El Mariachi
It’s hard for anyone to really talk about this movie without mentioning its low budget, and hard for me to talk about any of Robert Rodriguez’s movies without getting personal, because I read his book, “Rebel Without a Crew”, about the making of El Mariachi, when I was about 16 and it cemented my love of movies, movie-making, and I guess, if you project all that passion forward, art itself in general. It’s equally hard to talk about the amazing budgetary achievement of the movie, though, without clear information about what was done by Columbia Pictures after the finished tape version was acquired by them. They paid for a 16mm blow-up, eg, and possibly other clean-ups and sound… it’s not clear. A small segment of the original tape is available on the DVD which shows very little difference, nothing that would make it impossible to watch, anyway. I’d certainly like to see the full movie in its actual $7000 version. But the fact is, whether or not the movie cost this much “officially”, it is a fact that Robert Rodriguez’s career has been founded on a $7000 outlay earned mostly by working as a guinea pig for medical research. And that’s an inspiration.
Rodriguez does everything in his movies now – writing, directing, music, editing, photography, everything – as he did here (apart from music). What’s notable is that, prior to his total conversion to digital filmmaking (Spy Kids 2: The Island of Lost Dreams, Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over and Once Upon a Time in Mexico), this is the only film he was cinematographer on, so considering the assumption that he didn’t feel comfortable photographing with film, I’d have to say, El Mariachi is pretty damn impressive… it has a definite “look”.
This movie works exactly as a movie of its type should work. I often avoid it more than I would any of Rodriguez’s other movies, for the simple and stupid reason that it’s in a foreign language and, for a movie as “braindead” (and I mean that in the nicest way possible) as this, reading subtitles is hardly worth it. But watching it sparingly makes it all the more worthwhile on the rare occasion I do. This is the funniest of the Mariachi Trilogy (Johnny Depp’s work aside), and has much more bold creativity in it than any of Rodriguez’s movies (the fast-motion “mariachi” scene, for example, when El Mariachi is looking for work and is rejected by a bartender as they “already have a musician” and cue a goofy looking guy setting up his Casio-like keyboard and setting off the demo song, all in silent-movie-like fast motion). Again it’s hard to talk about the movie without mentioning all the inside knowledge that’s available in the book and the commentary etc. Seriously, the more you look into these movies, the more you get out of them.
I honestly don’t think there’s a single moment in the movie that looks as cheap as the much-touted budget figure. These days it’s literally possible to make a movie for nothing in the same style as Rodriguez made this: if you’ve got a digital video camera as many households now do, if you’ve got a computer, as many households do, if you’ve got friends to work with, it is easy as pie to be what Robert Rodriguez was in 1992. That’s all he had. But I don’t think many people could make as good a movie as El Mariachi with just these things. This movie truly shows why he was snapped up by ICM so fast when he visited Hollywood with his little home movie.