Gueros

This movie is black and white and it has a different frame ratio. At first, i thought they were going to do it because they wanted it to look like an art film but if you ask me, from what i watched, i am certain that this was done because of artistic and also satiric reasons. This movie is a great drama and also is a great comedy. Directing is really unique. Movie doesn't treat it's audience like they are stupid people. Movie respects the audience. For example, instead of a broken elevator sign, you see the inside of the elevator and you see that it doesn't come. When the character goes in a dark room, actor isn't pretending to be in a dark room, it is not a low lighted room that you can see but actor can't, you also can't see anything and it feels real. When a character closes other's eyes, before you see that, also your view is blocked by hands on the camera, which is your eyes. You feel like you are inside the film and it is amazingly done. When they listen to the song that should be amazing you hear nothing at all because they want you to imagine it since it will be different for everyone. And there is a scene in the school that it is really really funny and intelligently done. I won't spoil but i was laughing way too much at it. Movie tells a few different stories, panic attack, love, friendship, revolution and a whole other themes that are followed by their own scenes. Every thing in the movie leads somewhere and in every ending, it remind us that the world is cruel.Movie is funny, dramatic and exciting and overall it is very good. It makes fun of the Mexican so called art movies and also that maybe the cause of the black and white colour of the film. And it succeeds to be satiric in a good way. I am giving this 8/10 because i felt like it dragged a little on the last act. But, nonetheless i found it to be very intelligent.

...the grail may not be so important.

Set in 1999 amidst the university strike in Mexico, the film eschews the political (mostly) for the personal. The film moves with a pace that is both unpredictable, but in hindsight guided by some hand of fate. There are wonderful mirroring of events (seals, tigers and bricks/balloons), and the use of extreme sound/imaging borders on an ASMR trigger.

Memorable characters, humor and violence battle for your attention, and even if I only got the reheated meal via translation, this was maybe the most enjoyable Friday night film of the whole damn pandemic.

Two shorts and an interview accompanied the DVD I rented. Well worth watching, and not just for the sake of seeing Tenoch Huerta's acting chops. I was watching some of the deleted scenes included as well but I really did not want to alter the experience I had just completed.

One really unrelated tip, while I heard Ruizpalacios mention Truffaut, Jarmusch and Wender...not so long ago I watched the excellent multi-part documentary "Rompan Todo" which helped to set up the quest in a way.

That said, the film stands (strongly) by itself. Look forward to more from the film palace of Ruizpalacios!

The story here is as clever as it is simple. Two brothers and a friend hit the road in search of a dying Mexican folk singer who, according to legend, once made Bob Dylan cry with one of his touching ballads. While there are numerous side stories and plenty of character development, the plot doesn't get a whole lot deeper than that, and it is all the better for it. In that sense, the filmmakers knew exactly what they were doing and they achieved it wonderfully.

The film has a few flaws, but overall I thought it was pretty good. It could have been shorter, but the pacing is great. I felt like a few of the scenes were added just to ensure a sufficient running time and they could have been cut. One thing I loved about the film was that we never actually hear the music of the fictional Mexican folk singer that the brothers are following. Their car's cassette player is broken so they only ever listen to him via headphones. We are left to watch their silent reactions and fill in the missing pieces for ourselves. I'm not sure if the filmmakers had intended to possibly insert music during post production and then decided against it, but either way it is very effective and well done.

Without giving anything away, the ending of the film is right in line with the rest of the film's pacing. It is slow and anticlimactic, but we still end up feeling like everything turned out just the way it should, much like the characters are left feeling. And it is totally hilarious, but in such a dry way that you just might miss it.

Despite being a road film in essence, with characters traveling around and getting into adventures, Güeros isn't about story or characters so much as it is about a feeling. It's a feeling that most of us likely experience at some point in our lives, and for that reason most people will be able to relate to this film on some level.

I think the humanity shown in this film is amazing, because it doesn't have a presemptuous character is able to deliver, in a natural way, a very powerful message. I completely recommend it and I think it speaks about important topics in Mexico.

A hip coming of age road movie is the first feature from gifted Mexican writer- director Alonso Ruizpalacios. Shot in academy ratio and black and white and marked by a fresh use of camera, editing, sound, and humor and a breaking the fourth wall that owes something to the Nouvelle Vague, it focuses on Tomás, a slim, pale teenage bad boy ("güero" is Mexican slang for light-skinned) whose mother can't cope with him, so sends him from Veracruz to live in Mexico City for a while with his older brother "Sombra" ("dark-skinned"). Sombra is a student at the national university, but it's disrupted by a huge strike (loosely based on the 11-month strike of 1999), and he's "on strike from the strike," sitting idly in his trashy concrete apartment, a depressed slacker trying to teach himself card tricks. They get out, with his roommate and best friend Santos and girlfriend Ana (a strike leader), on a mission to find a cult Mexican rock idol of the Sixties called Epigmenio Cruz admired by their late father and both brothers, reportedly dying of cirrhosis of the liver, to pay him homage. It's said that Cruz once "made Bob Dylan cry." Ruizpalacios has acknowledged a debt to Truffaut, Godard, Wim Wenders, Jim Jarmusch, and Fellini, but his light touch, wit, and grasp of earthy Spanish vernacular (though he studied in London and speaks perfect English too) also link Güeros with Latin American youth films like Alex dos Santos' 2006 Glue, Che Sandoval's You Think You're the Prettiest, But You Are the Sluttiestt (2009), and the work of Fernando Eimbcke and Gerardo Naranjo. This won prizes at Berlin and Tribeca and had a limited US release May 2015 (see A.O. Scott's enthusiastic and detailed description in the NYTimes). Now out on DVD from Kino Larber. Watched on a DVD provided by Rodrigo Brandão (Indie Strategy) 2 Jan. 2015.