Including some of his and his brother’s short films, Sólo con tu pareja is the fifth Alfonso Cuarón film I’ve seen, each of them a telling of some slapstick sexual escapade (nope, I’ve not seen his Harry Potter film). With the exception of Y tu mamá también — an absolute masterpiece — each of these films has employed the same scenario with sparing variation: infidelity, homosexuality, or AIDS played for laughs in one or the other. It’s a competently entertaining farce, but its merits lie in the later work of Cuarón and cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki.
by Rumsey Taylor | Source: The Criterion Collection DVD
23 Oct 2006 11:05 AM | Comments (1)
I was excited to see this one – the trailer on the dvd looked great but I found it tedious. The whole (10-15 minute?) sequence of him running between his bed and his neighbors bed on the window ledge started off funny but dragged on like an SNL skit that repeats the same joke and never ends. Similarly the Japanese men belonged in one of several racist films from the early 80s (eg “Sixteen Candles”).
I found a lot of the sequences, including the last set piece on the tower felt like clever ideas for a commercial (not unlike the one he was trying to come up with a tagline for) but strung together didn’t add up to much of a story.
Wayne
29 October 2006
1:37 PM