He's gay in the world of Lucha Libre

   

     Never let it be said that the movies can't teach us things. How useful those things might be is another question. 

    Putting aside discussions about relevance, I should say that until I saw Cassandro, the story of a gay man who conquered the world of Lucha Libre, I didn't know that Mexican wrestling was a thing -- a very big thing. 

    I also didn't know that the word "exotico" refers to wrestlers who act in effeminate ways, donning garish costumes in defiance of the macho standards that dominate the ring. I'm not even interested in American wrestling, so it's hardly surprising that my ignorance extended to another country.

     Now I know a little bit.

       But about the movie:

       Gael García Bernal stars as Cassandro, a.k.a Saúl Armendáriz, a resident of El Paso who, from an early age, knew two things: He was gay and he wanted to be a professional wrestler. 

     As directed by Roger Ross Williams, the movie provides Saul with  motivation for his dream, something to do with impressing the severely religious father (Robert Salas) who rejected him for being gay. 

      Theatrical and unashamedly outlandish, Lucha Libre compares to the world of comic books; matches are replete with heroes and villains who elicit heavy vocal responses from avid audiences. 

     Sporting blonde hair, Bernal plays Saul without affectation. He's another movie guy with a dream -- only a very specialized one.

    The movie makes it clear that Cassandro is a kind of living fiction, a character Saul invents to distinguish himself from other "exoticos." Cassandro would become the first exotico who didn't automatically lose to macho opponents. He'd turn convention on its head and become a crowd favorite.

          That's pretty much the story.

          Two women play important roles in Saul's life.

         A strong Perla De La Rosa portrays Saul's mother. She accepts her son's gayness but cautions him about the dangers posed by a society in the grip of rigid definitions of manhood. She's part mother, part pal.

         Saul also develops a relationship with Sabrina (Roberta Colindrez), his trainer. Sabrina helps sharpen Saul's moves and watches as he realizes that he'll benefit from making the transition from a third-tier wrestler named El Topo to the flamboyant Cassandro, an altered version of a  name he got from watching a TV show.

      Saul's life as a gay man isn't neglected. He develops a romantic relationship with a wrestler called El Commandante (Raul Castillo). As a gay man who's married with children, Castillo's character lives a tormented dual life. He presents himself as straight in the wrestling ring. 

      Saul knows who he is and has no problems with it.

     Perhaps as an extension of Saul's clear-cut identity, Williams turns Cassandro into a role model for young gay men who might be hesitant about coming out.

     Audiences familiar with Lucha Libre may get more out of Cassandro than I did, but Williams's mixture of wrestling and kitchen-sink drama proves entertaining enough, a tribute to how people who seem incompatible can learn to appreciate one another.

     A footnote:  At the end of the movie, you'll see a photo of the real Cassandro. The wrestler's bulk made me wonder whether Bernal wasn't too slim for the role. You can decide for yourself.

 

‘Old’ clould have used some new tricks

      Imagine if you aged 50 years in a single day.

      Or -- on second thought -- don't bother because if you buy into M. Night Shyamalan's Old, you'll be taking a trip that's often more ludicrous than scary, mind-expanding or (heaven forbid) insightful.

     The movie begins when a family arrives at a tropical paradise, an upscale resort with a genial manager and all the amenities anyone could want. 

    Mom (Vicky Krieps) found the place online. Her husband (Gael Garcia Bernal) seems wary, but the two children -- a six-year-old son and an 11-year-old daughter -- are primed for fun in the sun. 

    Well, sort of. We quickly learn that Mom and Dad are keeping a secret about Mom’s health from the kids.

    On the morning after their arrival, the hotel's manager (Gustaf Hammarsten) suggests the family visit a beautiful beach, a secluded spot he recommends only to special guests.

    The vacationers are driven to the beach along with another couple and their daughter. Before long, a couple of additional beachgoers arrive, rounding out a cast that includes Rufus Sewell, Ken Leung, Nikki Amuka-Bird, and Aaron Pierre.

    Once at the beach, the characters begin a mysterious aging process that baffles and unnerves them. Don’t blame lack of sunblock.

     Those who try to escape immediately black out only to reawaken on the beach, trapped again in a rapid-aging nightmare by a steep cliff wall that makes the beach mostly inaccessible.

    Shyamalan employs make-up and adds new cast members to create the aging process, which includes episodes in which Sewell's character,  a surgeon, steadily loses his grip.  A girl becomes pregnant after starting the movie as a pre-schooler. The bones of a vain woman (Abbey Lee) calcify, turning her body into a mangled heap. 

     More cliched than perceptive, the movie has little to say aging, a topic that might given the movie real weight.

    None of the performances are notable, and I stopped trying to keep track of the cast other than to note that Alex Wolff has a somewhat extended turn as the boy of the early scenes at age 15. 

    Enough. Shyamalan has a hit-and-miss track record that includes movies such as Glass, Signs, The Village, Lady in the Water, and of course, The Sixth Sense. 

   Less mystique-oriented than some of Shyamalan's work, Old makes a lame attempt at social relevance, basing its screenplay on  Sandcastle, a graphic novel written by Pierre-Oscar-Levy and Frederick Peters.

     Not to disappoint his fans, Shyamalan gives Old one of his signature twists, a  big late-picture reveal that's easy enough to predict and which falls flat.  

     The finale strives for moral complexity but proves as unconvincing as the rest of a movie that already has drowned  in shallow thematic waters.    

       

Bob's Cinema Diary 6/23/20: 'Babyteeth,' 'Wasp Network,' 'Daddy Issues'

Babyteeth 

Talk about a parental nightmare. Your 16-year-old daughter falls for a 23-year-old drug user without a home. He's tattooed, sports a mullet, and doesn't seem to give a damn about anything. His name is Moses. That's the set-up for director Shannon Murphy's Babyteeth. But wait. There's more. Milla (Eliza Scanlen), the teenager in question, is no ordinary kid. She's got terminal cancer. So Milla's parents (Essie Davis and Ben Mendelsohn) face a problem. How do you say "no" to a kid who can't ruin her future because she doesn't have one?  Another teenage weepy about a kid with a terminal disease? Not exactly. Working from a screenplay by Rita Kalnejais, Murphy adds whimsical stylistic flourishes and enough emotional realism to upset expectations. A pianist who abandoned her musical career, Mom is about to drown in deep emotional waters. A psychiatrist by trade, Dad is so overcome with trepidation about what looms that at one point he gives himself a shot of morphine. Parental performances are strong but the movie belongs to Scanlen and Toby Wallace.  Wallace gives Moses lots of rough appeal. You never doubt that a good kid lurks beneath Moses' bad-kid surface. Babyteeth is the kind of movie you might approach with dread, but one that turns out to be more creative than you initially might have imagined. None of the characters want to be boxed-in by cliche. If Scanlen's name rings a bell, it might be because she played Beth in Little Women, one of last year's best-received movies.

Wasp Network

If you're looking for a good movie by director Olivier Assayas, you might want to try 2005's Summer Hours. I wish the same could be said for Assay's latest, Wasp Network, now showing on Netflix. Having already teamed with Assayas in 2010's Carlos, Edgar Ramirez plays a Cuban who in the 1990s leaves his wife (Penelope Cruz) and daughter to defect to the US. As we later learn, Ramirez's Rene Gonzalez is part of a Castro-conceived program to infiltrate Miami Cuban circles that carry out oppositional activities against the regime. A muddled narrative brings the so-called Wasp Network program to light, introducing two additional characters. Gael Garcia Bernal portrays team leader Gerardo Hernandez and Wagner Moura portrays a slick operative who takes a Cuban-American wife (Ana de Armas). Assayas seems to be aiming for epic scope, but can't put the pieces of the movie together in a way that staves off confusion. Although she doesn't get as much screen time as the men, Cruz makes a strong impression as a woman wounded by her husband's defection and betrayed by the revolution she avidly supports. The same goes for de Armas, another woman whose life becomes collateral damage as the plot unfolds. The performances are all strong, some of its scenes connect and the movie looks great, but Wasp Network registers as a misfire from a fine director and an extremely good cast.

Daddy Issues
Henrietta (Kimberley Datnow) moves from London to Los Angeles when she's summoned to join the board of her late father's firm. It seems that Henrietta -- who aspires to be a stand-up comic -- once lived with her dad and attended school in LA. That’s convenient because Henrietta has friends from back in the day, which means the movie has a supporting cast. Alice (Alice Carroll Johnson), one of Henrietta’s old pals, tries to convince a small group of reunited friends that she's a successful talent agent. In reality, she's a gay woman trying to make ends meet by providing non-sexual companionship for a benevolent Sugar Daddy who misses his late wife and only seems to want someone with whom he can watch TV. When Henrietta moves into her father's LA house, she learns that Nolan (Tanner Rittenhouse) also lives there. He works for dad's company and developed a relationship in which Dad became a kind of mentor. Henrietta's attempt to reunite with an old boyfriend goes nowhere. Director Laura Holliday never convinced me to care about any of this or to believe that Henrietta had real comedy chops. That would have been fine had Daddy Issues been a movie about the difference between wanting to do stand-up and actually pulling it off. Somewhere, there’s a movie here, but no one seems to have found it.

A boy longs for music in colorful 'Coco'

A Latino cast of characters fills Disney/Pixar's holiday entry. Oh, and by the way, the holiday is the Day of the Dead.

An animated movie built around Mexico's Day of the Dead and a story in which ruthless ambition and murder play pivotal roles? At first blush, such a movie seems like something that might have sprung from the imagination of director Tim Burton, no stranger to blending macabre touches into animated fare.

Not to worry. Disney/Pixar's Coco, which includes what might have been darkly hued ingredients, plants its feet firmly in a colorful world that serves as a backdrop for the movie's foray into Mexican culture. The Day of the Dead (Dia de Los Muertos) may be one of Coco's key events, but the movie puts its emphasis on family ties that extend through generations and, ultimately, serve as a source of strength for the living.

Guess what? The whole thing more or less works. Coco, Disney's holiday offering from Pixar, makes for an engaging entry into the canon of vividly realized Pixar animated features. To say that Coco bursts with visual diversity and color understates the case.

The story centers on Miguel (voice by Anthony Gonzalez), a boy who wants to follow in the footsteps of his hero, a recently deceased but enormously popular singer named Ernesto de la Cruz (voice by Benjamin Brett). De la Cruz became a singing sensation; young Miguel comes to believe that he's the great-great grandson of the venerable de la Cruz.

The problem: Miguel's family has gone into the shoemaking business and has forbidden all musical activity lest such frivolity upset Mama Coco, the shriveled family matriarch who gives the film its title. An explanation of the family's anti-musical stance would require spoilers. All I'll say is that the screenplay provides one.

According to the movie, the Day of the Dead marks the occasion on which the spirits of departed ancestors are supposed to return to mingle with their still-living loved ones. A series of plot machinations involving a trip to a local cemetery finds Miguel headed in the opposite direction.

Instead of awaiting the visits of the departed, he visits them in the Land of the Dead.

Much of Coco takes place in the Land of the Dead, a domain Disney treats as if it had been conceived as an addition to one of its theme parks, a fantastical world dominated by fully dressed skeletons, dazzlingly bright colors, vaulting towers, engaging characters, a busy transportation hub, and a villain who's more pompous than scary.

Miguel hopes his trip to the Land of the Dead will be productive: He wants to meet de la Cruz, receive the great singer's blessing and return home to pursue his musical dreams. But Miguel also meets Hector (voice by Gael Garcia Bernal), a tattered skeletal presence who's on the verge of being forgotten and who may have something to do with Miguel's quest.

Hector is that sorriest of souls. He'll be forgotten because there's no one to put his photo on a family shrine; he won't be able to cross the bridge that connects the living and the dead -- an arching display of marigold petals -- for a visit with his relatives. He'll vanish from his family's records, as if he never had lived.

I can't say exactly how kids will react to a story that makes room for jealousy, ego, and deceit, but I'm guessing that Coco's bright colors and Miguel's unflagging exuberance will stave off any bouts of kiddie fright and depression.

Besides, the skeletons in The Land of the Dead lean aren't immune from cartoonish behavior, coming apart and reconstituting when bones fly in different directions. These skeletons retain the personalities and relationships that they enjoyed in life. They're a lively bunch who give the lie to any notion that an afterlife might involve eternal rest.

Among the "dead" characters, Miguel finds his great-great grandmother (Alanna Noel Ubach). On the living side, we meet Miguel's grandmother (Renee Victor), a woman who serves as the family's enforcer, but who never fails to accompany discipline with robust expressions of love.

I've read that the filmmakers worked hard to incorporate authentic details of Mexican culture into the story and to sprinkle the dialogue with Spanish. Co-directed by Lee Unkrich and Adrian Molina, the movie also includes touches that anchor the story in the Land of Disney, notably a sidekick Xolo dog named Dante that accompanies Miguel on his adventures.

In Coco, Disney and Pixar realize a complex and visually dense world that contains music and musical numbers without being a musical.

The movie may encourage youngsters to ponder the perils of succumbing to the blinding light of celebrity and it shows -- in obviously literal fashion -- that there's much to be gained from honoring and remembering those who have gone before us. And, of course, there's the Disney value that transcends all cultures: pursuing a dream.

Selling the overthrow of a dictator

No offers a telling look at how Pinochet was ousted.
In 1988, Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet presumed that he had the muscle to survive a plebiscite on his rule, a victory that would squelch opposition while creating the illusion that the Chilean strongman had popular support. As we now know, Pinochet's rule came to an end. To his and many other people's amazement, Pinochet lost the plebiscite.

The movie No tells the story of that momentous vote through an unusual and narrow perspective, the ad campaign that was mounted against the Chilean strongman.

No was shot video-style (more on this later) in an apparent effort to match some of the original advertisements that were used by the campaign to oust Pinochet, ads that appeared on TV during a 15-minute, government-dictated time slot.

The story centers on Rene Saavedra (Gael Garcia Bernal), a young hotshot in Chile's advertising business. Rene more or less stumbles into the "No" campaign. For the most part, he's apolitical, a mindset that seems to have contributed to his estrangement from his more politically oriented wife (Antonia Zegers). The couple's young son lives with Rene, but he wishes that his wife would return home.

To the credit of director Pablo Larrain , the story doesn't morph into the expected tale of personal transformation: Rene's mind seems to expand a bit as the movie progresses, but he's no Che in waiting.

Rene learns what it's like to find himself on what many of his advertising pals view as the "wrong" side an issue, but he never entirely gives up the benefits that derive from his skills as an adman. It's almost as if the "No" campaign takes Rene from happy indifference to troubled ambivalence, hardly a radical leap.

Rene's boss -- played by Alfred Castro -- continually seeks to remind his talented young employee about where his bread is buttered, and Rene's hopped-up approach to advertising doesn't always play well with the political types behind the "No" campaign. They want to emphasize Pinochet's worst abuses.

Rene, whose immaturity is suggested by the fact that he likes to zip around on a skateboard, thinks the best way to sell "no" is by getting people to think "yes." Put another way, he's selling folks what most ads promise, a happy future.

One drawback: Larrain reportedly used video equipment of the period to make his film. I'm enough of a visual snob to say that I would have preferred a better-looking production, and the ads themselves can begin to feel repetitive.

Having said that, it's still worth noting that No manages -- through storytelling and the use of real ads and recreations -- to encapsulate part of the story about how the Pinochet regime received the boot.

I don't know enough about Chilean history to know whether the movie is spot-on. But Bernal's appealing performance and Larrain's view of the ways in which people can be manipulated combine for an intriguing take on how well-applied grease can help the wheels of history to turn.

Will Ferrell, the Spanish-language edition

If you know nothing about Mexican cinema, you might be fooled by Casa de me Padre into thinking that films produced in Mexico are poorly made, overly melodramatic, embarrassingly cheap and inadvertently silly. Those who know Mexican film understand that nothing could be further from the truth. Mexican cinema, though often neglected in the U.S., has had many periods of high achievement. What Will Ferrell & company have done in Casa de me Padre is to make a parodic version of the kind of movie they believe characterized Mexican cinema in the 1970s. Some critics have suggested that this subtitled movie, in which Ferrell and all the other actors speak Spanish, is more indicative of the work found in popular Spanish-language telenovelas. If you can get past all that, you may find some chuckles in what amounts to a courageous gamble for Ferrell, starring in a Spanish-language movie that may not appeal to his generally avid fan base. Ferrell plays Armando, the nerdy son of a rancher (Pedro Armendariz Jr.) Armendariz's Miguel Ernesto regards Armando as a lovable dolt, favoring his more wayward son Raul (Diego Luna).* When Raul arrives home with a beautiful woman (Genesis Rodriguez), papa is overjoyed. The smart son has returned. But all is not well. An illicit and often-brutal drug trade (led by a gangster known as La Onza (Gael Garcia Bernal) flourishes on the ranch. The movie plays a bit like an extended sketch, but Ferrell and his spirited comic cohorts plunge happily into material that draws much of its humor from the self-consciously shoddy way in which the film has been made. At one point, Ferrell and Rodriguez ride fake horses, a phony looking white cat adds mystical flourish, and no attempt is made to paper over holes in the movie's low-rent artifice. It's quite possible that Casa de me Padre -- a hit-and-miss affair that includes some amusing moments -- will become a footnote in Ferrell's career. Despite occasional burst of violence, the movie plays like a good-natured spoof that pokes fun at the kind of movies that, though presented with great seriousness, can't help but be perceived as preposterous.

*For those who like to keep track of passing time, it has been 11 years since Bernal and Luna appeared in the popular comedy, Y Tu Mamá También.