just a constant waste of lives. Granted, Kátia Lund and Fernando Meirelles are making a much more political point in their film, but I am still struck by the artist range of how violence can be used in such films where the goal is more than to make money and give adolescents cheap thrills.
Translation: These films made "south of the border" reflect a better appreciation for the reality of violence then what is coming out of Hollywood.
Final Note: The DVD for "Amores Perros" has a several music vidoes, which seems strange given the subject matter, but proves to be rather interesting. You would think the film's subject matter would not lend itself to such promotions, but, again, I think we are coming up against some significant cultural differences worth noting.
Movie Review: The trickery intersections of the fate!
Summary: 5 Stars
During many times the spirit of "the wonderful real" (a coined term by Alejo Carpentier) nestled in the mind of Latin American artists. If I hat to remind the first reference in this sense I would name Cortazar ¨ Rayuela , a famous novel in which the narrative is fractured and according author 's wishes, expanded or reduced, and imagining a entangled labyrinth of new derived situations acquires importance for then vanishing or eventually to become in the real importance thread of the story. Miguel Otero Silva a famous Venezuelan writer wrote "When I want to weep, I don' t" where we find in the same beginning of the play three families who coincide in a cemetery. Each one of them cries the death of his victim "curiously" named Victorino, born and dead the same day. One of them is high class, the other media class and the last one of humble extraction.
The high peak in the Literature was reached by Gabriel García Márquez, (Literature Nobel Prize 1984) with his famous "Cien años de soledad" , the most acclaimed Latin American novel of the sixties.
In this state of things you could say there was a true eruptive state in many filmmakers but that by different reasons never crystallized until the conjunction of such talents to produce the materialization of a long expected wish. Regarded with objective serenity, Mexico has been land of brilliant writers and poets Octavio, Paz, Carlos Fuentes and the great Alfonso Reyes, that' s why there is nothing surprising to know this film was filmed in that location.
Three different social levels immersed in their own business will meet in a brutal crash, and from this horrid encounter the film will turn through wonderful flash backs to tell every little story with their triumphs and defeats, with their vices and virtues. The dogs are the common denominator in each one of these portraits.
A diminished marriage where the sum of disaffections overpass the ancient love promises, the minor tragedies of the low depths, reminding us unavoidable to Luis Buñuel ' Los Olvidados" every one of them have a serious ethical deficit of minor or major intensity. And the ancient concept of the Greek tragedy spies on with new dresses to revitalize a concept so many times lived and so many times forgotten, due the well know concept: the vanity of the post modernism.
But the fate' s hand will appear to change the life and times of those human beings. Special attention deserves the most complex dramatic nude; two brothers who hate one each other, metaphorically expressed as the evilness of the contraries. One of them will hire a mercenary to murder his brother, and this human being has an important card to play. He does not t follow necessarily the dictated instructions and will become an unexpected focus of tension, due his unpredictability.
Irony, tragedy, magic realism, poetic violence, wonderful narrative ellipsis, exceptional camera work, amusing script, solid dialogues, mythic punishment and a great doses of this artistic current (Lo real maravilloso) conform a extraordinary mosaic inside this fundamental masterpiece of the Latin American Cinema and one of the best Mexican movies ever made.
Movie Review: Grabs you by the scruff of the neck
Summary: 5 Stars
Amores Perros is a Mexican film by 21 Grams director Alejandro Gonzalez Innaritu that involves three interlocking stories of love, violence, loss, and dogs. Yes, dogs.
The first segment of three in the 150-minute movie involves a young man named Octavio (Gael Garcia Bernal) who puts his rottweiler Cofi into dog fights, in which Cofi literally kills all his competition, and makes some nice coin along the way, which he hopes will convince his troubled brother Ramiro's mistreated young wife Susana (Vanessa Bauche), pregnant with Ramiro's second child, to come away with him. The segment begins and ends with the climactic car crash that links the three stories.
Segment two focuses on up-and-coming model/actress Valeria (Goya Toledo) and her beau, Daniel (Alvaro Guerrero), a magazine publisher who has left his wife and two daughters to be with her. In the new apartment they share, Valeria's dog Richie accidentally ends up underneath the floorboards, and the couple are at a loss for ideas on how to get him out, especially since they can't even see him and don't know if he's scared, trapped, or lost under there. This, coupled with Valeria's deteriorating health and uncertainty about her professional future, allows complications to arise in the relationship.
In the final segment, a seemingly down-on-his-luck guerilla-turned-hitman (Emilio Echevarria) is hired to take out a yuppie's partner for reasons not apparently clear. The hitman has also recently rescued a dying dog and attempting to nurse it back to health, adding him to the already bountiful stable of pooches that follow him around as he pushes his cart around town. The hitman has unfinished business from his past that he is also dealing with - and an opportunity arises for him to set things right and carry out his own designs on the hit for which he has been commissioned.
It is near impossible not to get completely absorbed in this film. The characters are so well drawn out, and each given hints of ambiguity that it is so easy to relate to every one of them - because we can immediately recognize them as humans, not just people in movies. Innaritu's documentary style of filmmaking - nearly every shot done with a handheld camera - makes us feel as if we're spying on real life.
As far as the involvement of dogs: it's a stroke of genius. Pay attention to the scene near the end when two characters, each carrying a massive amount of enmity toward the other, are unleashed on one another. Besides the species, how is this different from a dog fight? Parallels are drawn throughout the film between dogs and humans; we can be at times loyal, scared, hurt, and vicious. Unlike most movies, Amores Perros does not seek easy answers to life's hardest questions.
Movie Review: What a delight
Summary: 5 Stars
I discovered this film by accident. It played on my tv like a nightmare getting sideswiped by some small glimmer of hope. And that's pretty much how it plays once you get to the end. The director carefully lays down loss and shows how three different characters deal with their loss - the loss of love/innocence for the first character; a loss of love and the ability to walk for a model; and finally, a loss of "family" from the final character. As pointed out, all these characters dynamic changes occur through the use of dogs almost as foils for the other characters to discover something they didn't know about themselves. The first character, a seemingly innocent and caring person - is driven to violence and greed as he enters the underground world of dogfighting. A model starts losing her love, her ability to walk, and finally her leg as she tries to find her dog. Finally, a homeless hitman's symbolic family of dogs is lost to one dog - making him realize the importance of his true family and to learn a new value of life.Any movie that successfully conveys such and uplifting message from a rather down trodden tale deserves some kudos - but that's not the start of what makes this film so remarkable. The realism of the film is astounding. The dogfights and the life shattering car wreck are quite easily some of the most shocking pieces caught on film - as they look so real. The brilliance of the realism also lies in the attention to detail - the careful painting of Mexican life. The director's portrait is often dark and tainted - not rose colored. It is a true depiction of culture that is rarely seen on film. The first segment of the film especially moved me in its portrayal of culture and ideals as it weaves its way around the streets of Mexico.
Finally, Iñárritu's use of music also shows a certain flare for making a cinematic marvel. Tracks by such bands as Moenia and Control Machete are awesome in setting the tone for this rather dark, cinematic marvel. The music is varying - pretty much the tone of the film. At one point, I found myself in tears, and at others in shock of the horror. At some moments, I was even able to laugh a bit. In the end, however, the whole film left me in awe. Forget it being an amazing foreign film - this is just an amazing film which has layers of meaning about life while at the same time displays an amazing example of filmaking.
Movie Review: Prelude to Crash?
Summary: 5 Stars
I taped "Amores Perros" a couple of months ago and was initially reluctant to watch it because it sounded rather "over the top". (I was also reluctant because of the movie's English title which I won't repeat but which made it sound like a very depressing movie). I finally watched it last nigh and was very impressed. My Spanish was too rusty to keep up with the dialogue but I think that the English subtitles were more profane than was the Spanish audio. Personally, I would have translated the title as "Dog Lovers" which seemed to be the rather loose connection between the three stories.
What I liked about the movie was the director's focus on relationships. Admittedly the main characters had some real problems but that also enabled us to go into some complex situations. The initial story of the trilogy focussed on a teenager's love of his dog and his sister-in-law. He was always skating on thin ice but it was his passion that kept him from counting the cost. This segment was the most profane of the three although we never do get much of a break from that sort of thing. The movie jumps a bit in time which I thought worked fairly well. We don't understand much of anything in the opening of the movie but it makes a lot of sense later on.
The second story tells of a woman's challenge in dealing with her career-ending injury. She's a Mexican super model whose beauty is defined by perfection. When the perfection is lost for good ("There will be scars") she is unable to maintain to self-esteem. Her dog is a central element in this story and perhaps is an allegory in that her search for her dog is her search for her self worth.
The third story centers around the movie's most unusual character in a cast full of characters. He looks like a homeless person but we find out there's a lot more to him. He has a following of stray dogs that are one of his focal points. He had abandoned his past but is working on reconnecting to it.
The lives of these three group of characters come together in a major car accident and the director does a good job in moving them in and out of each other's story. I caught a lot of subtle glimpse of the characters popping up in other storylines and I wondered how many more I missed. This movie is rather depressing yet there is hope in the ending of each story. However, the solution is up to them; not to us.