Rating: 
Summary: Great Surprise
Review: Didn't know what to expect this being only the second film from Mexico that I have seen. Enjoyed "Amores Perros" so even though this was billed as a "road picture" I thought I would give it a chance. Great film! Loved the story and the acting was excellent. Enjoyed seeing the picture the way the director wanted us to see it, without all the cuts required by MPAA.
Rating: 
Summary: Looking for Truth with the Astral Cowboys
Review: In his last film, the Ethan Hawke/Gwyneth Paltrow remake of "Great Expectations", I felt like director Alfonso Cuaron wasn't able to fully spread his wings and use all his talents. Hampered by the rigid structure of the book, Cuaron had to scratch and claw to get his beautifully arty shots into the film. That particular tension doesn't exist here. In tackling a road movie like this, one with a searching narrative, Cuaron is able to lead his camera into nooks and crannies as much as he desires, in order to find true cinema rather than just a movie. One shot in particular stands out. After enduring a lengthy conversation at a picnic table, the camera abruptly gets up and leaves, exploring the kitchen area of the restaurant. There it finds a gaggle of old washerwoman, dancing sprightly to the music playing on the radio. It's a moment of pure joy that has nothing to do with the story being told, but doesn't need to. Cuaron also has a fun time, during the many car scenes, letting his camera float from the car to capture crucifix imagery; one is painted on a rock face, another marks a grave. The agnostic in me wanders if he's making a grand religious statement, i.e., the characters must bypass the cross in order to get to Heaven (or rather Heaven's Mouth, the name of a beach that doesn't exist... or does it?). On the other hand, knowing how this all ends, maybe it's a condemnation of their nihilistic ways. A movie that offers paradoxical interpretations through one dominant motif is just fine in my book.Cuaron composes his scenes through a series of long cuts. I've always loved this technique, for it allows the director and the actors to subtly build tension over the length of the take, and it creates a voyeuristic feeling in the audience. Cuaron's actors never let the takes stray from the reality of the scene, and for a film dominated by two actors in their early twenties, that is saying something.
Gael Garcia Bernal plays Julio Zapata, and Diego Luna plays Tenoch Iturbide. The boys are real teenagers: animalistic, horny, insensitive, passionate, stupid, etc. But each is exceptional in his own way. Bernal captures lower-class pride, but also envy of his richer friend. Luna, playing the son of a man important enough to invite the President to his daughter's wedding, captures Tenoch's reckless and wasteful rebellion quite well. The boys together are stunning, ably showing the close bond that Julio and Tenoch share. In the beginning they are asked to play scenes that at first strain all credulity (lying next to each other on diving boards, pants down by their ankles, I wondered, "Is this how teenage boys bond these days?"), but given the benefit of hindsight, perfectly show the exact relationship that they share. Maribel Verdu plays Luisa Cortes, the older woman who tags along with Julio and Tenoch on their way to the beach. Luisa is a fascinating and complex character, much more than the buxom babe that she at first appears to be. Maribel has to play several scenes where she is crying uncontrollably, and to her credit they never cross the line from stark to maudlin. She also has to become the catalyst for the boys sexual reawakening, and she pulls off the desirability and sensitivity of this part of her character with stunning assurance. The sex scenes, and there are four of them, are clumsy, energetic, graphic, and, well, quick (in a sense). The film opens with an unapologetic shot of Tenoch in bed with his girlfriend. She is leaving for Europe the next day, and Tenoch, in mid coitus, makes her promise not to "[sleep with] any Italian guys". It is a perfect note to begin for a film as free and open and immature as this one. That being said, most of the film's first third didn't work for me. A clumsy narrator intrudes often to give the audience background information on each of the characters. I'd prefer to be shown this kind of thing than told about it. But eventually, the narrator settles into another function, one that amplifies the film greatly. He starts to break into the action with talk about the characters' unmentioned pasts, then their unmentionable presents, and then their unknowable futures. We find out that one secondary character, a fisherman, will soon be put out of work by the coming influx of commercial fishing companies; seeing this man, happy in his element while the audience knows his fate, is a heartbreaking moment. The film becomes, then, just a snapshot of these people's lives, one that is affected by all that came before, and that truly affects all that comes after. In some very surprising and extreme ways. Be patient with the clumsiness of the beginning, for you will see that it was necessary when you get to the poignant end. This is a fine film that truly gains power upon reflection afterward.
Rating:
Summary: Y Tu Mama Tambien
Review: This movie is brilliantly done.This could not be more accurate when it comes to a teenagers lives involving emotional instability and confusion between love and lust.Strongly recommended!
Rating:
Summary: A teen sex movie as Chekhov might have written it.
Review: There will never be an American film like "Y Tu Mama Tambien"--certainly not as long as the Weitz and Farrelly brothers hold sway in Hollywood. Alfonso Cuaron takes the basic plot of a Hollywood teen sex comedy--two rowdy teens take the woman of their dreams on a road trip to the beach--and makes something amazingly nuanced, powerful and moving from it. Middle-class Julio and wealthy, politically connected Tenoch are recent high-school graduates looking forward to a summer of hot sex and getting wasted. At a wedding reception, they meet Luisa, the sexy wife of Tenoch's older cousin, and spin a tall tale about Heaven's Mouth, the beautiful, secluded (and nonexistent) beach where they plan to spend their summer. Nothing more is said about this until--after receiving two very bad pieces of news--Luisa calls Tenoch and tells him she's coming with them. From then on, you get some traditional road-trip horseplay and sexual badinage, but also some things American audiences wouldn't expect, as the trip simultaneously fulfills Julio and Tenoch's brightest dreams and brings their illusions crashing down to earth. A trip that begins in youthful high spirits ends in lasting sorrow and painful self-knowledge. Throughout the movie, Cuaron has an omniscient narrator tell us facts Julio, Tenoch and Luisa never learn about each other; he also has a running commentary on characters the three pass on their way--poor and oppressed Mexicans who will never know the luxuries the protagonists take for granted. The political and class divisions of Mexico are a powerful undercurrent in this movie, adding to its sting and poignancy; the moment in which Tenoch and Julio finally turn their class resentments on each other comes unexpectedly, but inevitably. "Y Tu Mama Tambien" is extremely profane and contains loads of explicit sex--it is emphatically not for the easily offended. But in delineating the narrow lives of his three main characters, Cuaron illuminates universal truths about human nature, with a touch so sure you'd swear that Chekhov had been transplanted to 21st-Century Mexico. Maribel Verdu (Luisa), Gael Garcia Bernal (Julio) and Diego Luna (Tenoch) are superb actors as well as being extremely sexy, and one hopes that more movies starring them will make their way across the border.
Rating:
Summary: Julio and Tenoch's Excellent Adventure!
Review: This movie puts any American coming of age road trip to shame. It is so honest and intelligent. It's funny and poignant and sexy all at the same time.
We see the many layers of Mexico as Julio and Tenoch take the older Luisa to the beach they invented to impress her when they meet her at a wedding. It is all there, the beauty, the squalor and the sweet humanity of it.
The acting is just great. The characters are so natural and real. The story isn't anything new, but the tale is in the telling. The sex it treated in a refreshingly unflinching manner.
Luisa turns out to be all Julio and Tenoch imagined and more. As they say, be careful what you wish for, it may come true.
In the end, we discover what Luisa is hiding and it helps to explain her wanton abandon, which makes this movie what it is.
My wish is for Mexico to send us some more wonderful movies like this one.
Rating:
Summary: All About My Mexico
Review: Even though many critics describe the film as a "road picture" but it really offers so much more. The film is very funny, warm, beautiful, honest, and sexy. The camera works are brilliant, gritty, and simply gorgeous ... how could they bring out the sublime purple in an ordinary electric fan? The acting by everyone is perfect and I don't use the P word easily. Every other scene is funny and the whole audience cracked up in laughter. I went to see the film twice here in the heart of Florida (where foreign films are not usually received well) and both screenings were sold out. The film is really that good. Many images continue to stay with me since I saw it a month ago - the two boys swimming in a leave-clogged pool, the two boys bearing the same easy-to-miss tattoo on their backs, the glistening silver dome in the maid's hometown...to name a few. Luisa is one of the most divine characters to ever grace the screen. As she dances to the jukebox music at a dying beachside cafe, you will be caught forever in her luminous gaze. Everything about her haunts me. If you ever wonder about the meaning of life, you might find the answer in the film ... I know I did. As I left the cinema, I became a new person.
Rating:
Summary: Boys will be boys everywhere
Review: The subtitles aside, it's obvious from the very first scene of Y TU MAMA TAMBIEN that it's not a U.S. production. So, take that, MPAA! Two Mexican teenaged pals, Julio and Tenoch, have just said goodbye to their respective girlfriends, who are leaving on a vacation to Italy. Now, awash with raging hormones as boys of that age are, they spend their time obsessing about...well, you know...and doing everything possible to keep their reproductive organs occupied. Soon, they meet Luisa, a ten years-older woman married to a distant cousin of one of our heroes. Apparently devastated by her husband's ongoing infidelities, Luisa impulsively agrees to accompany Julio and Tenoch on a drive across country to a mythical beach called Heaven's Mouth. Luisa genuinely wants to see the seashore. We all know what the boys want. I'd better tell you now that, while Y TU MAMA TAMBIEN is exuberantly erotic, it's not smutty. Or, at least, it shouldn't be in the eye of the beholder unless it's been forgotten what life involves. The film is, of course, a coming of age story. Luisa's unabashed and uninhibited sexuality puts a predictable strain on the boys' friendship as she tries, at times with great exasperation, to get them to set aside their adolescent callowness (and grow up, for Chrissakes!). But, while the movie is sometimes a comedy and very much a teenaged boy's fevered fantasy, it's more than that. Julio's family is of middle-class affluence, and Tenoch's is simply just rich. In their drive across Mexico, the boys barely notice the poverty and police presence so much a part of the country because their minds are elsewhere. But, the audience sees it, and is reminded of the economic gulf separating societal elements by the occasional voiceover of an unseen narrator. One particularly poignant incident involves the travelers paying a monetary tribute to a rural "queen" in order to pass a roadblock, a garland of flowers stretched across the pavement by poor villagers. Y TU MAMA TAMBIEN doesn't rate the appellation of "great". The theme has been presented too many times before. But the humanity of it is intensely engaging. The boys, played by Gael Bernal and Diego Luna, are admittedly immature in all the ways that make even girls of the same age roll their eyes in disbelief. But they carry it off with such zest that it's impossible not to like them. And I can testify as a former adolescent boy that Maribel Verdu as Luisa could rightly be the centerfold of the most feverish daydream. However, her role goes much deeper. As the plot unfolds, the audience realizes that the ostensible reason for her leaving her husband isn't what's driving her. When we learn what the real cause is, we are left profoundly sad at the immense tragedy of it. See this terrific movie, especially if you're the parent of a teen boy and you've forgotten what demons drive a young male of that age. This could be the best foreign film of 2002.
Rating:
Summary: Ahhyyy la muerta...
Review: This is one of the best movies ever!!! There are no words to decribe the emotions and exitement the characters went through in the film. I loved the story, from beginning to end. I recomend it to anyone that isn't afraid of seeing something diffrent and looking at a story from a mexican directors point of view. This movie, along with Amores Perros (Also 5 stars), is just unforgetable!!!
Rating:
Summary: 2 guys, a girl and a great new film.
Review: Alfonso Cuaron follows his two fine and individual literary adaptations - 'The Little Princess', 'Great Expectations' - with a modern, 'original' road movie that is more novelistic than either of them. In the ironic mode of 'Magnolia', 'Amelie' and 'The Royal Tennenbaums', the very cinematic action is broken off by a parodically omniscient narrator who provides every scene with more detail than it needs, filling in back-stories, articulating feelings characters don't show, and even inventing futures for them. But whereas this narrative voice in the previous films was a part of their breathless stylistic brio, here it performs a different function. Each narration is announced by a breaking off of the action, a turning down of sound - rather than integrating itself with the overall tone, it breaks it, distancing itself from the comic antics, trusting the extraordinarily natural acting to keep our sympathy with the characters. Though initially jarring, this device provides some of the film's most haunting effects, adding layers of perspective unavailable to young characters only living for the moment, but which may agonise them in hindsight. Time and again, the film's narrow focus - two spoiled kids, who spend all their time joking,bragging about sex, drinking and smoking pot - is opened out to reveal different Mexican lives, lives not quite so privileged. The road movie - the boys are taking their adulterous cousin's wife to a non-existent beach they drunkenly boasted about at a wedding - is a time-honoured vehicle for both a journey into one's developing, maturing character, and also into the state of the nation. So while the Mexico the trio pass through is full of the colour and variety they patriotically boast of, it is also riddled with poverty, institutional racism, police brutality, and signs of death and residual superstition everywhere. At a moment of supreme joy in the story, the narrator will intrude and tell us that such and such a character will lose his job and his home, or that someone died in a road accident etc. This device makes us less guilty about enjoying the energy and the wit, the generosity and the hormonally volatile company of two brats, one very rich indeed. When they are having fun, the film sparks with pleasure at life; when they are not, you become impatient with the film's sombreness. These kids need to be well off - only they have the freedome of mobility to travel through the various Mexicos Cuaron wants to show us. They also have the complacency that needs to be tempered. But one of these boys is an inheritor of the Mexican elite - his father is a government minister once linked to a near-genocidal scandal; the President attends the gloriously gaudy wedding of his sister, all bullfighting and mariachis. The boys, for all their sexual exploration, are like two Presidential envoys, investigating and reporting from Mexico, while the real rulers swan off to Washington for conferences about globilisation. Critics have compared 'And Your Mother Too' to 'Jules Et Jim', but the disenchanted political element is completely absent from Truffaut's film; a closer precursor would be Blier's Gerard Depardieu classic 'Les Valseuses', another road movie about two sexually obsessed young men who really want each other, and which casts a sharp eye on contemporary France. The difference being that Cuaron cares about women, and his Luisa is a wonderful creation, her own zest for life co-existing with all kinds of pain, fear and betrayal only partially glimpsed through cracked windows by the boys. 'Mother' shares a continuity with Cuaron's previous films, not just in the theme of young people unmoored from their dubious parentage and heritage, and the bittersweet narrative development, but in his amazing use of space, his ability to turn the domestic and familiar into the creepy and alienating - look at the supermarket high-jinx suddently caught in a vast, alienating long shot. His loose shooting style conceals immensely complicated compositions, framing paralell stories in the one sequence shot or image, to devastating effect, such as Luisa's break-up call to her husband while the companions she can see are reflected beside her playing foozball.
Rating:
Summary: very funny movie
Review: i think this was a good movie where you really dont need to know spanish to follow the movie. its a good study of the human condition and just what is willing to do to fill the void in the few remaining weeks of ones life. sure there is a lot of sex but that is what life is about. i liked the charachters and the story. be aware tho that this movie is not for kids.
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