Baldo by Hector D. Cantú and Carlos Castellanos for June 30, 2012

How about “The Mask of Zorro”? Antonio Banderas as the greatest Mexican hero.

The greatest Mexican hero is El Santo. I don’t recall Zorro ever defeating an Aztec Mummy.

I agree. What happened in The Greater Glory isn’t any different than what the Catholic church did during the inquistion.

“For Greater Glory” is an excellent movie. You should go see it.

did he see the alamo? there were hundreds of latinos in it?

Papi forget about reviews and polls,that’s a bad mentality, just get convinced by yourself!

Ay caramba!

There are more bad movies out there than good ones; if you just “pays your money and takes your chances,” you’ll wind up paying to see a lot of dreck.

Reviews are worth checking out, but they shouldn’t be the only factor or the deciding factor. Also, there’s rarely universal consensus; one reviewer may hate a movie that nine other reviewers love, and if that’s the only review you’ve read you might miss out on something that you might otherwise have really enjoyed. Of course, you may also see a movie that 9 out of 10 reviewers love, and you hate it, and afterwards it turns out that the one bad review was the one you end up agreeing with.

I always liked watching Siskel and Ebert together, because between the two of them I could almost always figure out whether I would enjoy a movie. Of course, they OFTEN disagreed with each other, but by following their back-and-forth I could learn pretty much everything I wanted to know to make my decision whether to go see the movie or not. And it was more than just the “Thumbs Up/Thumbs Down” verdict which I needed to make my decision; sometimes I’d watch the debate and decide I wanted to go see a movie they gave “Two Thumbs Down” to, or avoid something they gave “Two Thumbs Up,” because I knew what factors I was likely to agree with them on (individually or collectively) and which factors I’d likely disagree with them on.

Word-of-mouth is generally the best way to make the decision what movies I want to see or avoid, but again I have to know who’s recommending it to me and why; I need more than some stranger telling me “It was great, better than ‘The Godfather,’ I’m going to see it again and again.” So really it’s nothing more than collecting grass-roots-level ‘reviews’; I don’t simply want to know how many people liked it, I want to know WHO liked it, and WHY. That goes for professional reviewers and word-of-mouth both.

The WORST way for me to make a decision about a movie is just on the basis of the advertizing (trailers, TV spots). True, trailers are often the first thing that brings my attention to a movie (if I’m at a foreign or independent film, the trailers are usually for other foreign or independent films that I’d never know about just from watching TV), but it’s often the case that a movie that intrigued me from the trailer gets blown out of the water when I read the reviews, or a review will convince me to see a movie when the trailer looked like something I’d walk a mile to avoid.

“I guess Austrians should go see Austrian films. Enough separation and bigotry; the ethnicity of the actors does not matter, only the quality of the acting.”

Ideally, that would be the case. But it doesn’t work that way (yet) in real life. If you make a love story about two young White people, the White movie-going audience isn’t going to think “This is a movie about White people”, they’re going to think “This is a love story.” But if you make the same movie about a young Latino couple, they’re going to think “This is a movie about Latino people, I won’t relate to it.” The same goes for movies with Black leads, or Asian leads, or a same-sex love story, or whatever (in a comedy or an action movie, you can have a non-White lead and/or a non-White love interest, but you’d better surround them with White people).

Yes, the cream will rise to the top, and a really excellent Latino or Black or Asian actor can become famous and a box-office draw (and get to make prestige pictures surrounded by White people), but movies with non-White people don’t have the freedom to be mediocre that movies with White people have. So “When a movie comes out with Latino stars and a Latino story, we need to go see it” even if it’s mediocre, to help make sure these movies keep being made. Because if it fails, the studio isn’t going to think “It failed because it was mediocre”, they’ll think “It failed because nobody goes to see movies with and about Latinos.”

And hey, Andy Garcia can always get work playing an Italian. He’s done it before, and everybody loves movies about Italians.