El Mariachi (1993)
Directed by Robert Rodriguez
El Mariachi just wants to play his guitar and carry on the family tradition. Unfortunately, the town he tries to find work in has another visitor, a killer who carries his guns in a guitar case. The drug lord and his henchmen mistake el Mariachi for the killer, Azul, and chase him around town trying to kill him and get his guitar case.
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What critics compared El Mariachi to
He is interested in flux and movement and volume and pace, much like Steven Spielberg was in the early days of "Duel."
For the same bankroll, director/writer/cameraman/editor/coproducer Robert Rodriguez El Mariachi had a plot and entertained, whereas Primer is non-linear and non-sense, light-years from being arguably the best American sci-fi flick of the last 20 years.…
Carruth, who wrote, directed and scored the film, has created something that shows remarkable promise - just like Robert Rodriguez did with $7,000 in "El Mariachi" (1992).
From a visual standpoint, the film looks much more expensive than it was; as Scott Foundas points out in his essay accompanying the Criterion Collection release, Following cost less than both Robert Rodriguez’s El Mariachi (1992) and Kevin Smith’s Clerks (1994), both paramount examples of mid-’90s do-it-yourself indie ingenuity.
Like Robert Rodriguez with his transformation of El Mariachi into Desperado, Ritchie has used the extra money to hire a few big name stars and to make the final product look more polished, but his overall approach has not changed.
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This was El Mariachi redux, another Texan doing a lot with a little—and Carruth’s subsequent struggles to get another film off the ground seemed to resign him to outsider-artist anomaly.
He burst onto the scene with the micro-budgeted El Mariachi in 1992 and kept cranking out the hits, with gems like Desperado (1995), From Dusk Till Dawn (1996) and Sin City (2005) released to much acclaim.
There's character work here that exceeds anything in Rodriguez's previous films since El Mariachi, and the action sequences represent a major leap forward in his work as well.
Rodriguez has made plenty of movies more expensive than his DIY debut El Mariachi , but despite his facility with genre material, he’s never made the jump to a giant-budget canvas until now; he was always too busy stretching his own canvases in his Austin backyard.
He’s also known for making movies on a shoestring budget (see also: his debut feature, El Mariachi) and creating a successful action franchise for kids.
Outside of his earlier Alvodomar films and the Robert Rodriguez franchises (Spy Kids and the last two-third's of the El Mariachi trilogy), Banderas comes across less interesting than his persona.
Both El Mariachi and Desperado arrive on DVD in separate Special Edition reissues, their joint release sandwiched between the theatrical debuts of Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over and the third chapter in the El Mariachi saga, Once Upon a Time in Mexico, whose title finally puts Rodriguez's Sergio Leone fetish centre stage.
So, now imagine a James Bond movie made for a 5-year-old, and that's how you get "Spy Kids," written and directed by Robert Rodriguez ("El Mariachi"), which takes the Bond gestalt and infantilizes it even further.
Spy Kids was written and directed by Robert Rodriguez, who burst onto the indie scene with El Mariachi and proceeded to make hard-core action-horror films like From Dusk Till Dawn and The Faculty.
Written and directed -- startlingly enough -- by guns-a-blazin' Tarantino protégé Robert Rodriguez ("El Mariachi," "Desperado," "From Dusk Till Dawn" ), "Spy Kids" is a glossy, MTV-and-CGI modernization of the kind of throw-away adolescent caper matinees Disney used to crank out in the early 1970s (think "Candleshoe," "Escape to Witch Mountain").
For someone who has directed a blood-drenched $5,000 indie about a mariachi with a gun disguised as a guitar holder (1993's "El Mariachi"), a ghastly, foul-mouthed vampire epic (1996's "From Dusk Till Dawn"), and a high school-set horror movie about alien teachers (1998's "The Faculty"), it would seem like an odd choice for director Robert Rodriguez to next choose a family film, but that is what he has done.
Writer-director Rodriguez once made an ingenious low-tech no-budget movie known as "El Mariachi."
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From Richard Linklater's Slacker to Robert Rodriguez's El Mariachi, Austin is fast becoming the focal point for somewhat of a renaissance in "low-budget"; filmmaking.
Similarly to the hero of Sergio Leone’s Man With No Name trilogy, the driver in Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive , and the title character in Robert Rodriquez’s El Mariachi movies, the narrator in Fight Club is never introduced by name.