We Americans love our heroes, be they caped or just made of the right stuff. When we sit down to watch a movie, more times than not, some regular guy is going to do the right thing and make us in the audience feel good for watching. I watched a Mexican Movie last night, The Chosen Ones, and a Swedish Movie, Love Steaks.
The Chosen Ones was kind of a horrible movie, the men in one family were entrapping girls by getting to know them, then enslaving them as prostitutes, if they threatened to run away, they were told they knew where their families lived. The movie picks up where the youngest boy is in love with his first girl crush. He wants to just be in love, but the family wants the girl for their whorehouses. Eventually they take her, and she is beaten into submission. The boy makes a deal with his father to get her out of there, but that only means he has to replace her with a new girl. Just when there seems to be an outside hero, a random father who is looking for his daughter, who pledges to help get her out, the young boyfriend has another girl and so the first girlfriend is removed from the whorehouse. The last scene shows the family on a hilltop, proud of their land purchase and them talking about the plans to build a getaway house out in the mountains. There is never a bit of guilt in what they do, and from what we see no penalties. They bribe the cops, the neighbors know to keep quiet, or suffer. Even the young boy seems content in the end, he has his girlfriend free from the whore life, but she isn't escaping anytime soon, and the camera fades as they continue eating and talking.
The other movie had even less rhyme or reason. Some new guy gets hired a s a masseuse in an upscale hotel, there, he befriends the cooking staff, and of course, falls for the kind of attractive girl. She seems to be an alcoholic, so in one scene she is cool, and in the next scene she is out of control. I honestly don't see what the clean cut young kid would have really seen in the alcoholic girl, but maybe because there didn't seem to be other choices around. The whole movie lacks a plot, other than carrying on day to day, trying to hump in the hidden places of a hotel, but not trying too hard. The movie kind of peters out when the girl finds out the new guy has talked to management about helping her out with her alcoholism, she reacts by telling him she was fired, so the young man goes in front of a board meeting and proclaims that if this establishment is going to fire instead of help someone in her condition, he cannot work there, so he quits. The girl then hears about this, and she runs after him, but she is such a freaking flake, I don't know for what purpose.
In an American movie, some heroic dad would save the girl and shoot up the bad hombres and walk out a hero sporting some kind of gun over his shoulder. In the bottom one, the two would have become a better pair and they would have found a way to live happily ever after, maybe after suing the hotel. So yeah, as an American, I expect some sort of happy ending, not this dull fade aways I got in both movies. Blechh.
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