Best movie of this year hands down!

Undescribable Perfection

Thanks for the memories!

Sadly Over-hyped

If you watch this film today chances are you'll come to it having already seen Alejandro Inarritu's more recent, famous English work like 'Birman' (2014) and 'The Revenant' (2015), both of which rank as modern classics. Having already seen both of the above I was interested to know what Inarritu's Mexican films were like and I was not disappointed. 'Amores Perros' or 'Love's a Bitch,' the title being a pun on both love itself and dogs, both of which feature prominently.The basic premise of the film is a now well established and copied trope of a central, connecting event through which a variety of stories are spun off, usually in cities. In 'Amores Perros' a car crash brings our three main stories together and a variety of love and situations, types of love and good and bad outcomes. The most interesting is the final and climatic arc of the El Chivo character, who is dotted throughout the first two stories in a mysterious and half taunting method, drawing us closer to the finale and his piece.There is a tendency in films like this to fall into melodrama but Innarritu maintains the realism of his picture well. The brutality of the interconnected stories too, also feel realistic. The only real problem with it is some now very dated music for the soundtrack which sticks the film in its late 90s/early noughties feel. There is also a danger that such films attempt to say too much about life in too little time or too much. Whilst Amores Perros runs for about two and a half hours at no point does it feel too long nor does the film feel like Inarritu is attempting to say all he can about love, life, cruelty and the world.The role of dogs in their human masters and abuser's affairs is a clever little motif that helps draw the stories together. They, as much as the human cast, deserve applause. For the most part the characters we are privileged and horrified to be privy to their lives feel real, honest and actual people. There is sympathy yes, but never too much and the ugliness of humanity is made clear without falling victim to dull nihilism.Even the shaky, gritty camera-work feels fresh despite its 2000 release date. Whereas action films since the Bourne series and its various descendants have killed shaky cameras before repeatedly desecrating their graves and using their corpses the setting and context of Inarritu's work means that the cinematography works well.All in all whilst it's not a perfect film 'Amores Perros' does what any good drama should do, deliver dramatic situations, sequences, stories and make us feel for the characters in equal parts pity and disgust.

The movie is a reflection on the cruelty of humans towards both animals and other humans, showing how humans may live dark or even hideous lives. But the film's theme is loyalty, as symbolized by the dog, "man's best friend". Dogs are important to the main characters in each of the three stories, and in each story various forms of human loyalty or disloyalty are shown: disloyalty to a brother by trying to seduce the brother's wife, disloyalty to a wife by keeping a mistress with subsequent disloyalty to the mistress when she is injured and loses her beauty, loss of loyalty to youthful idealism and rediscovered loyalty to a daughter as a hit-man falls from and then attempts to regain grace.

Amores perros, in the style of 21 Grams or Crash (21 grams coming from the same director, Crash from a different director I believe), tells 3 stories about 3 different people (or pairings of people, actually), from 3 completely different walks of life in Mexico City that are united by an unfortunate and tragic car accident. Each struggle with love and loss, illusion vs. reality, as well as loneliness/isolation. Alejandro Gonzales Innaritu is a brilliant director and producer. Amores Perros is a film that can be viewed multiple times and interpreted slightly differently each time. The script is also so well written that the characters do and say just enough to tell the story, but leave enough vagueness to make you question the depth of their character and their motivations. Each story is accompanied by a parallel story involving man's best friend, el perro, the dog. All characters are accompanied by dogs, who mirror their life experiences in some aspect, as well as physical appearance (if you look closely enough). A perfect fit for the Spanish and English titles of the movie. You can tell every single little detail of this movie has been well thought out and carefully crafted. An excellent watch.

The movie serves the viewers with three sub-stories which don't really correlate. It opens up strongly with a sequence that serves as an anchor for all those sub stories. But the anchor isn't the only congruency point this movie uses. There are other quite meaningless rendezvous where the focus characters, who don't really know each other, meet and don't really share any line of dialog. But those smaller rendezvous serve well as time anchors, helping the viewers understand the timings of each scene. The stories also come very strong. Focusing on different backgrounds for each story, They each reveal themselves full of varied surprises and twists, although some of them are fairly predictable. The acting overall is just another decent effort. It sure is not really this movie's strongest point. But again, the story and the general story flow alone should suffice to make this movie good entertainment.