Americano (2011)

Excellent, Without a doubt!!

As Good As It Gets

The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

It is a whirlwind of delight --- attractive actors, stunning couture, spectacular sets and outrageous parties. It's a feast for the eyes. But what really makes this dramedy work is the acting.

I wanted to like this film, it started nice with good characters but then it just went nowhere. The director did nothing with the most interesting characters (the father, Linda the friend, and the owner of the bar. No sense of believability or rational thought. Parts of the film really ask you to suspend all belief.SPOILER the Frenchman just happens to run into a kid who has a connection to the bar where Lola works - c'mon.Selma walked through her part and was totally unbelievable as the whore. I wish I could talk of the plot holes but there really was not plot to pull together.

Mathieu Demy has made a vanity piece about nothing, except what a charmless pompous and humorless man looks like brooding and boring an audience for hours. This guy leaves his beautiful girlfriend, about whom he is oddly, babyishly equivocal, for a mindless senseless and deeply ugly excursion into SoCal and Mexico, where he makes all the wrong solipsistic empty-headed moves of a spoiled rich reckless and cowardly dope. The director is obviously a rich kid, spoiled, with cinema bloodlines that allow him to shoot self-indulgent nonsense with truly great co-stars. I was embarrassed for them. The film is to self-serious to be hilariously bad, it is just inept and annoying. Sad.

this movie should be retitled 'the masochistic frenchman' - what a self destructive character Demy portrays. truly this story (which is very interesting in concept) is just torn to pieces by the main character stealing every scene and turn in this story! i didn't believe in his characterization at all.i understand his feeling of abandonment by his mother and the resentment he expressed in having to deal with her estate. but there is not enough background into his personality to support his deep hatred complication. (example - his tossing away of everything in the apartment without care). and just why would he care so much about Lola? a person he has not had contact with for decades! again - not enough character development to support the obsession and misery he endured on her behalf. it's just wasn't believable. and why would he steal the automobile? the telephone conversation he has with his father in which the father psycho analyses his son is just pointless by the time it shows up in the story.the only shining actor is geraldine chaplin! she is marvelous as the caring but dominating neighbor and not enough of her side of the relationship with the mother is made clear. the writer is too mysterious with his implication that Lola and the mother had something going in their 'friendship'. then the little Mexican boy - what? was that suppose to be Lola's son? not made clear. and the cemetery scene - again - what? sorry this flick is just too full of who, what, when, where, holes; and then he goes back to his lover in France. if you are a person that likes incomplete plot lines - check this movie out!

Demy's story is not without charm, and in between the stutter in a simplistic seen it man traveling abroad to recover the body of his parent, and in the process searching and maybe finding himself story, revolving around a bunch of pretty much generic characters, his lead written for himself en-tête, there are some small finds, like Chaplin's play, or Hayek's yet another stripper character. Unfortunately, however, the most outstanding negative feature is not even the direction, which exemplifies how any setting can be displayed from the most unflattering and bleak angle, from Paris to L.A., with the most uninspired framing you could believe possible, or the shaky borderline earthquake documentary camera work, nor the dialog, which is not a stand out, but in the film quality itself. It reminded me of the execrable film grain of the civic education videos they used to project at the cinema before the movie in my home country 25 years ago during the communist era. I guess Demy found a stash somewhere. Slightly worn.Also, on an even more humorous note, it will provide food for thought for those planning on some day spending a long weekend in Tijuana.