ejamessnyder 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.

sirako Not worth a watch, I'm surprised by the good reviews it's getting, making me think that the people involved in the film are the ones writing the good reviews. Shot in black and white for no reason, follows 4 people doing nothing and fails in portraying the student's movement that serves as a background. it's just boring, I felt that they tried to achieve something like the great "Duck Season" but they failed, if you haven't watched Duck Season, watch that instead. This just gives me no more material to write about. Describing this in a sentence I'll just go for: A plain road trip with no interesting characters that will waste your time

ckronosz-933-519542 I know this might come out as a little pretentious, but to fully get the movie you've got to be at least acquainted with a little bit of recent Mexican history. The references are funny but well carried out: the University's strike of 1999, the massive concert at Avandaro in the 60s, the Oxxo/K/7eleven (convenience stores) as a place of nocturnal gathering and longing for alcohol, cigarettes and cheap burritos, the high-scale parties crashed by ironic outsiders, Tlatelolco as a locus of the tragic 1985 earthquake--all of these refer, not quite just satirically but neither quite seriously, to essential turning points of the history of Mexico City from the second half of the XXth century on. In a sense, the movie is a road movie--telling the story of the City from the nostalgic perspective of someone who has dwelled at its most intense venues. You get to see the innards of massive department buildings, the zoo, a homeless performing its deliciously enticing, endless discourse on his life, the national university at its more heightened political ventures, downtown, marginal pulquerias (places where pulque, is sold), and the demonstrations at the middle of a high-speed road. There is not much more of a common thread amongst all the scenes apart from looking for an old, decadent hero that personally influenced the main characters; the longing for love, the running away from untold fears. But not much more is needed; if you've ever been on an all-night party at the City, indifferently to your economic background, you'll find yourself reflected in the sequences.

lasttimeisaw A voguish feature debut from Mexican filmmaker Alonso Riuzpalacios, shot entirely in Black and White with an uncommon 1.37:1 aspect ratio. GUEROS is a pristine debut full of promise but also sink into the filmmaker's own ideal existential wallow.In the opening scenes, the film directly prints the explanation of the word "güeros" on the screen, in case us foreign audience cannot catch the meaning, and it proposes two options, it is either a discrimination against colour or against homosexuality. And the film only deals one of the two. Set the backdrop of an undefined time (where Walkman is still popular, I suppose, should be in the 90s), Tomás (Aguirre) is a young boy lived with his widow mother, being too naughty, he is sent to live with his big brother Federico aka. Sombra (Huerta), who is a college student living with his roommate Santos (Ortizgris) in their messy apartment.While the university students are in the middle of a massive strike. The trio lay around in the apartment doing nothing. Since Tomás is a devotee of an over-the-hill musician Epigmenio Cruz (Charpener), who is sent to hospital due to poor health, the news triggers his quest to find him and ask for an autograph. So the story maunders around a two-day road trip, en route they visit the hospital, bump into some dangerous thug, reunite with Ana (Salas), a fervent activist student in the campus, party-crash, go to the zoo while Sombra has to face his worst nightmare, a tiger, and eventually track down Epigmenio in a remote cantina. Ostensibly, it is another plot-doesn't-matter ethos-journey combined with political agenda, budding romance, surrealistic touch, fly-on-the-wall realism and the dry humour.The picture exudes appealing élan thanks to its swift camera movement, monochromatic freshness and the idiosyncratic treatment of the fictional Cruz's music - a muffled void defies categorisation. But, the momentum doesn't hold up, soon, the journey deflates into an aimless wander, pry into the underbelly of a contemporary Mexico but never reach a cinematic catharsis or produce any prospective worth of excitement, the main characters are bankrupt of any empathy or charisma to keep up audience's attention of their often arbitrary behaviour. It is a film eventually fails to live up to its master-class craftsmanship, but considering its successful tournament in the international festival circuits, I might again find myself in a minority of one, to each his own taste, GÜEROS doesn't emerge as a comprehensively outstanding film in spite of its uniqueness.