Miss Bala

First Hit: Although there’s a twist at every turn, it is predictable, but has enough of a twist at the end to make it interesting.

The film begins with Gloria (Gina Rodriguez) doing makeup for some fashion models in a Los Angeles fashion show. After the show, she gets in her car and heads to Tijuana Mexico to visit a close friend, whom she considers family. Suzu’s (Cristina Rodlo) family took Gloria in when she was small, and they spent their young years together. Gloria is headed there to help Suzu get ready for the Miss Baja California contest.

To introduce Gloria to Chief Saucedo (Damian Alcazar), who has some sway over who wins the contest, Suzu takes Gloria to a nightclub. What we also learn is that Saucedo is slowly taking over all the illegal trade that goes across the U.S – Mexico border. He’s attempting to take this unlawful business away from a gang called Las Estrellas.

Las Estrellas is led by Lino (Ismael Cruz Cordova). To shut down the Chief’s attempt to take over the border trade business from Lino, the Las Estrellas gang steals into the nightclub and starts to shoot it up. In the process they kidnap Suzu.

Gloria spends the rest of the film trying to find and rescue her close friend.

The storyline takes Gloria through being captured and used by the DEA, Las Estrellas, and the CIA. It is how the story weaves its way through all this that makes the film both work and not work. There’s too many tricks, story twists, and plot turns.

One thing that wasn’t very believable was the apparent age difference between Gloria and Suzu. This difference made me wonder about how they were friends when they were young. I also thought the some of the scenes were overly staged.

Rodriguez was good as an intense person who wanted to find her friend. Rodlo was OK as Gloria’s friend. Cordova was OK as the heavy leader of the gang. Alcazar was appropriately manipulative and arrogant as the crooked police chief. Anthony Mackie was OK as the undercover agent. Gareth Dunnet-Alcocer wrote an overly trick-filled screenplay. I didn’t engage with all the twists and turns. Catherine Hardwicke did a reasonable job of directing through all the storylines. 

Overall: This was an overly complicated film, and it didn’t need to be.

Twilight

First Hit: The young teen girls in the theater cheered and swooned, the rest of us watched a mediocre story that was generally poorly acted.

Stephanie Myers wrote a book about a young girl falling in love with a vampire whose family only drinks animal blood (the vegetarians of vampires), not the blood of humans.

Kristen Stewart plays Bella the young girl having to move from Arizona to a small town in Washington State where her father lives. She is the new girl in school and becomes immediately attracted to one particular boy who is very pale and doesn’t come to school on sunny days.

The boy, Edward (played by Robert Patterson), hangs out with his family. His relatives all go to school together. They look and act a lot older than the rest of the high school kids which is mostly because they’ve been stuck at approximately age 17 for hundreds of years.

Edward is confused by and attracted to Bella because she is the only person whose mind he cannot read. She is fascinated by his shy reluctance, cute paleness, and brooding nature.

The film is about their trials and tribulations of becoming an accepted couple by their families and the community. Just as things start going well, a renegade trio of human blood sucking vampires come across Bella and would like to suck her blood. This, of course, leads to a fierce battle between two vampire types.

Stewart plays her character reasonably well as does Billy Burke who plays her quiet introverted policeman father. I didn’t think Patterson did much with his character except to look sullen, needy and wanting to be saved from his destiny. The story seemed haphazard and all over the place with filler stories trying to make this whole thing plausible. Catherine Hardwicke, who directed a very good Lords of Dogtown, did well to keep this thing on a track. I just don’t know if it was a poor story or a poor translation of the book.

Overall: There must be something about young girls wanting to save or fall in love with a vampire because the girls in the theater got off on this film. I think that a more interesting story would have been to explore the local Indians who made a deal with the vampires centuries ago. This was only briefly touched on a few times during the film.