Hero Moment of the Week – Oct 22

I’d heard about Desperado and El Mariachi and Once Upon A Time In Mexico for years, but never really focused in on them until I heard the tale of how they actually came into being.

The first movie, El Mariachi, was made on the smallest of shoestring budgets, when the producer/director/writer, Robert Rodriguez, checked himself into research hospitals and submitted to any research project going anywhere, in order to raise money for the project.  He wrote the music, he edited the movie, and every scene was filmed in just one take.

Wow.

The movie actually won serious critical attention at the Cannes Film Festival the next year, and word of mouth after that got Rodriguez into mainstream theatres, and earning some serious money…enough to create a sequel, Desperado, and pay for an upcoming actor with serious star potential at that time — Antonio Banderas.

Desperado wasn’t a box office smash, but it was a very respectable money earner, and won more critical aclaim for its return to basic story telling.  And it really does revert back to old simple models that romance readers and writers will recognize at once.  Good guys.  Bad guys.  Violence.  Love.  Hatred.  Vengeance.  A simple plot.  A beautiful heroine.  A drop dead gorgeous, sexy hero, trying to find his way to freedom against overwhelming odds.

Sound familiar?

And Banderas was so perfectly cast, you can’t turn you eyes away from the screen.

I actually watched all three movies about five years ago when they were on video on demand.  The first one, El Mariachi, is in Spanish, with subtitles.  It’s worth watching at least once, to get the background story on El.  It’s really a set-up for the second movie, Desperado, which is the gem of the three.  I think I watched that one without blinking the entire time, and maybe I might have breathed once or twice.  It was an amazing ride, that first time througth.  Great fun!

It took me a week to find the boxed set of three after that.  ~grin~

Desperado and Once Upon A Time in Mexico both star Banderas and are in English, but Once Upon A Time does tend to get a bit big-scale and silly in scope.  Although Johnny Depp is in it, and he ain’t half-bad either.  :)

Because Desperado is such a return-to-basics good-guy-bad-guy movie, there are so many hero moments in it for Banderas, I can’t pick just one to tell you.  If you’ve never seen the movie, I urge you to watch it, with the warning that it is bloody and violent.  Glance away as you have to…Banderas and the love story inside the movie is so worth the trouble.

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