journal features

movie review - Y Tu Mama Tambien

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-eight years and a million words

Toronto, 2002.11.13

This is kinky Mexican flick (the English title would be 'And your mother, too') about a 30-something woman and two teenage boys who go on a road trip. It was greeted with a great deal of hoopla, as certain films seem to be, and while I don't think it deserved all the fanfare, this is an interesting flick.

The film seems - while you're watching it - to be about the dismally venal boys, but morphs into something else. The sex is omnipresent and hasty and fully frontal. The plot surprises more from its obfuscated nature than in anything that develops in the movie. As with any film where you don't really know what's going on, this means you have to approach it with a good deal of patience. But it pays off, here.

Strongly recommended.

rand()m quote

It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled, or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena; whose face is marred by the dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions and spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best, knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who, at worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly; so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory or defeat.

—Theodore Roosevelt, Jr.