52james

I have never tried to lower an IMDb score before, but all the high reviews of this film comes from its heart beating in the socially political and ideological right place. Show it in a class to teach youngsters about the horrors of immigration if you like, but please don't pretend it's a great film! Again and again, El Norte shows crude and forced unbelievable scenes so clearly intended to make its ethics felt that the aesthetics of the viewing experience gets jolted right out of the realm of suspended disbelief. The rats in the "sewer," for example, are as fake as the pipe the poor Guatemalans creep through. The transition of filthy LA hovel from dump to blessed tidy homestead feels to me yet another instance of A Clear Point Being Made. Even the comic laundry machine instruction go way past realism into some ditsy insistence that rich white matrons are too spoiled by their ease to imagine how insanely unreal their control over Life really is. Usually a film rated in the high sevens at IMDb can be relied on for a good cinematic experience. This version of the American Dream is more a nightmare of forced ideology, supported by handsome actors reading lines as well as you could expect, with Dream Scenes insisting on the Big Points, but a script preaching so hard that only the Choir could rate it above a 5. I give it 2 in hopes others might help get the Imaginary High Seven back down to a score it deserves.

I enjoyed the beginning and very end of this film, but in the middle where the engaged photographer gets lost while his fiancée is in the hospital I really felt like quitting. If you can endure him getting a ukulele in the gift shop, you've got way more grit than I. And his inability to come up with even one good line to explain why his beautiful girl should stay with him? Aw, come on! How can he be that stupid?! I just couldn't believe anyone could be so entirely clueless as our hero in the aimless witless wandering inner 30 minutes of this film. Maybe if you've got a fast-forward that could allow you to watch the loser less closely—as you'd speed-read or skim through some scenes you can't enjoy in an otherwise good book—then you could rate this much higher than I can for the way it sags in its excruciatingly dimwitted longueurs. I know theoretically I shouldn't hold it against the film itself that its hero is such a sap; but he's such an incredibly stupid jerk for such a while, I just can't forgive the movie for making me share his bad company!

I had to add my few impressions just to get the average review feeling for this film up closer to the score it really deserves. Beautiful photography and deliciously fitting music give the road trip a genuine convincing real emotional satisfying impact. I wasn't looking for plot, so didn't miss there not being one. The film makers here know how a film depends on feelings evoked by imagery and believably suspenseful drama. How you can get that without plot is how this movie works. That a feeble little VW micro-bus can get so much mileage with so little power is the impressive surprise. Yep, lotsa higher-powered vehicles pass it by, or find it's in their way. But Linas keeps on driving along and we get somewhere pretty satisfying eventually.