Mala Noche

"Mala Noche" is Spanish for "bad night." I'll use it in a sentence: Last night I saw this film, so I had a mala noche. There's this guy, a liquor store clerk, who hangs out with two underage Mexican boys living in Portland, and the clerk is infatuated with one of them. We know this because the clerk fancies himself a poet, but since his prose barely reaches the level of a reject third-rate beat poet, he's not sympathetic or interesting. Though there are moments toward the end that remind me of Wong Kar-wai's vastly superior "Happy Together," for the most part I see the film as a precursor to "Old Joy" and "The Puffy Chair" and other terrible, pretentious, modern experiments in testing the viewer's patience. Whenever I see a really low-budget movie (like this one), I think how "El Mariachi" was made for less than $10,000. And that's a great movie. And the latter "Pirates of the Caribbean" movies had huge budgets, and they were terrible. The budget is not an excuse.