Tomorrowland suggests a Disney-company fire sale. Nothing is sacred in the corporation’s aim to own audiences’ imaginations by endlessly recycling its brands. The Disney brand specializes in how young people look at the world. Unfortunately, gullible parents and babysitters use Disney and Pixar formulae like cultural manifestos — as a shortcut to feeling and substitute for thinking. (This tendency is opposed in the new Mexican film Güeros — see below.)
To fashion a movie from one of the original Disneyland theme-park attractions shows the ultimate corporate cynicism. (What took so long? We could have been spared Pirates of the Caribbean.) Tomorrowland’s plot — based on “a place where the best and the brightest people in the world come together” — is shameless consumer flattery despite director Brad Bird’s almost appealing attempt to craft a story that examines generations of Disney hegemony: George Clooney plays a scientist, Frank Walker, whose dreams and fears are shared by young nerd Casey Newton, played by Britt Robertson.
Bird’s typically canny retro-futurist imagery evokes the warning in Francis Ford Coppola’s similarly mythic Tucker: The Man and His Dream: “Be careful — you might catch people’s dreams.” Bird’s dream of transitioning from his forte in animation to animating live action blatantly bids for auteur status. It overlaps the story’s idea of matching mankind’s need for spiritual gratification with his own love of technology (i.e., corporate control). Clever Bird’s Tomorrowland is a slicker version of Scorsese’s misguided Hugo — hardly a compliment. The no-surprises plot is just what millennial audiences have gotten uncritically used to. Bird might next make a movie finding kineticism in Disney’s souvenir shops.
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‘We’re on strike from the strike,” proclaim Sombra (Tenoch Huerta) and Santos (Leonardo Ortizgris), two students on the verge of personal enlightenment in Güeros. They traverse Mexico’s social strata, confronting various dilemmas involving groups ranging from street gangs and insolent squatters to student radicals, but are always aware of ethnic and class rivalries.
Together with Sombra’s kid brother, Tomás (Sebastián Aguirre), and Ana (Ilse Salas), who leads a faction on strike at the University of Mexico — she also holds Sombra’s heart — they embody a new, prankish style of youthful disaffection. Alienated from both what society has to offer and what it expects of them, they’re bonded by shared love for the enigmatic pop musician Epigmenio Cruz (Alfonso Charpener). “This guy could have saved Mexican rock,” Sombra enthuses. They go searching for the reclusive Epigmenio, motivated by the myth, “He once made Bob Dylan cry.”
But by not replaying old Sixties attitudes, as is done in Alfonso Cuarón’s insipid Y Tu Mamá También, Güeros itself saves Mexican rock — and 2015 cinema. This more entertaining road film creates a cultural whirlwind; it shows an authentic social essence, unlike the more famous imported Mexican directors Cuarón, Alejandro González Iñárritu, and Guillermo del Toro.
Güeros itself saves Mexican rock — and 2015 cinema.
The title “Güeros” refers interchangeably to an unfertilized egg or a person of light skin color. Director Alonso Ruizpalacios (co-writing with Gibrán Portela) explores both those idiomatic meanings through the emotional interplay of his four Mexico City youths: The handsome Sombra (who suggests a dark-skinned cousin to Emilio Estevez in Repo Man), plus his lighter-skinned brother and their friends, embody the racial mix of Mexico’s heritage in a personally felt contemporary adventure.
Ruizpalacios’s students don’t buy into the received liberal progressivism that has overtaken college campuses in the U.S.A. (perhaps some below-the-border skepticism explains why). His quartet’s fascination with an indigenous pop star evinces genuine cultural feeling different from our own consumerist youth movies. Among Güeros’s many brilliant segments is the campus-protest colloquy, where clashing points of view, caught by a virtuoso roaming camera, give way to reflexive sexual and racial attitudes — calls for Ana to strip, arguments over native linguistics (“Who you calling ‘güeros!’”).
Other than the ethnic subtext of Julian Hernández’s wet-dream/spiritual epics (A Thousand Clouds of Peace, Broken Sky, and the first half of Raging Sun, Raging Sky) or Sergio Tovar Velarde’s Four Moons, I don’t recall any other Mexican imports with such imaginative social texture. Ruizpalacios shows each character listening to a cherished old Epigmenio cassette, yet we hear nothing: It’s private, homesick “music,” indescribably serene and satisfying for each individual. That Epigmenio’s tape shares the same title as the film subtly indicts the racial division inherent in Mexican culture and its post-European contradictions.
Starting with detailed fragments of a situation (a water-balloon joke, some highway-overpass mischief, a convenience-store debate), then showing the wider context of that action, Ruizpalacios illustrates modern urban Mexico from the inside out. His homegrown technique is inspired by several ingenious works of world cinema: Damian Garcia’s lustrous black-and-white recalls such eye-opening landmarks as Jean Vigo’s Zero for Conduct, Richard Lester’s It’s Trad, Dad, and Bernardo Bertolucci’s Before the Revolution. Ruizpalacios’s sound effects also salute the masters: the incessant drum march from L’Age d’Or, the traffic horns from Weekend.
#related#It’s unusual these days for such self-conscious filmmaking to be so politically attuned. Ruizpalacios must be a prodigy to deconstruct contemporary notions of revolution this inventively: winding down the empty paths of a progressive college campus; quoting José Martí (“Be cultured and be free”) while exposing chaos among privileged youth; letting a pause during the quartet’s spree reveal bourgeois condescension toward workers; breaking the fourth wall to uncover his own antic methods. And every trick brings us closer to modern Mexico’s existential dilemma.
The kids in Güeros descend from Luis Buñuel’s 1950 masterpiece Los Olvidados. (“Don’t I look like Jaibo?” Sombra flirts with Ana, and she is delighted that his reference is both romantic and film-savvy.) They’re also conflicted about idealism and commercialism, in the same way that led Godard to label the young generation in his 1966 Masculine-Feminine “the children of Marx and Coca-Cola.”
Ruizpalacios, son of NAFTA and the digital age, searches along with his quartet to define a new political perspective rooted in his own sense of culture. Güeros has the personal drive of an exuberant modernist film and a classic pop album. When Sombra listens to Epigmenio, his response will make any true film and pop-music lover gasp. In fact, Güeros complements rapper Kendrick Lamar’s objective in his new album To Pimp a Butterfly: to rethink the history and culture he was born into. Like Lamar, Ruizpalacios could herald a conscientious future for pop culture. Tomorrowland, indeed.
In an ideal world, young people would be protesting against movies like Pitch Perfect 2 that falsify their own experience, pandering to their manufactured comfort zones and cinema illiteracy. And if they weren’t already brainwashed by marketing, they’d also reject films like Mad Max: Fury Road and Age of Ultron that only appeal to their juvenile excitation over violent spectacle. In a truly movie-loving culture, they’d make a popular hit of Güeros.
— Armond White, a film critic who writes about movies for National Review Online, received the American Book Awards’ Anti-Censorship Award. He is the author of The Resistance: Ten Years of Pop Culture That Shook the World and the forthcoming What We Don’t Talk about When We Talk about the Movies.