Rubicx

Having visited Argentina several times and knowing about some of its great movies, I had looked forward to seeing The Owners (Los Dueños). Unfortunately, I found the movie incredibly dull and slow and for a country that is known for good looking people, I had to ask myself why was every cast member somewhere in a range from burnt out to below average to bad looking. The director clearly abused his privileges regardless of story. The knife scrapping across the toast, the drive backwards in the car, the melancholic faces, but so what? What did any of those directorial scenes add to the story. Nothing. Argentina can do much better than this film.

I'm a fan of his books, but this movie seemed like I was watching the same scene over and over again. Someone wrote they took the magical realism out in order to make the film more realistic to the daily lives of Mexicans. Well, first, they should have kept the magical realism in, it would have been more cinematic. Second, I never got the impression we were in Mexico but rather in some ambiguous place in Latin America, maybe Colombia, but with all the different Spanish accents who the heck knew where we were. The director maybe Mexican but that does not make it a Mexican story nor part of the new Mexican cinema. At the very least the acting was good and the cinematography, too.

You know a movie sucks when half of it has to be narrated. Even worst, we spent the first 20 minutes getting a lecture about Henry Ford's car production, the 1929 Wall Street crash, the great depression and prohibition, before we even got into the "story." Was this a movie about an underdog and his horse or a 7th grade social studies class?! An hour later, the movie was interspersed with other historical facts "a la Ken Burns" style with footnotes and still images about the New Deal, etc. The studio must have assumed that the audience was stupid and did not know that the film was set in the 1920s/30s/40s.

Fortunately, the sets were top quality and most of the lead actors were good, albeit they did not have much to tell us. If you are looking for emotion then you will have to depend on the music.