Amores Perros (2000)

"If you want to make God laugh... tell Him your plans."

plot: Three separate stories are connected through a car crash. In one, Octavio (Gael Garcia Bernal) uses dogfighting to raise money to run away with his brother's wife. Next, a supermodel, Valeria (Goya Toledo), deals with loss after the accident. Finally, vagrant hitman El Chivo (Emilio Echevarria) struggles to connect with his estranged daughter.

Wow, this movie is ten years old! Ten! This DVD is old, too. It's so old even that I bought this bad boy on sale at Media Play. Media Play! They don't even have those anymore! I'm just glad it didn't turn to dust in my MacBook. It just goes to show how relatively old this movie is in that all the reviews compared it to Pulp Fiction, when the "everything's connected" device has since been used in Magnolia, Crash, Traffic, etc. And yes, two of those movies came out in 1999, one year before the American release but I think they were new enough that critics wanted to avoid using them as examples.

This was another... long... movie. Over two-and-a-half hours. And another... dark... depressing... drama. Thank God Anchorman is next. I can save the intentional overdose for another day.

Amores Perros is something of an important modern movie. Released in the first year of the new millennium, it introduced America to the actor Gael Garcia Bernal and the director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, as well as helping to usher in the Mexican Wave of filmmakers like Guillermo Del Toro and Alfonso Cuaron.

This was a tough movie to watch, and not because it was bad, but because it was heavy on the animal cruelty. Dogfights, dogs getting shot, trapped, killed, set on fire post-killing. This ain't Marmaduke.

I thought this movie was very good. I think it was entertaining, but not as portentous or emotionally devastating as probably intended. True to a foreign and/or indie movie, a lot of what happens is tragic, and it continues to be tragic, and in the end none of the characters seem to have gotten what they wanted. Literally none of them.

The acting is very good, as is the directing. I think it's through sheer charisma and style that this movie is so acclaimed and esteemed while another, similar film might be jeered as pretentious twaffle. Overall I recommend a viewing at least once, but make sure you have a strong stomach, because although there's a disclaimer in the beginning promising that no animals were harmed... some of those dog bodies looked very, very real to me.

This asshole wasn't exactly helping matters either.