Surprising Film

Well hello there, Mr. Ambiguity!
Sure was a long time since I saw the movie, but I remember the fat Mexican guy much better than the girl. Wait I remember that the ending makes the movie look like a possible love story, which it wasn't really. But I also remember that the ending had been disappointing since the climax.
As to what I was talking about up there, must have been just expressing my enthusiasm for the movie taking the time to present details not immediately relevant to the plot. That kind of thing gives me the feeling that my screen is just a window into the world of the movie, which extends somehow beyond the limits of what I actually see. It's just an illusion of course, but I love it. As to the strangeness (if that's what baffled you), I was pointing out that the world I could partly see, partly imagine behind the screen didn't look quite familiar, yet it still seemed coherent. Then I thought that a world doesn't have to look familiar in order to feel real, maybe on the contrary, the less familiar it is the more I can be sure that I'm not just imagining things :). Um - I'm not sure this is more illuminating. So I was just happy about the plot-unrelated details we see. Maybe that's what you meant yourself by "movie taking its time".

And yeah, the flick felt very noir, down to the protagonist being out of control, at the mercy of the wheels of fate. I don't remember the self-awareness but sounds like an interesting point, why do you say it was almost self-aware?

Look I found my longer comment from back then:
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Apart from the slightly disappointing ending, where the fantastic and intimate feel of the movie got melted away in the blink of an eye through an almost deus-ex-machina move, it was just as loveable as I've been promised that it would be. It totally looked like a mix of Dark Passage and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre - the fairy tale feel of the former, with our main character bumping into suddenly good and suddenly bad guys, with strange dreamy sequences (except that here they were caused by blood loss, hence their mood was a lot darker), and with the Mexican background of the latter - I was praying that Pancho wouldn't turn out to be a bad guy, christ was he a total sweetheart! Imagine a totally drunk old fat Mexican being asked "Are you drunk?" and answering with a huge smile "Is possible".

The main character looked a bit like a prick in the beginning, but later on turned out that his cold stiffness was mostly due to him being like a fish very much out of water, trying hard (and often failing) to make sense of the world around him. Because he did step into a world beyond, where young Indian girls stare at you with huge eyes because they have seen your death, where eerie gods of unluck are being burned - but not before indicating the place where the deceiving and hurting will be performed, where people become suddenly your most trusted pals, sharing with you their bed under the naked sky and protecting you with the price of their own skin, where the bad guy, the one who had your friend killed back "home", is deaf without an eerie device attached to his chest and ear (that makes him hold the telephone receiver upside down), a place that may be hell (*points upwards*) or heaven (*points downwards* - remember The Third Man?).

And in the middle of all this, we have a protagonist who knows right from wrong - apart from casually calling his Indian pal "Sitting Bull" , who doesn't flinch in front of the femme fatale, whose determination to finish his mission is so strong that, at a point where he's half-delirious from blood loss and falls under the illusion that the bus meant to take him away from San Diego, to safety, was actually the bus that had brought him there in the morning, so in that point when moments of his stay in San Diego collide into each other and mix with the local Fiesta into a hallucinatory ballet, his only thought is to find the object of his grudge and exert his retribution upon him. A retribution that is mostly silly, which people from outside his story call either unpatriotic or absurdly cheap, but which is his own way of tying the loose threads from the story of his dead friend. Which is now his own story. A wonderful movie, there'd be so much more to say about it...
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there's a highway that is curling up like smoke above her shoulder