by MARK SLUTSKY

Once Upon a Time in Mexico

Robert Rodriguez’s last film in the trilogy also containing El Mariachi and Desperado is his second release in as many months, what with the last Spy Kids movie opening in August. It’s a weird one, this. Antonio Banderas returns as El Mariachi himself, haunted gunman and guitar player. He’s drawn out of retirement by Johnny Depp, very amusingly playing a rogue CIA agent, and sent to assassinate another assassin, the General who murdered his wife and child.

At this point the movie gets very, very confusing. There’s a lot of double-dealing and backstabbing as seemingly dozens of characters, each with their own agendas, appear on the scene, and suddenly the movie becomes needlessly complex. It feels like there’s at least five main characters and likewise at least half a dozen major bad guys; it gets to the point where you really have no idea what’s going on and who, if anyone, you should be rooting for. Apart from Banderas and Depp you’ve got Willem Dafoe as a drug lord, Mickey Rourke as his second-in-command, Ruben Blades as a retired FBI agent, Eva Mendes as a Mexican intelligence officer, Danny Trejo as… I forget what he is. And there’s Salma Hayek, who’s not in this movie nearly enough (she only appears in flashback, for some reason). It’s as if Rodriguez set out to make an epic and was forced along the way to compress it into 100 minutes or so of running time. There’s definitely some neat stuff here—shot on hi-def video, it’s bright and beautiful, with wildly vibrant colours and some really neat-looking mini set-pieces. But for all that, it never feels like a real movie. Or maybe it feels like it’s too many movies, jostling for space.

11’09”01

Eleven filmmakers, representing 11 separate nationalities, each offer up their own 11-minute take on the events of September 11, 2001 in this anthology film. As to be expected, the results are mixed, although there’s some really good stuff in here. Two stand out as immediately affecting—in Ken Loach’s segment, a Chilean survivor of the US-backed coup against Salvador Allende tells about his own country’s September 11 (the date of the coup, in 1973, which led to a regime that murdered over 30,000 people). A short, personal documentary, it’s devastating. Alejandro González Iñárritu’s piece consists almost entirely of sounds from the fall of the towers, against a black screen, that occasionally flashes with home video images from the day. Devoid of visual content (which, face it, most of us are at least partially desensitized to at this point), the sounds, of falling debris, screaming, confused onlookers, cell-phone calls, have an impact that’s visceral.

Samira Makhmalbaf, Claude Lelouch, Amos Gitaï, Shohei Imamura, Danis Tanovic , Idrissa Ouedraogo, Youssef Chahine, and Sean Penn also contribute shorts. Some take place in New York and deal directly with the events; others allude more elliptically to the issue, or concentrate on their impact in other parts of the world. Not all are good, but for the perspective it provides11’09”01 is a worthy and perhaps even necessary one. It deserves to be seen.

Cabin Fever

A clever twist on the slasher genre, though it doesn’t really add up to much. A bunch of none-too-intelligent college kids head out to the woods for a week of partying; soon after arriving they’re stalked by a mysterious killer. Only in this case the killer isn’t a psycho—it’s a disease! Necrotizing fasciitis, to be precise, the extremely terrifying “flesh-eating disease” that claimed Lucien Bouchard’s leg a few years back. It’s an invisible killer! The premise is pretty good and director Eli Roth clearly has a love for the conventions of cheap horror, especially of the ‘80s variety. There’s plenty of blood, and he’s not remiss in throwing a little nudity in there as well. The way the disease begins to show up is nice and icky (like a scene of a girl shaving her legs that just gets… well, you’d have to see it). That said, Cabin Fever does kind of peter out. It never builds to the big scary horror climax you’re waiting for, and as clever as the device of the invisible disease-killer is, the scariness wears off before half the movie’s done.

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