which is what once upon a time in mexico is.
it even has mickey rourke in, who i have a soft spot for seeing in films. i'm not quite sure why, but i do. william dafoe is there, too, and so is salma hayek, who has surprisingly little to do with the film. the only person who seems totally unnecessary to the film is antonio banderas' el mariarchi, who i think would have been better served by being left in desperado. but then, to be honest, i've never really seen the point for antonio in most films he appears in.
there are, however, some fine moments in the film, and they have pretty much all to do with johnny depp and his cia agent, sands. (who wears a cia t-shirt at one stage.) he's got snappish dialogue ("i'm just going to go and freak out right now.") and some really quite funny moments, the highlights being with the kid towards the end of the film, the mexican chef, and with the fattening cheech from cheech and chong. if you're not convinced that depp will be in the film long enough for you, i assure you that he has the equal screen time of antonio, perhaps a little more.
also
outside this film, i saw some kid's car that had been painted with a bad dragon on it. i know, i know, but it was right there, parked so that everyone could see. a kind of come-up-and-see-my-car position. except, of course, that this dragon was awful. it was flat, one dimensional, and looked as if it had been painted by a bunch of depth perception deprived kids of year three. it was disappointing on so many levels, the first being, of course, that someone would get a green dragon painted onto their white car, but the second being that they didn't pay for someone professional to do the design for them.
i've just no faith in the world.
