Amores Perros (Love is a Bitch), written by Guillermo Arriaga and directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu is one of the best movies that I can't completely identify with. Its tormented and desperate lives brought together in an internecine design grabbed me where I live, which is why I could overlook the dark cloud of Catholic moralism painted over them. Peter Rainer at New York magazine hit the nail on the head:

Without being explicit about it, Gonzalez Inarritu has fashioned an intensely Catholic fable. Moral lessons and epiphanies resound. Perhaps without this apparatus of implied religiosity, Amores Perros would be an even greater movie than it is. The director has stated in interviews his belief, as expressed in the film, that violence turns against itself, against its perpetrators. This is no mere didacticism; we see quite intricately in his movie how horror breeds horror. Yet as ferociously bleak as Amores Perros is, it is never nihilistic. It still has an abiding faith in the rites of penance and retribution. This is a small failing, if indeed it is a failing at all. A movie this powerful has surely earned the right to its pieties.

Now comes 21 Grams from the same two guys and sitting through it feels like an act of pointless penance. Peter Rainer is again pretty much on the money:

It�s forceful, to be sure, but in a lurid way that suggests a telenovela that�s been baking in the sun too long.

Mr. Iñárritu sees life as a spiritual journey...

I cannot conceive life as just biological, chemical coincidence of two little things that were in the water millions of years ago. We are here. I feel that. It�s incredible, I don�t know, there are some many things. This experience of living is not limited by my senses, my eyes, my ears. I feel there is something beyond that and that is what I believe. Just because I don�t understand it doesn�t mean it doesn�t exist. So, I believe in interior journeys.

21 Grams depicts no discernible internal journeys, only events and reactions to them, all of which seem to be predetermined somehow.

--aslam

7:50:20 PM