I remember back when I was in high school, a few of my hipster-female AP classmates saw this movie and raved about it for weeks. I think this was the hit movie of choice at their sleepovers, and I think they watched it a dozen times at the least. At the time, I too was into finding the cerebral, intelligent, better-than-blockbuster movies that I could use to boast my art taste into something more refined and respectable. But I never got around to watching it.
So last night, I'm perusing Netflix and see that it's available. It has a high rating on Netflix. I look it up on the net, and it has a high rating on just about every movie site available. I figured it was worth starting at 11pm and staying up late for. Besides, it had a really attractive girl as one of the lead roles. Maribel Verdu:
There was a lot of good about the movie. The cinematography was captivating. I loved seeing a Kerouac worthy road trip that served as a medium to showcase the beauty of the Mexican countryside while also exposing the extreme divide between the small percent of wealthy people and the large percent of poor people. There was a real sense of hopelessness throughout each of their stops. An old woman awkwardly dancing in a kitchen full of matriarchs. A hobbled elderly man begging for money. A 98 year old woman who makes cheap, shitty nitnack souvenirs being lauded for her long years. Random villages of huts with Native American-type decor with overweight people standing around watching the sun.
And then their road trip of sexual exploration drove right through them completely missing the prime opportunity to enrich their own lives by helping others. The movie stars two teenagers who are absolute douche bags. One is super rich and his dad is a politician, and the other is middle class and is seen as being poor though we learn throughout the movie that he's far, far richer than the majority of Mexico.
Anyway, I think this movie was trying to make a leap in revealing a truth about sexuality. It almost worked when it was focusing on these two dweebs somehow picking up a super hot chick who was pissed off at her husband for cheating on her. It could have worked if she decided to spend a weekend with two teenage boys, acting slutty, fucking the two of them because she was depressed, and then dealing with the repercussions of her actions whether it's jail time or therapy or an epiphany about life or something.
But no, what we got was a slow rise to the climax of the boys being gay for each other. The movie pushes the idea that sexuality is fluid. It flows from one person to the other based on relationship and intimacy and that gender really doesn't matter.
Take an excerpt from Psychology Today:
There is evidence that male sexual attractions and behaviors can also be fluid. First of all, men in other cultures, including non-Western societies and those of ancient Greece, have been known to participate in a transitory period of ritualistic homosexuality at some point during their lives. For example, not too long ago, the Sambia, an indigenous tribe in New Guinea believed a boy could not reach manhood unless he fellated an older man and ingested his semen. Secondly, in my own research, I found it was possible for the self-identified gay youth to have experienced sexual attractions to women before they identified as gay. Thirdly, I invite readers to go to Craigslist.org and take a look at the personal ads, for "men seeking men" and count how many are written by self-identified "straight" or "str8" men looking for sex with other men. Finally, some progressive adolescents and young adults with same-sex attractions do not label themselves or identify as gay because they refuse to center their identities on their current sexual feelings and behavior--which they expect will change depending on who their partners are.
It's a thought amongst many sexologists and psychologists that sexuality is galvanized when we are young and that we are not necessarily born hetero- or homo- but rather are taught how to behave from a certain age.
This movie explores that thought.
The boys are sex-crazed. The movie opens with them screwing their girlfriends, and if there's one thing to take from the scenes, it's that they are rather bad at it. Their girlfriends love them though, and the first 15 minutes of the movie is the boys and girls fucking and begging each other not to cheat. So already from the start, we are told that teenagers are out of control sexually. This notion is not given any negative consequences and in the end is rather celebrated. Even when one of the boys tells the other that he also fucked the guy's mother, hence the title of the movie.
Further into the movie, we discover through Luisa, the super hot married chick they somehow lured into the road trip to the beach, that the boys don't know anything about real intimacy. They both get the chance to screw her and even though she begs them to fulfill her desire to feel intimacy away from her husband, they splooge within seconds of penetration.
They get pissed and frustrated at each other and then reveal that they've been fucking each other's girlfriends, because, you know, there's no discipline here.
Instead of breaking up the friendship or leading to a big fight that really settles the issue of screwing the other person's girl, they end up being "saved" by Luisa who gets sick of them. She decides to leave. So they beg her to stay, and she tells them that she'll only stay if the trip gets refocused on the beach and less about fucking especially fucking her.
Could be a good resolve right there. Sex is not the end-all of relationships. Sex is not the goal. It's spending time as friends and enjoying a moment such as a beautiful beach in Mexico.
But it doesn't end there. That's not the resolve. It's merely a transition to the real conclusion of the movie.
They spend time together and with a happy family. They become friends. They go to a restaurant and get drunk. They joke as if it's one big happy family joke about how they've fucked each other's girlfriends and how they were both terrible with Luisa. Luisa leads a big chant about the celebration of the clitoris.
Then they all begin to have a threesome except the boys for some reason decide they are no longer interested in the 10 they have in their arms. They are interested in each other and so they fuck each other and leave Luisa out of it. They finally discover true intimacy through sex...with each other.
Then, there was a small plot point early in the movie that Luisa went to the doctor, and oh, she died of cancer. It was a copout ending of her character because there was so little depth and exploration of her behavior that the writers had no idea what to do with her. So hey, anyone who knows they're going to die would want to fuck a couple of douche bag teenagers, right? That's what we'd want to do knowing the end was near.
TL;DR - I failed to see why this movie garners so much praise. I think it's because the two boys are very sexual and eventually find themselves being gay for each other. The movie is decent though with beautiful scenery and Maribel Verdu being naked quite a bit. 5/10
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