Amores Perros

This mega-popular Inarittu blockbuster, from 2000, is a sharpish slice of narrative with some well, at speed, drawn characters and a good momentum too it. It is also filmed well enough, and we can't deny that we're happy to have seen it, even if it does seem at the end just the teeniest bit inconsequential.
The rapid cuts and grainy film are actually rather deceptive; Inarittu often opts to linger on faces, even if on the surface the camera appears to be a constant source of movement. The film quality adds a realist element, in a slightly hoary manner but effectively enough. No performances sag, and Gael Garcia Bernal has a certain magnetism that make his latter fame understandable.
This is a film about the sotry, the connections. The themes behind these are of loss and fetishism. The question for this film is; is it about the stories, or is it about the wider human condition? Adopting the latter is rather a denial of the undoubted impact of particularly the first strand; though it may be better to read the latter two that way. The use of dogs as a kind of fetish is well made, and the connections do help universality. Perhaps, however, this is in an odd way a drawback, as we have too much of a wide-angled view; perhaps we would rather less repition, more individuality? That would remove the heart of the film though, and make it weirdly disconnected. A difficult one.
So, a fun bit of filmaking, the stories don't quite straddle the univeral/subjective balance (or move towards a kind of dialectical unity), but they are decent enough. Worth a look.