Feb. 12, 2003 - 10:53 pm
a.k.a. Love's a Bitch. this one i've been trying to see forever. this is the most failure i've ever had in my attempts to see a film. remember the no subtitles entry from a few days ago? yeah, that was all about this movie. it was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at the Oscars, and is currently number 172 on the IMDb. anyway, the media center has a copy on dvd (where you have to go out of your way to choose to watch it with subtitles i might add) but i stayed and watched that during my four hour break on Tuesday. and i finally actually saw this film successfully.
i don't think i'll ever watch this again. way too much animal cruelty. apparently they bent some of the animal cruelty and "harming" animal rules in order to make this. there are lots of dog fights to the death and dogs getting killed in other ways in this movie. i guess the movie is primarily about tragic love relationships, but there are also a lot of dead dogs. i enjoyed the movie and thought it was pretty good, but it's too hard to watch all that. plus i'm sure i'll never be able to find a copy of it to watch again outside of the media center.
the movie is sort of in 3 different parts. it centers around 3 groups of people and their tragic relationships. then they're all involved in a car crash at once and that's how their stories tie together. in the first section, there's a young man (the guy who played Julio from Y Tu Mam� Tambi�n (2001)) who decides that he wants to run away with his cruel brother's young pregnant wife. in order to make money for that, he begins entering his dog into the local fights and he ends up getting in with some bad people. the second section centers around a model who is seriously injured in a car accident and her struggle as she begins to deal with her sad change in lifestyle. oh and her dog gets stuck in the floor for days. reason...unknown and never explained. the third section deals with a whino assassin who takes care of random dogs off of the street. and he tries to reunite himself with his lost family who hates him. yeah, all pretty strange plot lines. i agree.
the cinematography in this is all pretty much handheld. i guess i like seeing that from time to time. it's weird how that can work as long as you're making an "independent" movie and you have an otherwise excellent camera and film stock. but if i went out and made a movie in super 8 with the camera girating all over the place it would look like crap. weird how those things work out in our minds eh?