Official "Once Upon A Time In Mexico" Discussion Thread
08-25-03, 11:39 PM
#101
Moderator
Originally posted by David_M
Would it have been better if he had posted after the fact, and gave a review at the same time?
Would it have been better if he had posted after the fact, and gave a review at the same time?
08-30-03, 04:25 PM
#102
DVD Talk Hall of Fame
o..k just saw the making of on Bravo where ROBERT RODRIGUEZ says in HIS OWN FK'N WORDS, that ONCE UPON IN MEXICO is PART 4 ant the Flashbacks are PART 3 [he called it a phantom part]... anyway I can't remeber the POOR MEMBER that was ATTACKED in this thread for stating this before, poor fellow I Apologize for Doubting U
... Oh yeah it was ME
the TV guide list the replay at 1am, so check ure local listings and check it out
... Oh yeah it was MEthe TV guide list the replay at 1am, so check ure local listings and check it out
08-30-03, 09:52 PM
#103
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But if there is no plan to create a seperate film and title it part 3, this film in itself will be Part 3 and not part 4. 
the poor member still needs the bashing.
the poor member still needs the bashing.
09-11-03, 03:42 AM
#104
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Official "Once Upon A Time In Mexico" Discussion Thread
Usually, I just tag along to whomever starts a movie thread [and sometimes it's some lucky soul who gets to see it early].
Well, I haven't seen it yet but I wanted to start the thread.
And since it doesn't open for another 30 or so hours, I figured i'd post an interesting article from today's Miami Herald to tide us over...
Director attempts western with 'Once Upon a Time in Mexico'
Once Upon a Time in Mexico is being billed as the final installment in Robert Rodriguez's trilogy, after El Mariachi and Desperado, about the gun-toting mariachi with no name. But the writer-director wants to let you in on a little secret.
''This is really part four,'' he says with a smile. 'We ended up skipping part three altogether. It's a very strange movie, like waking up after drinking too much tequila and going 'Where am I?' ''
At the end of 1994's Desperado, Antonio Banderas (as the mysterious mariachi) and Salma Hayek (as his beloved Carolina) rode off into the sunset together, leaving a trail of corpses -- most of them bad guys -- in their wake. But Mexico, which opens Friday, picks up several years later, relegating the duo's relationship to flashbacks.
Like its title implies, Mexico is an epic, and, as Rodriguez explains, "a movie about Antonio and Salma wouldn't be epic.''
MAKING `DOLLARS'
Rodriguez credits Quentin Tarantino, who made a cameo appearance in Desperado, with giving him the idea for Mexico.
"On the set of Desperado, Quentin had it all in his head already. He was saying `This is your Dollars trilogy! No one has done this since Sergio Leone. El Mariachi is A Fistful of Dollars. Desperado will be For a Few Dollars More. And now you gotta do The Good, The Bad and the Ugly. It's gotta be epic. And you gotta call it Once Upon a Time in Mexico.'
'And I said `That's very interesting, Quentin, but let's shoot this scene and get this movie done first.' I really didn't think that was ever going to happen.''
Rodriguez, who says he feels closer in spirit to his Spy Kids movies than the genre films (From Dusk Til Dawn, The Faculty) he is best known for, says the main reason he agreed to make Desperado -- a $7 million sequel to his $7,000 debut El Mariachi -- was to show studio executives he was capable of making a big-looking movie for a budget that, by Hollywood standards, was definitely small-time.
Upon its release, Desperado grossed a modest $25 million -- a nice return on Sony Pictures' original investment, but still disappointing by action-movie standards. ''Desperado was a little ahead of its time,'' Rodriguez says. "It was Salma's first English-language movie and Antonio's first Hollywood starring role. It was action, but very ethnic, and a lot of people didn't think it would have universal appeal.''
But Desperado eventually found its audience on cable TV and home video -- it was the first title Sony released on the DVD format -- which led the studio to ask Rodriguez if he'd be interested in making another one.
SHOOT FIRST, EDIT LATER
Rodriguez, who had fallen in love with the ease and portability of the high-definition digital cameras he had just used to make 2001's Spy Kids, was excited by the creative freedom the equipment would allow him to bring to a large-scale action picture. But he was already contractually bound to have Spy Kids II ready for a summer 2002 release date, and if he put Mexico on the back burner, an impending actors' strike (which never materialized) threatened to push the film into Hollywood limbo.
"I told Sony `I can go shoot this movie right now, because Antonio is free, Salma is free, everyone is available, but I won't be able to edit it until I shoot, edit and release Spy Kids II.' It would have to sit in a can for a year, waiting to be edited. And they said yes.''
Armed with a budget of ''less than $30 million,'' Rodriguez rushed into preproduction, heading down to Mexico to scout locations while still writing the script. Inspired by The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, Rodriguez decided to make the Mariachi one of three main characters.
''The guy with the guitar case was so iconic, I had to come up with some really cool, archetypal characters. I just started drawing and came up with a guy with no eyes and a guy with no face, and then I constructed a story around those three guys, something with multiple storylines that would live up to the title,'' he explains.
What he came up with was a complicated tangle of double and triple crosses involving renegade CIA agents, a political coup, a presidential assassination attempt and lots and lots of John Woo-style gunplay.
FREEDOM FOR `MEXICO'
Because he makes profitable movies at a price, the studios give Rodriguez whatever creative freedom he wants, allowing him to carry out all aspects of post-production at his 63-acre ranch home near Austin, Texas, where he lives with his wife Elizabeth Avellan (who doubles as his producer) and their three sons.
That creative freedom also serves as a lure for actors, who know the project won't end up being wrested from the director's hands in order to satisfy the marketing whims of studio executives.
''Actors often get frustrated when they read a script that they like and when they get to the set, the director is not charged up anymore, the producer is all over them, the script has been changed and the movie doesn't come out like they thought it would,'' Rodriguez says.
With a cast that included Johnny Depp, Willem Dafoe, Mickey Rourke, Ruben Blades and Enrique Iglesias (making his Hollywood debut), shooting began on Mexico in Rodriguez's traditional rapid-fire style. Rodriguez says serving as his own cinematographer and production designer actually makes for less work.
"You can be thinking about the lighting and production design while you're writing, so when you get to the set, you just have to concentrate on what's really important, which is the actor's performance.''
QUICK SHOT
As he had done in the past, Rodriguez also scheduled the shoot so each actor could come in and shoot their respective roles on consecutive days, often in sequence, and then get out. Depp, for example, only spent eight days on the Mexico set, even though he's onscreen for more than half the movie.
''Johnny had never shot a movie that quick,'' Rodriguez says. 'On his last day, he was like `Is there anything else I can do?' But every day he was there, he was working from beginning to end. If this movie had been shot on a regular schedule, he still would have worked for eight days. They would have just been spread out over eight weeks.''
Once Upon a Time in Mexico is the fourth movie Rodriguez has completed in the last three years, but the director says he has no plans to slow down. He's already planning his next two films, one a computer-animated feature, the other a psychological thriller that he describes as "Hitchcock on acid.''
''I really make work easy for myself, because I don't have the pressure of a studio hanging over me, so it doesn't feel like work. If I went to L.A. and did The Hulk or something, that would be work. But when you work for yourself from your home, it's like running a Latin restaurant where the entire family pitches in,'' he says. "You can eat there, you can work there, you make people happy and you sleep in the back. So you never want to leave. It doesn't get any better than that.''
Once Upon a Time in Mexico is being billed as the final installment in Robert Rodriguez's trilogy, after El Mariachi and Desperado, about the gun-toting mariachi with no name. But the writer-director wants to let you in on a little secret.
''This is really part four,'' he says with a smile. 'We ended up skipping part three altogether. It's a very strange movie, like waking up after drinking too much tequila and going 'Where am I?' ''
At the end of 1994's Desperado, Antonio Banderas (as the mysterious mariachi) and Salma Hayek (as his beloved Carolina) rode off into the sunset together, leaving a trail of corpses -- most of them bad guys -- in their wake. But Mexico, which opens Friday, picks up several years later, relegating the duo's relationship to flashbacks.
Like its title implies, Mexico is an epic, and, as Rodriguez explains, "a movie about Antonio and Salma wouldn't be epic.''
MAKING `DOLLARS'
Rodriguez credits Quentin Tarantino, who made a cameo appearance in Desperado, with giving him the idea for Mexico.
"On the set of Desperado, Quentin had it all in his head already. He was saying `This is your Dollars trilogy! No one has done this since Sergio Leone. El Mariachi is A Fistful of Dollars. Desperado will be For a Few Dollars More. And now you gotta do The Good, The Bad and the Ugly. It's gotta be epic. And you gotta call it Once Upon a Time in Mexico.'
'And I said `That's very interesting, Quentin, but let's shoot this scene and get this movie done first.' I really didn't think that was ever going to happen.''
Rodriguez, who says he feels closer in spirit to his Spy Kids movies than the genre films (From Dusk Til Dawn, The Faculty) he is best known for, says the main reason he agreed to make Desperado -- a $7 million sequel to his $7,000 debut El Mariachi -- was to show studio executives he was capable of making a big-looking movie for a budget that, by Hollywood standards, was definitely small-time.
Upon its release, Desperado grossed a modest $25 million -- a nice return on Sony Pictures' original investment, but still disappointing by action-movie standards. ''Desperado was a little ahead of its time,'' Rodriguez says. "It was Salma's first English-language movie and Antonio's first Hollywood starring role. It was action, but very ethnic, and a lot of people didn't think it would have universal appeal.''
But Desperado eventually found its audience on cable TV and home video -- it was the first title Sony released on the DVD format -- which led the studio to ask Rodriguez if he'd be interested in making another one.
SHOOT FIRST, EDIT LATER
Rodriguez, who had fallen in love with the ease and portability of the high-definition digital cameras he had just used to make 2001's Spy Kids, was excited by the creative freedom the equipment would allow him to bring to a large-scale action picture. But he was already contractually bound to have Spy Kids II ready for a summer 2002 release date, and if he put Mexico on the back burner, an impending actors' strike (which never materialized) threatened to push the film into Hollywood limbo.
"I told Sony `I can go shoot this movie right now, because Antonio is free, Salma is free, everyone is available, but I won't be able to edit it until I shoot, edit and release Spy Kids II.' It would have to sit in a can for a year, waiting to be edited. And they said yes.''
Armed with a budget of ''less than $30 million,'' Rodriguez rushed into preproduction, heading down to Mexico to scout locations while still writing the script. Inspired by The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, Rodriguez decided to make the Mariachi one of three main characters.
''The guy with the guitar case was so iconic, I had to come up with some really cool, archetypal characters. I just started drawing and came up with a guy with no eyes and a guy with no face, and then I constructed a story around those three guys, something with multiple storylines that would live up to the title,'' he explains.
What he came up with was a complicated tangle of double and triple crosses involving renegade CIA agents, a political coup, a presidential assassination attempt and lots and lots of John Woo-style gunplay.
FREEDOM FOR `MEXICO'
Because he makes profitable movies at a price, the studios give Rodriguez whatever creative freedom he wants, allowing him to carry out all aspects of post-production at his 63-acre ranch home near Austin, Texas, where he lives with his wife Elizabeth Avellan (who doubles as his producer) and their three sons.
That creative freedom also serves as a lure for actors, who know the project won't end up being wrested from the director's hands in order to satisfy the marketing whims of studio executives.
''Actors often get frustrated when they read a script that they like and when they get to the set, the director is not charged up anymore, the producer is all over them, the script has been changed and the movie doesn't come out like they thought it would,'' Rodriguez says.
With a cast that included Johnny Depp, Willem Dafoe, Mickey Rourke, Ruben Blades and Enrique Iglesias (making his Hollywood debut), shooting began on Mexico in Rodriguez's traditional rapid-fire style. Rodriguez says serving as his own cinematographer and production designer actually makes for less work.
"You can be thinking about the lighting and production design while you're writing, so when you get to the set, you just have to concentrate on what's really important, which is the actor's performance.''
QUICK SHOT
As he had done in the past, Rodriguez also scheduled the shoot so each actor could come in and shoot their respective roles on consecutive days, often in sequence, and then get out. Depp, for example, only spent eight days on the Mexico set, even though he's onscreen for more than half the movie.
''Johnny had never shot a movie that quick,'' Rodriguez says. 'On his last day, he was like `Is there anything else I can do?' But every day he was there, he was working from beginning to end. If this movie had been shot on a regular schedule, he still would have worked for eight days. They would have just been spread out over eight weeks.''
Once Upon a Time in Mexico is the fourth movie Rodriguez has completed in the last three years, but the director says he has no plans to slow down. He's already planning his next two films, one a computer-animated feature, the other a psychological thriller that he describes as "Hitchcock on acid.''
''I really make work easy for myself, because I don't have the pressure of a studio hanging over me, so it doesn't feel like work. If I went to L.A. and did The Hulk or something, that would be work. But when you work for yourself from your home, it's like running a Latin restaurant where the entire family pitches in,'' he says. "You can eat there, you can work there, you make people happy and you sleep in the back. So you never want to leave. It doesn't get any better than that.''
09-11-03, 12:59 PM
#112
DVD Talk Legend
I'm all over this like white on rice. Due to fading memory, I think this is the only movie I've been excited about this year since Finding Nemo.. (with Return of teh King coming later).
09-11-03, 04:52 PM
#117
DVD Talk Hero
A friend of mine saw this movie today (movies start on Thursdays in Puerto Rico) and told me it sucked. 
Basically he said Desperado (which we both love though we acknowledge it has a paper-thin plot) is an epic compared to this flick. Bascially he said the visuals are fantastic but the story is random at best. Also he told me a lot of scenes go absolutely nowere and you leave the theatre not knowing what movie was meant to be attatched to all the cool shots and action sequences.
I'm still going to see this later today but the news is very disappointing considering that Rodriguez has called this his epic in the saga of El Mariachi.
Basically he said Desperado (which we both love though we acknowledge it has a paper-thin plot) is an epic compared to this flick. Bascially he said the visuals are fantastic but the story is random at best. Also he told me a lot of scenes go absolutely nowere and you leave the theatre not knowing what movie was meant to be attatched to all the cool shots and action sequences.I'm still going to see this later today but the news is very disappointing considering that Rodriguez has called this his epic in the saga of El Mariachi.
09-11-03, 04:55 PM
#118
DVD Talk Hero
Originally posted by Jackskeleton
Spoiler:
Spoiler:
09-12-03, 01:42 AM
#120
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Well...colour me disappointed. It seems to me that Rodriguez does too much on his films now to stay focused.
The editing was scattershot at best and some of the camera work was barely passable... The story was almost incoherent, and if it weren't for Johnny Depp this movie could have been even worse...
I love Mariachi and Desperado, but this left me cold. El is barely utilized...man, the plot is horrificly bad IMO. And although there is some gore towards the end, the gunfights in the first 10 minutes of Desperado have more blood and are more exciting than anything in this movie.... The trailers had me totally hyped...and I think the trailer ended up being better....
If you're a fan of the series, give it a shot, and if you're a Depp fan, it's a must see...but I was just hoping for a bit more.
*** / ***** (3 out of 5 stars)
MATT
The editing was scattershot at best and some of the camera work was barely passable... The story was almost incoherent, and if it weren't for Johnny Depp this movie could have been even worse...
I love Mariachi and Desperado, but this left me cold. El is barely utilized...man, the plot is horrificly bad IMO. And although there is some gore towards the end, the gunfights in the first 10 minutes of Desperado have more blood and are more exciting than anything in this movie.... The trailers had me totally hyped...and I think the trailer ended up being better....
If you're a fan of the series, give it a shot, and if you're a Depp fan, it's a must see...but I was just hoping for a bit more.
*** / ***** (3 out of 5 stars)
MATT
09-12-03, 02:59 PM
#123
DVD Talk Ultimate Edition
For some reason, this is only showing at one theater here in San Diego. It is showing in a couple of adjoining towns but it is weird that it isn't being shown at the two large malls in town that basically show everything.
09-12-03, 03:19 PM
#124
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Originally posted by Rypro 525
anyone know what the trailers showing with the flick are going to be? (I'd guess there's a good chance that there will be a kill bill trailer)
anyone know what the trailers showing with the flick are going to be? (I'd guess there's a good chance that there will be a kill bill trailer)
09-12-03, 03:33 PM
#125
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Originally posted by mdc3000
Well...colour me disappointed. It seems to me that Rodriguez does too much on his films now to stay focused.
The editing was scattershot at best and some of the camera work was barely passable... The story was almost incoherent, and if it weren't for Johnny Depp this movie could have been even worse...
I love Mariachi and Desperado, but this left me cold. El is barely utilized...man, the plot is horrificly bad IMO. And although there is some gore towards the end, the gunfights in the first 10 minutes of Desperado have more blood and are more exciting than anything in this movie.... The trailers had me totally hyped...and I think the trailer ended up being better....
If you're a fan of the series, give it a shot, and if you're a Depp fan, it's a must see...but I was just hoping for a bit more.
*** / ***** (3 out of 5 stars)
MATT
Well...colour me disappointed. It seems to me that Rodriguez does too much on his films now to stay focused.
The editing was scattershot at best and some of the camera work was barely passable... The story was almost incoherent, and if it weren't for Johnny Depp this movie could have been even worse...
I love Mariachi and Desperado, but this left me cold. El is barely utilized...man, the plot is horrificly bad IMO. And although there is some gore towards the end, the gunfights in the first 10 minutes of Desperado have more blood and are more exciting than anything in this movie.... The trailers had me totally hyped...and I think the trailer ended up being better....
If you're a fan of the series, give it a shot, and if you're a Depp fan, it's a must see...but I was just hoping for a bit more.
*** / ***** (3 out of 5 stars)
MATT
This may have been the biggest disspointment of the year for me & if you look up my posts, there is nodody here that was looking forward to this movie more than me. So here is what I think is wrong with the movie.
First - If it is possible, Johnny Depp is actually TOO GOOD of an actor. I am serious. He steals this movie just like Pirates & in this movie his character is really pointless. The man is just mesmerizing to watch act & the pure craft of acting, there are very few that are better. Where as the first two films are brilliant action movies, this movie drags when Depp or Banderas aren't on screen.
Second - What Matt said, this movie is a mess, as is the editing, as is the plot, & as is the action. The attraction of the first two are the Mariachi's. Banderas owns this role, he is the driving force of the movie & in this movie he takes the back seat as does his story. And his 2 mariachi partners are absolute pansies. Pretty boy Inglesias is just that, a pretty boy who poses or sings in every shot. The other guy is nothing more but a sloppy stereotype. They are given way too much dialogue & there is nothing cool about them (I guess unless you are a teenage girl).
Third - Danny Trejo: We all love the guy & we especially loved the guy in Deperado where he is such a bad a$$. And this movie makes the horrendous sequal mistake of now makinig him a sad a$$. He rules in Desperado b/c he is the silent bad a$$. In this movie he is failed comic relief. Rodriguez takes a minor cool fan favorite characer & here tries to make him more than he should be. He talks way too much & like Depp his character is completely pointless. I HATE when they take a completely cool character & then make him a pansy.
Fourth - The action......just sucks. Aside from being very sloppy it is soooooo redundant. The action in Deperado was lively, well shot & at the time in America rather inovative & executed perfectly. Here you've seen it all done a thousand times already & better elsewhere & even better by Rodrigues. Who didn't dig the hell out of the guitar cases in the first two? In this movie they are practically a joke. The one Mariachi carries around this giant guitar case which is nothing more than a remote control bomb that cause a little exlposion at a time where it made no sense to use it.
The movie was such a disapointment & I really wonder how Rodriguez couldn't come up with anything better, especially given the cast. The only good parts where Depp throughout the movie, the tremendously underrated Mickey Rourke & Banderas who really shines in this role depite not being used as he should be.
Last edited by Sessa17; 09-12-03 at 04:00 PM.