Asesinato en el Meneo

I have just finished watching my 50th movie for this year. I know, I know… I should have already passed the 100 mark… at this rate, 2003 will probably be my all time low… even worse than last year when I couldn’t even break the 200 mark for the first time ever… but this has been a busy year with the baby and all. Just imagine that in 2003 I haven’t been to the movies at all… the last time I set foot on a movie theatre was Dec. 3, 2002 for “Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets”... gee whiz!

I rented “Asesinato en el Meneo” the other day…

Real crappy movie… a low budget sexy comedy that failed at being sexy and definitely failed at being funny…. The plot is an insult to anyone with a half an IQ…. The acting feels as fake as a rubber chicken… Why do Costa Rican actors need to “recite” their lines as if they were on the stage of a trashy and sleazy play written by William Esquivel? Why can’t the so-called Costa Rican cinema movement move on beyond “Eulalia”? Why must everything produced in Costa Rica look like it was stolen from a late 70’s Mexican production? Why can’t Costa Rican “filmmakers” learn the delicate art of smart product placement instead of shamelessly turning the film into a 90-minute commercial? Why must they make an effort to show every actress half naked?... wait… let me re-think that last comment… maybe a little more Tinto Brass and a little less Mariano Laurenti would help…

Anyway… this artistic mediocrity reaches several other levels… there has never been any TV show we can actually be proud of… I know we’re exporting A Todo Dar… but are we proud of that?... The rest is just crap: La Pension, El Barrio, Caras Vemos… it’s all the same junk… the same old tired jokes… the same 30-minute long commercial… news flash… “pintas”, “playos”, “zorras” and “polos” stopped being funny somewhere back in the late 80s… move on!

What does it take to make a good independent foreign film? The answer is easy… A great story and creativity… According to the Internet Movie Database, “El Meneo” cost around $700.000 to make… Robert Rodriguez filmed “El Mariachi” (one of the best and most influential low budget foreign films ever made) in Mexico for about half that budget, took it to Sundance, won, found a distributor in the US and made a cool $4.2 million profit. Aren’t there any good stories in Costa Rica worth filming? 3 or 4 years ago, we had several short films that showed incredible potential… “La Pasion de Nuestra Señora”, “La Calera”, “Las Mascaras”, etc… What happened? How did we go from potential to crap?

And the new film out “Mujeres Apasionadas” (directed by “Eulalia” herself) does not give us any hope at all…