this guy walks into a bar...
No Oscar nominations for Desperado . Still, despite Roger Ebert 's suggestion, in his review, that Robert Rodriguez had not yet "learned... How to structure a story so that we can care about the violence on more than a technical level," I think there are characters here worth caring about. Plus, the technical level here is so far above so much else that it hardly matters. The simple take--Ebert's: Rodriguez "has a gift for visuals that can make scenes dance on the screen." The more complicated version: After making El Mariachi for $7,000, using local actors and local, well, non-actors, practical effects and readily available locations--plus the camera thing, which I'll get to in a moment--Rodriguez knows how to plan his scenes, how to stage them, how to frame them. Unfortunately--I think--he got sidetracked later into kids films, but there are moments of genius in some of his stuff. The camera thing, and I learned this in either the commentary track o...