Saw Amores Perros. It was a sort of grimly stoic movie about various failed romances. The first revolves around two brothers both in love with a woman who is the wife of one of them. The married brother hits his wife and is professionally a petty thief. The unmarried brother is the underdog here, but makes his money via dog-fighting, so he's not exactly a savory fellow either. Also there's this sleazy attitude to the first segment that all that this battered woman really needs is a man who truly loves her (as evinced by his sincere and passionate lust.) I don't buy that the underdog brother would be really all that good for her, but he'd probably be better, so okay.
The next segment is about a married man who leaves his wife to take up with a model who then suddenly gets into a car accident, seriously breaking one leg. When she gets back from the hospital, her dog gets stuck in a crawl-space and so she sits around the house all day, surrounded by photos of herself pre-accident, and thinks about how she's gonna model anymore with one busted leg and listening to her dog skitter and whine under her floorboards (SYMBOLISM!) Needless to say, the romance suffers for it.
The last concerns a homeless-man / gun-for-hire who has a small pack of dogs that follow him around. Much more would give away serious plot points about his story, so I'll leave it at that. Dogs appear in all three stories as a kind of short-hand for human love & decency. It's a nice touch, but man, I really wish they hadn't started off with the dog-fights. There's a lot of dog-fighting and it's always just awful. Appropriately, I feel both brothers are kind of lacking in the milk of human kindness. The film gets much kinder after that first segment though, so hang in there if you can. The film also interleaves all three stories, jumping forward and backward in time. I was more entertained than I should probably let on, merely trying to place the chronology of a scene. The return to the same images and events over and over gives the film a feeling of weight which I'm not sure it earns. A very stylish and initially extremely abrasive film. I stayed up way too late watching this.
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