El Norte (1983)

Excellent, Without a doubt!!

As Good As It Gets

It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

It's a good enough film. The cinematography and the soul of the script are what make the movie for me, though. They chose non-actors it seems for the film and I found it a bit distracting at times.Props to the focus of the story and that it doesn't all end with days of wine and roses, which makes me happy because I was greeted with as honest a film on the subject back in 1983. Not that it's not, but there are a few moments where I found myself saying, "Come on, really?" There are moments in the film where red herrings are thrown around (sequence where helicopter and them crawling through a rat-infested tunnel, is an example) and the editing can be a bit off with pacing. Other moments in the story where they are confronted with a difficult circumstances that hadn't brought themselves up until later in the story, and you're surprised that they haven't been confronted with up until that. In other words, conflict arises to serve the movie and the flow of the story; they show up to hit the beats that you expect for a movie to hit. The flow of the story can be a bit arbitrary at times, which when you notice, can be annoying.For me, the saving graces are the cinematography and the production design. The cinematography provides for a lot of beautiful imagery, with most of the film's images coming from the backdrop of Guatemala. The production design. I feel like the production design captures a lot of the culture and it establishes the world that they live in very well from the beginning of the movie. The image of the worker's feet as they move at the command of their foreman/boss as you see an alternation of naked feet and torn-up tennis shoes is pretty clever and it's this little account for details that make up the environment which I really liked about the film.The cinematography with the character's in Guatemala is beautiful to look at and made the film for me. I guess the middle of the film and the way certain conflicts arise struck me as contrived.The final sequence as Enrique makes it to his new job and reflects before the credits roll, was awesome and it made me reflect more positively on the film. So, yeah: watch it.

A sweet wonderful film that really shows the life and plight of undocumented aliens. What motivates me to give it a 8 out of 10 is the ending part of the film and the lack of certain realistic aspects of the film and story. Aside from magic realism (a very popular genre in post-modernistic Latin American literature and film – see NOTE below), the characters of brother and sister have very few real hardships - in comparison with what Central Americans actually have to endure on their very difficult and torturous trip to the north. There are rapings, muggings, and of course, the most difficult and common entry point, the desert. The desert is such a huge aspect of the journey that needs to be overcome. If there had been more usage of the indigenous dialog – it would have been so much more truer to the experience of what these people went through.NOTE: For all you video game "fanboys" out there - here is the definition of "magic realism": A literary or artistic genre in which realistic narrative or technique are combined with surreal elements of dream or fantasy.

This film will enlighten all who despise illegal immigrants to the U.S.A. I am one who is concerned about illegal immigrants crossing our borders by the thousands every day. This movie illustrates just what these immigrants endure and risk to go to El Norte (The North). Gregory Nava has created a masterpiece of low budget film-making with the help of cinematographer James Glennon and his co-writer Anna Thomas. The visuals are stunning it takes place in a small Central American village in Guatemala (western Mexico stands in for off-limits Guatemala). It is a small Indian village where locals speak Ki'iche instead of Spanish. Local farmers rebel when the military begins partitioning their land resulting in the deaths of many farmers. Rosa & Enrique Xuncax see their father killed and their mother taken away and incarcerated. They are next, and the know it. They decide to run off to El Norte, the dreamland their mother often swooned about. Thus begins a perilous trek and an adventurous journey to the U.S.A./the Promised Land. Only the poverty and danger of Mexico stands in their way. Newcomers Zaide Silvia Gutierrez and David Villalpando are superb as the leads and they steal and break your heart. This is a truly stunning film! It is now out on Criterion DVD and includes a 2-hour documentary of what this crew endured in the making of El Norte. I highly recommend it.

I wrote this review after viewing the film in my Spanish class. I turned this into the teacher for extra credit.El Norte, the north. A film made under a limited budget and by a director with limited talents. No offense to the director or actors, who obviously but their heart into the story, but directors of the 1920s silent era have managed to pull off more genius and drive emotions deep into the human soul better than this movie has ever done. Now, I don't expect everyone to be a Cecil B. DeMille or a Steven Spielberg, but this director needs to take a crash course in cinematography.I find what ruined it was self-indulgent directing. Not so much the story or the meaning, but the direction itself. The close-ups weren't saved for dramatic effect, and he did not take advantage of them at the appropriate time. The music was ill-chosen. A new score may not have been available, but better soundtracks could obviously have been used in place. Nothing ruins a potentially breathtaking scene like music that comes straight out of a commercial.Now, I realize the whole point behind the story; that illegal immigrants suffer a lot of trauma when trying to cross the border. I'm for helping everyone achieve the American Dream as much as the next guy, but the way they go about it was ill-advised. Sure, if they went through customs there would be a lot of bureaucracy and papers to fill out, as well as years before one became a citizen, but it would have saved them a lot of time, stress, and even their lives Whether or not the filmmakers wanted to accomplish instilling pro illegal-immigration theories is not relevant, and that does not detract from the film's potential entertainment value. When looking at it from an entertainment standpoint, it really is a moving film. No matter what is ruined by directing and unnatural camera angles and sloppy acting, there still is a storyline behind the mess. Oppressive regimes, murdered parents, cheating trail guides, selfish employers, friendly comrades… it's all in there. It may not be Gone with the Wind, but there is a heart in the midst of it all.The hodge-podge of languages (Mayan, Spanish, and English) made it confusing. Who was who? What was what? I started to shift in my seat from discomfort. Then there were the seemingly random additions, like the voices that just spontaneously began speaking from seemingly no where, and without utilizing "oil on the lenses" or "fog". It made it too hard to distinguish reality from fantasy in the film. Then there was the strange head hanging from a tree in the final cut of the film; what was the point of that? Whose head was it? Films of the foreign market range from masterpieces to be placed on the shelf beside Casablanca and My Fair Lady to works of utter mediocrity. This film, unfortunately, is dangling on the fringe of that character. What saves it is the heart that the film holds in its grasp, underneath all the swearing and bad makeup. The 80s hairstyles and cars are evident, as are those sprinklers and washing machines that could only be found in a junkyard nowadays. The movie is dated, has some entertainment value, but could have so much more going for it if the director paid attention to detail instead of trying to make an "arty picture."