Tag: Mexican

Mexico loves its wrestling leagues. I mean, they love them more than 1980’s-90’s America loved Wrestling, which was a large amount. Sold out shows multiple days a week, celebrities with larger than life roles to play, schools, you name it.

Lucha Mexico is, for what I can tell, the first documentary to examine the life of these Mexican wrestles, their rise to fame, their daily lives, their training and more.

They also jump right into it. They introduce us to wrestlers like Shocker, 1000% Amazing (translated), Blue Demon Jr. (son of the famous Blue Demon), Strongman, El Gitano, Kemonito (the CMLL mascot), a guy named Fabian, and some lady wrestlers like Faby Apache and Sexy Star.

You may ask yourself, who the fuck cares? Good question. Besides a shit ton of people in Mexico, wrestling is still a big deal in parts of the world. Japan loves them, subsets of America love them, and so on. And there is no reason why we should only have one type of wrestler famous here. Why not the people with big personalities in Mexico as well?

Especially when you get to see them behind the mask.

Kemonito is so cute though.

Just kidding, we still don’t get to see them behind the mask. For those who don the mask, that has to become their lives. Blue Demon Jr. wears the mask for 18 hours a day, the other 6 is when he sleeps. Part of the persona is the mystique behind it, and technically with a mask they can have a life away from the ring. Blue Demon Jr. is probably just the extreme there being the son of a huge movie star/wrestling celebrity.

But not everyone wears a mask! Only like half the people have masks. Some people just revel in the celebrity like a normal American wrestler.

And honestly, overall, by about 2/3 of the way through I totally lost my interest. There are only so many people they can gradually introduce to us before I get a bit overwhelmed. At the same time, some people they introduced us to got a few minutes of time then never talked about again.

The stars of this film are basically Shocker, Strongman, and El Gitano. Blue Demon Jr. has a small and interesting segment, but not a whole lot. The ladies are introduced, Faby (who might have been the best female wrestler in the world at the time it was filmed?) gave some story but not enough. I don’t know really why her relationship with her husband ended, and Sexy Star was given a quick story and then again ignored.

I am not just upset either that Kemontio, clearly the best wrestler ever, wasn’t the main focus. He had his one and done segment and then it was over.

I guess what I am really saying is that the people they made this documentary about didn’t have enough charisma to carry most of the documentary. Either more variety or given more depth to the other wrestlers in this picture and I would have been more excited throughout the documentary.

I got very excited about watching Pulling Strings in theaters. Why? Because I had no idea what the movie was about. Zero. Never heard of it. But there it was, just a movie, screening in front of a boy, asking him to love it.

Mostly because I was the only one in the theater. Looks like no one else heard of it either. I was even more excited when I found out it was not rated. What hijinks might this movie provide? Sex on sex? Drugs on sex on crime? Who knows.

Wait. Or it could just be foreign. They don’t rate those movies always. If so, it’s probably just PG or something. Lame.

Foreignness confirmed.

Alejandro (Jaime Camil) is the lead singer of a mariachi band in Mexico City, Mexico. There are a lot of mariachi bands there, but he is the best singer, so really no competition at all. He used to write a lot of original songs too. Until, the incident.

This is actually a real incident, his wife died. Very sad. Now he is a single father, and he is failing at it. Because he works at night, the catholic church school feel like he is being a bad influence on his daughter. He is also in debt to some bad people. So he wants to send her away to her grandparents in Arizona, he just has to get a visa first. Well Rachel (Laura Ramsey) ain’t having none of his shit. He has none of the required forms, no stable income, a non official lease for his house. Nothing. No visa. She barely even looks at him or listens to him.

Speaking of Rachel, she is totally getting transferred to London, but her mother (Stockard Channing) disapproves and wants her to come home. The mom character annoys the piss out of me this movie, even though I think they were going for sympathetic, so I am done talking about her.

Anyways, she gets super drunk at her going away party (which Alejandro performs at), tries to sleep on a bus station, but Alejandro won’t allow that. She won’t tell him her address, because she doesn’t want to go home drunk to her mom, so he just takes her to his house. But she freaks out the next morning when she can’t find a laptop from her boss (Tom Arnold), which has important government data on it. Alejandro finds it in his house, but decides to lead her on a multi day ruse first, where he helps her find it through the back alleys of Mexico, with “scary people” just played by his friends. This will show him as dependable, hard working, smart, and get him that visa! He is …pulling her strings, and also pulls strings on his guitar. Get it?

Alejandro’s best friend comes along for the ride (Omar Chaparro), and also Rachel’s best friend every once in awhile (Catherine Papile).

All in the sexiest van known to man. What an adventure this will be!

For those wondering, this movie is not 100% Spanish. Heck no, we got at least four American characters in here, and they are all embassy people or mothers, so when they interact, all English baby. Also, Rachel doesn’t know Spanish fluently, so she mostly speaks in English to Alejandro. So there is that.

And because we are dealing with a mariachi singer, we totally get a lot of mariachi music. And shit, that Jaime Camil guy can really sing. They gave us subtitles during that part, but I chose to ignore them, because reading lyrics is stupid. I just wanted to feel the music, and the music felt good.

Like any romance movie, this one is based off of lies. They will fall in love, but when she finds out he was lying for two days, she won’t like that. We do get other cliches, we even get the rush to the airport to stop her one. Thankfully, the cliches it seems to openly acknowledge, so we end up getting changes from the norm at the same time.

Overall, I thought this was a really cute movie. It had music, it had a budding romance, it had comedy, and it had a cute ending. 100% of the people in the theater with my agreed with this rating.