Re: What Did You Watch? 2024-11-27 (Wednesday)

Arthur Lipscomb <arthur@alum.calberkeley.org> wrote:

El Mariachi (blu-ray) 1992 low budget movie produced, written, and
directed by Robert Rodriguez.  The plot follows "El Mariachi" (Carlos
Gallardo) who is mistaken for a hitman while trying to bum a job at a
local bar for tips.  I watched with a really good commentary track from
Rodriguez.  This was his first movie, and extremely low budget
(according to Wikipedia $7,225).  On the commentary he talks at length
about all the corners he had to cut to get the movie made with lots of
very interesting stories.  One thing I was surprised by was that he
constantly referred to the lead actor as his character name, "El
Mariachi."  But he also talked about how involved he was in day-to-day
decision making and production. Then I quickly realized it's because he
was also a co-producer.  Much of the movie was made up on the spot based
on whatever random person they could get to agree to be in the movie,
and if they could bring their own props and costumes that was a definite
plus!  For example the guy they hired to play a musician got the part
because he was the only guy in town with a portable keyboard.  This is a
Spanish language movie, but the lead bad guy doesn't speak Spanish,
which is why he wears sunglasses to hide the fact he's phonetically
reading a script.  The movie was designed to be a direct to video for
the Spanish language market and they were all shocked when it suddenly
became a huge hit.  He points out tons of errors and mistake in the
movie that they realized existed at the time of making, but didn't care
because they didn't think anyone would actually see the movie outside of
a tiny Spanish language direct to video market.  Rodriguez said when the
studio wanted to dub the movie into English, it cost more to dub the
film than the entire cost to make it.

Great stories on the commentary track!

This was a great movie. I liked it better than Desperado, which was
essentially a remake.

Desperado (4K disc) 1995 Sequel written and directed by Robert
Rodriguez.  Antonio Banderas takes over the role of El Mariachi who this
time around is out for revenge against a Mexican drug dealer.  Salma
Hayek turns up as the love interest.  And Danny Trejo shows up as a
killer who uses blades.  Is the movie good?  Any movie that has a guy
carrying a rocket launcher hidden in a guitar case is by definition a
good movie.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QVjfmgr2cf0

Salma Hayek was sexy as hell, although I never saw the telenovellas she
was in at the start of her career on Mexican television.