Amores Perros (2000)
Directed by Alejandro G. Iñárritu
A fatalistic car crash in Mexico city sets off a chain of events in the lives of three people: a supermodel, a young man wanting to run off with his sister-in-law, and a homeless man.
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9 films that influenced Amores Perros
What critics say influenced Amores Perros
Like Pulp Fiction, Amores Perros focuses on three stories about criminal behavior.
Novelist Guillermo Arriaga's script, while borrowing from "Pulp Fiction," has plenty of engaging surprises of its own.
This movie, a triptych whose overlapping structure is reminiscent of such movies as "Pulp Fiction," "Before the Rain" and "Winter Sleepers," is definitely fierce and most definitely human.
For marketing purposes, Amores Perros has been tagged in America as Mexico's answer to Pulp Fiction.
Without a doubt, the majority of the reviews of Amores Perros, the acclaimed debut feature from Mexican filmmaker Alejandro González Iñárritu, will, at one time or another, invoke Pulp Fiction .
To be honest, comparisons between "Pulp Fiction" and "Amores Perros" probably wouldn't be unfair.
As other commentators have noted, the filmmakers could well be paying homage to Luis Bun~uel, "Tristana" in particular, as this sequence unfolds with pitch-dark humor as two heretofore fortunate and privileged people have been protected from the shallowness of their feelings for each other.
Fans of Bunuel’s 1970 film, “Tristana,” will see Bunuel’s influence all over this story, but Inarritu nevertheless makes it his own as he eventually connects it to the film’s final act, “El Chivo and Maru.”
Recalling Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction - but edgier than both - this is a hell of a first film.
And while the director is no doubt sick of hearing the Pulp Fiction comparisons (he told one interviewer he was influenced more by Faulkner than Tarantino), the similarities seem about as coincidental as Reservoir Dogs' to City on Fire, right down to the closing segment of a badass's bloody path to redemption.
El Chivo plays "Long Cool Woman in a Red Dress" before toying with his kidnap victim recalling Michael Madsen's far more violent scene in Tarantino's "Reservoir Dogs."
Its world of violence and subtropical beauty, its passion and heartbreak, its grimy realism and its sneaky, almost spiritual touches of surrealism mark it as a powerful and original work, the best and boldest debut film I've seen since at least "American Beauty" and maybe "Reservoir Dogs."
Like a couple of other powerful debuts from the last decade (I'm thinking of American Beauty and Reservoir Dogs), its dark, almost surrealist tone escalates it high above the usual gory gunfare and marks it as a film to be reckoned with.
In keeping with the canine title references, the final shot brings to mind the post-apocalyptic world of 1975's sci-fi cult film "A Boy and His Dog."
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A triptych of stories of dog owners set in a Mexico City that makes the metropolis of Luis Buñuel�s Los olvidados look quaint, Amores opens in medias mess as a car containing two fleeing youths and a bleeding rottweiler collides with another containing a model and her pampered Lhasa apso.
Give me the less pat Los Olvidados instead, but this pumped telenovela is very much the film Kieślowski would have made had he followed Buñuel's lead and voyaged to Mexico.
This movie, a triptych whose overlapping structure is reminiscent of such movies as "Pulp Fiction," "Before the Rain" and "Winter Sleepers," is definitely fierce and most definitely human.
This movie, a triptych whose overlapping structure is reminiscent of such movies as "Pulp Fiction," "Before the Rain" and "Winter Sleepers," is definitely fierce and most definitely human.
Now, if Iñárritu could imitate the lyrical beauty and pace of Like Water For Chocolate to develop his characters more, and if he could control his frenzied camerawork more like Scorsese does in his best work, we could hail the coming of a Mexican filmmaker who will stand among the greats.
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Only Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia from 1999 can be rightfully said to predate Amores perros in the creation of this unique narrative form, though it was another 2000 film, Traffic , that really got things rolling as far as making that form so popular as it became throughout the decade, when it began to truly wear out its welcome and go from being a fresh, compelling way to structure narrative threads, to being a wholly irritating cliché in such films as Gonzálex Iñárritu and Arriaga's last collabartion, 2006's shallow, suffocating Babel .
It's Magnolia south of the border, with a grimly realistic car crash taking the place of biblical plague as denouement.
To that end, Amores Perros (loose translation: "Love's a Bitch") is the aching meditation on love and loss and catastrophe and chance that another fiercely talented and Quentin-influenced man of three names, Paul Thomas Anderson, tried and failed to make with Magnolia.