Word: arriaga
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Mystic River's story is told in Eastwood's straight-shootin' fashion, while 21 Grams, written by Guillermo Arriaga, jumps like an antsy first-grader from one plot strand to the next. Neither film, despite what you might have heard, is within shouting distance of a masterpiece. Gonzalez Inarritu's English-language debut lacks the zigzagging drive of his Mexican hit Amores Perros and taxes credulity with its pileup of fatal coincidences. Mystic River has a case of wandering accents (sometimes South Boston, sometimes West Hollywood) and plods toward its conclusion more like a tired cop than a cunning detective...
...intricately structured screenplay by novelist Guillermo Arriaga keeps reverting, ever more intimately and horrifically, to that crash, not merely showing it as the major figures in three intertwined stories experience it but also letting us see their lives prior to and after the disaster that radically reshapes their fates. Inarritu, 37, who has made hundreds of TV commercials in Mexico City, consciously intends his movie to be a portrait of his "dangerous, beautiful" hometown. The film is muy espanol, a portrait that blends harsh realism with a curious tenderness. It is also muy Bunuel, but without his conscious surrealism...