ejamessnyder The story here is as clever as it is simple. Two brothers and a friend hit the road in search of a dying Mexican folk singer who, according to legend, once made Bob Dylan cry with one of his touching ballads. While there are numerous side stories and plenty of character development, the plot doesn't get a whole lot deeper than that, and it is all the better for it. In that sense, the filmmakers knew exactly what they were doing and they achieved it wonderfully.The film has a few flaws, but overall I thought it was pretty good. It could have been shorter, but the pacing is great. I felt like a few of the scenes were added just to ensure a sufficient running time and they could have been cut. One thing I loved about the film was that we never actually hear the music of the fictional Mexican folk singer that the brothers are following. Their car's cassette player is broken so they only ever listen to him via headphones. We are left to watch their silent reactions and fill in the missing pieces for ourselves. I'm not sure if the filmmakers had intended to possibly insert music during post production and then decided against it, but either way it is very effective and well done.Without giving anything away, the ending of the film is right in line with the rest of the film's pacing. It is slow and anticlimactic, but we still end up feeling like everything turned out just the way it should, much like the characters are left feeling. And it is totally hilarious, but in such a dry way that you just might miss it.Despite being a road film in essence, with characters traveling around and getting into adventures, Güeros isn't about story or characters so much as it is about a feeling. It's a feeling that most of us likely experience at some point in our lives, and for that reason most people will be able to relate to this film on some level.

SnoopyStyle Sombra and Santos are aimless youths in Mexico City. There is a student strike at the University and the guys are striking against the strike. Sombra is surprised to find Tomás at his apartment. He's been sent there by their mother. Mexican rock musician Epigmenio Cruz is supposedly hospitalized and Tomás wants to visit him. The guys search for him and encounter a series of incidents.The first forty minutes are aimless. It's a lazy hazy afternoon of nothing dramatic. It could be a lost start and then the road trip happens. The situations get more interesting. It's all in black and white. It has a dreamy quality. It has some compelling moments and an overall feel of adventure.

lasttimeisaw A voguish feature debut from Mexican filmmaker Alonso Riuzpalacios, shot entirely in Black and White with an uncommon 1.37:1 aspect ratio. GUEROS is a pristine debut full of promise but also sink into the filmmaker's own ideal existential wallow.In the opening scenes, the film directly prints the explanation of the word "güeros" on the screen, in case us foreign audience cannot catch the meaning, and it proposes two options, it is either a discrimination against colour or against homosexuality. And the film only deals one of the two. Set the backdrop of an undefined time (where Walkman is still popular, I suppose, should be in the 90s), Tomás (Aguirre) is a young boy lived with his widow mother, being too naughty, he is sent to live with his big brother Federico aka. Sombra (Huerta), who is a college student living with his roommate Santos (Ortizgris) in their messy apartment.While the university students are in the middle of a massive strike. The trio lay around in the apartment doing nothing. Since Tomás is a devotee of an over-the-hill musician Epigmenio Cruz (Charpener), who is sent to hospital due to poor health, the news triggers his quest to find him and ask for an autograph. So the story maunders around a two-day road trip, en route they visit the hospital, bump into some dangerous thug, reunite with Ana (Salas), a fervent activist student in the campus, party-crash, go to the zoo while Sombra has to face his worst nightmare, a tiger, and eventually track down Epigmenio in a remote cantina. Ostensibly, it is another plot-doesn't-matter ethos-journey combined with political agenda, budding romance, surrealistic touch, fly-on-the-wall realism and the dry humour.The picture exudes appealing élan thanks to its swift camera movement, monochromatic freshness and the idiosyncratic treatment of the fictional Cruz's music - a muffled void defies categorisation. But, the momentum doesn't hold up, soon, the journey deflates into an aimless wander, pry into the underbelly of a contemporary Mexico but never reach a cinematic catharsis or produce any prospective worth of excitement, the main characters are bankrupt of any empathy or charisma to keep up audience's attention of their often arbitrary behaviour. It is a film eventually fails to live up to its master-class craftsmanship, but considering its successful tournament in the international festival circuits, I might again find myself in a minority of one, to each his own taste, GÜEROS doesn't emerge as a comprehensively outstanding film in spite of its uniqueness.

linkogecko First of all, there is a simple question to ask yourself in order to find out if you're likely to enjoy this movie: have you seen and enjoyed films like P.T. Anderson's "Inherent Vice" and "Punch-Drunk Love"; or the Coens' "A Serious Man" and "Inside Llewyn Davis"; or even that other work in the oddly specific Mexican cinema genre of "Mexico City's disenchanted youth living in unidades habitacionales (low-income housing complexes, similar to the British council estates or the U.S. projects), going from action to action without much ambition, peppered with existential and black humor and shot in black and white" that is "Temporada de Patos" ("Duck Season")? If so, boy are you gonna love this one!"Güeros"'s title referring to white people might make one think that this is a politically-charged deconstruction of racism and classism in Mexico, but much like the film makes a point of saying how difficult it is to define who IS a "güero" in Mexico, it also makes a point of saying how difficult it is to define pretty much ANYTHING in this culture. Politics and society unquestionably play a role in the film, but more as a backdrop (an inescapable one if you happen to live here) than as a main subject. Overall, the film is content in hopping from place to place and short mission to short mission, only offering glimpses of the reality it is set in, in order to make its grandest statement that is about, well... nothing.Much like most of the films mentioned at the start, "Güeros" is existentialist at its core, the aimlessness and lack of a point IS the point. Unlike other pointless films however, "Güeros" is rarely boring. The chemistry between the main characters, the tiny mysteries woven into their world, the gorgeously simplistic imagery, the unexpected twists (including some weird meta references and even an instance of the fourth wall being broken) and, most of all, the amazingly witty dialogue ("Güeros" is FAR more, and more universally, funny than the vast majority of Mexican films that have the gall to call themselves "comedies") make the experience of watching this film more enjoyable and more likely to stay with you than most other films of its kind.