Am i the only one who thinks........Average?

I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

While it is a pity that the story wasn't told with more visual finesse, this is trivial compared to our real-world problems. It takes a good movie to put that into perspective.

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

What I've discovered in Sangre de mi Sangre, a recent thriller about two Mexican boys who go to New York, is the movie I thought Slumdog Millionaire would be. This is a genuine film about living in poverty and maybe surviving it. Slumdog is an unjust combination of positive thinking and Hollywood clichés that results in a severe lack of authenticity. It may have been an effort to depict India's economic landscape, yet its sanitized, unrealistic story undermines the effort to present poverty holistically. Sangre avoids this simple mistake by showing us potentially real people in a situation entirely conceivable. It also takes place in a wealthy country and forces us to focus our attention squarely on the poor characters.Pedro and Juan are two older teenagers who pay off a good ol' boy to enter the United States. They may be of similar age, but Pedro is much less experienced at being an adult. He's idealistic that he will meet his father in New York City and live the American dream. His father is said to own a restaurant. Juan is less calculated and more opportunistic. He is going to New York because that's where a lot of immigrants go. The two meet on the bus ride up there, and Juan slips away with Pedro's documentation and, thus, his identity.In New York, a distraught Pedro wanders around until he meets another impoverished Spanish speaker in Magda. She has the distinction of being a U.S. citizen that can speak both languages. She originally attempts to have him arrested since it would invigorate her droll life of selling trinkets and sex. The two of them fall into an awkward, survivalist love. As nice as it is to have another person around, you still have to think about yourself on occasion. Pedro is scarcely able to do this and rescues Magda from a pervert who pays him for use of her body. He would've gained fifty bucks too.Juan has no qualms with living ruthlessly in New York. He meets the father character and convinces him he is Pedro. The old man is just an employee at a restaurant and has been emotionally hardened due to years of lonely labor. He doesn't respond the way Juan wants him to at first. Juan preserves and partially fulfills the sueño americano by earning some money and the old man's trust. He now has the money to get laid. Who do you think he consults? Pedro sees him and attacks him, and the fitter boy wins.It is hard not to see the biological influence in this film. It takes place in 21st century New York and Darwin's wisdom still applies. The circumstances have changed, but the more dominant male triumphs over the lesser one. Juan is the narrative's antagonist despite his being the natural hero. It's rare for a domestic movie to be so blunt.The filmmakers do not make a stance as to which side they support. The film is almost a documentary in its unbiased focus on each of its main characters. Pedro's part is more memorable because it provides the human focus needed in this fictional film. Everything in Juan's life is based on his imperative to survive. His parts are rather boring with forced humor about his out of touch views regarding women. We didn't want to see a movie about Juan, but as this film is a dissertation on poverty, he had to be the winner.

Mr. Zalla is a very good director, he gets wonderful performances from the actors and demonstrates a great sense of visual composition. However the writing is sloppy at best, the story does not hold water, is filled with inconsistencies and maintains a gruesome, almost sordid tone to a movie that could have said just as much about the condition of immigrants without stripping them of their humanity. That the characters are flawed is expected, but must they all be beyond hope of redemption? A day after seeing this movie, I am still making lists of all the details that did not add up or were entirely too coincidental for such an otherwise "realistic" movie. The soundtrack by Brian Cullman is excellent. One wishes there was more of it.

I saw this film at Sundance -- and was blown away -- it is a fascinating film and extremely well done. There are a lot of different ways to look at the immigration issue, but I think that Chris Zalla chose a unique path. However, what was so beautiful about this film is that it is not an immigration movie -- that is what I loved. It was a human story. A family story. Painful, but uplifting all at the same time. I was riveted by the actors, especially Paola Mendoza, who I think is incredibly talented. I hope that films like this can open up a dialogue about the immigration issue in this country, as I think that it is time for us, as a nation, deal with this problem. I look forward to seeing the film again.

My wife and I saw Padre Nuestro, now called Sangre De Mi Sangre at a special showing at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston and were treated to a question and answer session by the Director/writer, Christopher Zalla. The name of the movie was changed from Padre Nuestro to its new title in Mexico where it had a fairly wide distribution to avoid confusion with an earlier light weight comedy made in Chile with the same title. This movie is anything but light weight as it revolves around the gritty life experiences of illegal aliens struggling to survive in the United States in a dog eat dog world.This movie contains wonderful performances from each of its four principal characters and Jesus Ochoa (Diego), who is the most well recognized of the Mexican cast, fills the screen with a performance as large as his girth. Armando Hernandez (Juan) deserves mention for an equally powerful performance with only a slightly lesser efforts from Jorge Adrian Espindola (Pedro) and Paola Mendoza (Magda, which certainly did not detract from the excellence of this film.Filmed on location in a gritty industrial section of Brooklyn, the story contains a sense of believability with only a modest level of contrivance necessary to develop a credible, seamless story line. A powerful movie, which measured up to its success at the Sundance film festival in 1987. The movie will have a limited release in the United States at a single theatre in five city's during the month of May, 2008, so it may not be widely seen, which would be a shame. I look forward to seeing Christopher's next film which we are told will be set in a Bolivian prison for Brad Pitt's Plan B Entertainment and which may star Don Cheadle.