Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE: The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (2006)

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Posted by Sam Graham (Member # 2889) on 02-26-2006, 11:13 PM:

CINEMA: Century 20 at Jordan Creek, West Des Moines, IA
AUDITORIUM: 7
PRESENTATION: Dolby Digital/THX
PRESENTATION PROBLEMS: RF channel tweeter/horn out, left side token machine in arcade out, left flipper on "Lord of the Rings" pinball machine out
RATING: Three and one half stars (out of four)

WARNING: If spoilers last for more than four hours, consult your physician

Pete's (Jones) good friend Melquiades is found dead by two border patrol guys. Jones wants justice, but justice is hard to come by for an illegal immigrant nobody but Pete cares about. The first half of the movie does a lot of time-shifting to lay out the whole deal. We later see who killed Melquiades, then we see what happened to Melquiades, and then we see the whole deal laid out that leads to Melquiades being buried three times...though I don't quite understand how the second burial was technically...a burial.

Surrounding all this is Pete's girlfriend Rachel, who is also girlfriend to the sheriff, and wife to the local diner owner. Subtlety is NOT her specialty. Then there's recent Cincinnati transplants Lou Ann and Mike. (WHO gets named "Lou Ann" in Cincinnati and ends up living in a border town?) They help make the first half of this movie play out like a collision between "The Last Picture Show" and the style of David Byrne's "True Stories". Sometimes we're not sure why we're seeing all these people, but they're interesting. The second half of the movie is one of the better journeys on film since maybe "Wild at Heart".

The ending is where I stopped short of four stars because a lot of what made the movie so quirky in the first half just sort of got left behind. But it's still easily going to be one of my best for this year.