| B- | Austin Film Festival 2020 |
There are a few things you have to get over with this movie. A few things that have to happen to get the characters where the writer/director wants them to be. (And to his credit, he acknowledged that in the Q & A.) And the narrator, who added almost nothing to what we were already being shown, drove me crazy. Fortunately, they only used him in the first 10 minutes.
But once you get past those, this is a fun, quirky movie. The trailer gives you a sense of the director’s style. (The movie is in Spanish and the other trailer I found did not have subtitles.) I enjoyed how the two main characters interacted and wound each other up.
Minus a couple of points for the ending. Another “YOU decide how this ended” cut. The writer/director said he loves this kind of ending, but I am finding them to be lazy or perhaps motivated by fear (“What if the audience doesn’t like the direction I take?”) You could make a case for them for certain movies, like if the whole film was about ambiguity or uncertainty. (But can you imagine a version of Seven that ends before Mills pulls the trigger? What a cheat that would have been.)
