Quest Status: 748 / 1000
TSPDT Rank #835
I avoided watching this movie for a long time, mainly because I knew it involved dogfighting. This was definitely a valid concern. It may be true that no animals were harmed during the making of the film, but the simulation is convincing as hell. This was a more harrowing watch than Salo for me. Even putting the animal cruelty aside, there's just as much human cruelty, and scenes of a dog trapped in a dark hole with rats, making for one of the most stressful viewing experiences I've had in a long time. So view with caution...
That being said, this movie initially seems like it's going to be a Mexican Pulp Fiction with graphic scenes of simulated dogfighting thrown in for added grittiness, but this impression starts to fade after the first hour. The film has a complicated structure, with three main stories that bleed into each other at various points and one major point of intersection between them. Despite the fact that these stories intersect, the characters don't really end up interacting with each other like the ones in Pulp Fiction. It's more about comparing people from different social classes and exposing the undercurrent of violence running through Mexican culture as a whole. It's an explosive film, not to mention that it was Alejandro González Iñárritu's debut, creating enough of a splash to catapult him out of Mexico and into Hollywood.
--- 252 films remaining ---
NOTE
This review is part of my new Tumblr blog Cinema Cycles, which can be found here.
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