Skip to main content

Sin Nombre

On Saturday, we had a very busy day. We saw a grand total of 3 Mexican films.

The first one (Otra Pelicula de Huevos y un pollo) was an animated comedy featuring talking eggs & a chicken, and to be honest, I think you have to be Mexican to get most of the jokes.  I was in a row with several Mexican people who where practically doubled over laughing when one of the eggs said something which I though was about 15% funny. Oh well, I guess it was entertaining enough.  I liked the animation & appreciated the very high production quality.

The second (Los Herederos) was a documentary about kids living in rural Mexico.  I found this to be a very powerful film.  It contained very little actual dialog - it mostly showed this kids working hard.  Damn hard -  expected to work as hard as the adults from a very early age.  I'll not go into much detail - I reckon anyone who has an interest in Mexico should see it for themselves.

The last one (Sin Nombre) was by far the best of the 3, and has deservedly won several Sundance awards (amongst several other film awards around the world).
It centers on 3 main characters;  A young Honduran girl traveling with her father and brother from Honduras through Mexico, heading for the US border.  They plan to attempt to enter the US to join with family living in New Jersey.  The other two main characters are Wily, a member of a notorious gang and a young kid (12ish?) whose name we never learn, but gets the gang name 'Smiley' after a fairly horrific initiation.

Again, I don't want to give much away - this is certainly a film that everyone ought to see for themselves.  It's gritty, beautifully made and revealing.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Slow Cooked Pork with Potatoes & Gravy

Well Jacqui's away back to Mexico for a bit.  The teenagers were here and it all went very well. They're nice kids, and we had a GREAT TIME :) I also have some opinions about the state of modern Mexico that I'm dying to write about, but it's a bit to heavy for a sunday afternoon, so instead I'm gonna tell how to make something delicious. So, lets say you've got one of those slow cookers, and you've tried a few things but it always ends up kinda-tasting-the-same. Well, I know exactly how you feel.  I've tried several things, and usually they're OK, tasty enough, but lacking in whatever it would take to make the 6-8 hours worth it. Until I discovered a secret.  I didn't find this anywhere on the web, but I have inferred it. The secret with slow cooking is simplicity.  Each ingredient just adds to the mess of flavours and makes it's easier to get wrong.  It's like mixing paint.  The more colours you add, the more likely you are to ...

Guitar Completed... more or less...

I finally got the guitar finished.  I'm sure you'll remember that one I bought in a local auction shortly before Christmas? I finally got it wired up, screw together and stringed.  I plugged it in and was more than a little amazed to find that it actually worked!  It's actually feels nice to play, and looks pretty too. It also has buckets of tone and I would imagine would make a nice blues guitar. However, it's not perfect as yet. There appears to be something of an annoying hum,  but I think with some additional shielding and grounding, it'll be fine.  And it's a fairly well known issue with strats anyway. Also, the neck pickup appears not to work.  Not sure why - it appears to be correctly wired.  No problems though.  I very rarely use that pickup anyway. And lastly, the scratch plate doesn't really fit.  The body isn't exactly a strat shape, just very similar.  I think it looks quirky, so I don't mind :) Check it o...

All work and no play makes Dan a dull boy

Well, it's all been very busy at work these days.  I'm helping the very nice folks at NZQA to build their new website, and this weekend, after months of coding & hacking, it finally went live. You can check it out (if you like) at http://www.nzqa.govt.nz .  There may still be bugs, missing pages and perhaps catastrophic crashes, but it certainly looks better and is apparently easier to use. I did the "dynamic" pages - this is a fancy way of saying that I re-skinned the legacy pages to make them look like the rest of the site :) There are several nice &/or interesting technologies in use back there : Silverstripe is used for CMS, and it's been interesting to see how to integrate something complex like a professional CMS with a set of legacy pages. Anyway, mostly done now.