El Mariachi

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Editorial Reviews
From The New Yorker
This first film by twenty-four-year-old Robert Rodriguez was made for seven thousand dollars, and part of its enormous charm is that it really looks like a seven-thousand-dollar movie. It's a grubby little thriller, set in a Mexican border town, about a wandering mariachi musician (Carlos Gallardo) who is mistaken for a killer. The picture is a virtually unbroken series of chases and shoot-outs, and the non-stop action should be tiresome, but it isn't. Rodriguez establishes a delirious pace, and keeps the bullets flying and the corpses crumpling for a brisk, and appropriately terse, eighty-two minutes. The movie has the sort of dry, bracingly unwholesome humor that relentless mayhem can produce if the characters are mean and abject enough and the storytelling is speedy and laconic. This young filmmaker is no visual wizard; he's just an energetic and imaginative manipulator of tried-and-true genre conventions. But if you enter his seedy world with expectations as low as the picture's aspirations, you'll probably have a very good time. Also with Reinol Martinez, Consuelo Gómez, and Peter Marquardt. In Spanish. -Terrence Rafferty
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker




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I recently watched this. I watched this with the commentary turned on, Robert Rodriguez was really funny. He was talking about all the tricks they used to keep the costs down. He said he used the same actors in several different roles, having them shave their mustaches and change clothes. He raised the $7,000 it took to film this by working as a medicine tester in Texas. This was a cool little movie.

 

[abomb]

Great movie. RR using himself as a lab rat is a great story.

 

[schutd]

The whole movie shot in single takes, and maxed credit cards. I love this trilogy!

 

[dodie53]

is this movie related to banderas' desperado movie?

 

[Brian in Mesa]

is this movie related to banderas' desperado movie?

Yes.

El Mariachi, Desperado, and Once Upon a Time in Mexico make up Robert Rodriguez's Mexico Trilogy.

 

[Chaplin]

Yes.

El Mariachi, Desperado, and Once Upon a Time in Mexico make up Robert Rodriguez's Mexico Trilogy.

To be fair, Desperado has elements that make it a sequel, but it's more of a remake. And Once Upon A Time was just a big mess with too many characters and too much going on.

Rodriguez spent a few years trying to get a job in Hollywood by using El Mariachi as a calling card. He never intended to get American distribution--Mexican maybe, but not American. Sony saw El Mariachi and decided not only to give him a job directing, but they ended up releasing El Mariachi in theaters as well. And of course that first American directing job was the "remake/sequel" Desperado.

 

[Chris_Sanders]

Johnny Depp plays one of the greatest anti-heroes ever in Once Upon A Time. I actually like that movie a lot.

 

[Brian in Mesa]

To be fair, Desperado has elements that make it a sequel, but it's more of a remake. And Once Upon A Time was just a big mess with too many characters and too much going on.

True. They're all three connected but not necessarily 1,2,3.

El Mariachi and Desperado are a lot like Evil Dead and Evil Dead 2. Almost the same movie - one made on a thin budget and the other a remake of the first with a better budget.

Here's the explanation from Wikipedia regarding the plot of Once Upon a Time in Mexico:

The trilogy was originally conceived as a way for Rodriguez to make three movies for the Spanish-language home video market to hone his skills as a director. Quentin Tarantino, a friend of Rodriguez, is reported to have said to Rodriguez that El Mariachi and Desperado were the start of his Dollars Trilogy, the trilogy of Western films directed by Sergio Leone consisting of A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Rodriguez agreed on this idea, and the resulting conclusion of the trilogy, Once Upon a Time in Mexico, has many similarities with its Spaghetti Western counterpart. This is often the explanation of, and reason behind, the inclusion of much more screen-time and story centered around different characters other than El Mariachi within Once Upon a Time in Mexico.

 

[schutd]

Once Upon a Time In Mexico was fantastic. CHaplin and I seem to either be right in line with each other or polar opposites, theres never any middle ground. he calls mexico a big mess, I call it the best of the series. El Mariachi gets the nod simply for what it accomplished, but Mexico was top to bottom an absolute blast.

It took time for me to appreciate Desperado because of its "remake" like feel, and at the time Banderas was a total toolbag to me. Ive since come to love it, and I pretty much worship at the throne of troublemaker studios...

 

[Chaplin]

Once Upon a Time In Mexico was fantastic. CHaplin and I seem to either be right in line with each other or polar opposites, theres never any middle ground. he calls mexico a big mess, I call it the best of the series. El Mariachi gets the nod simply for what it accomplished, but Mexico was top to bottom an absolute blast.

It took time for me to appreciate Desperado because of its "remake" like feel, and at the time Banderas was a total toolbag to me. Ive since come to love it, and I pretty much worship at the throne of troublemaker studios...

Well, obviously I don't agree with your opinion on Once Upon A Time In Mexico, but I actually agree with you about Desperado (and I can say the same about From Dusk Till Dawn as well).

 

[AZZenny]

Once Upon a Time was a big mess, and I loved it -- great movie, big mess: not completely incompatible.

 

[Gaddabout]

El Mariachi was a fun movie. Once Upon A Time ... you could tell it just had too big of a budget. During an independent movie director's round table (just a few months after El Mariachi), someone once asked Robert Rodriquez what he'd do if some Hollywood studio gave him $80 million to make a movie. He said he'd make 80 movies.

He needs to get back to wherever he was at emotionally at that point. That's when he was making really good movies.