I have this entire plan for this website that involves making it, you know, actually readable. Being that there’s a lot of text and all. Having already ‘hired’ five website designers, you can see the results for yourself. This is what happens when you offer to pay someone to do something. What I need to do is get someone to work for me for free. Like what you’re doing now by plowing through the ugliness you see before you.

Once I do that, the new website will allow me to write short pieces on movies that I want to say something about, but for which I don’t have the time to say Something. As such, the bland and overpraised Carancho deserves only a brief evisceration. Let’s start, as I often do, at the end, where the main characters are hit by a car. See, Sr. Ricardo Darín is a ‘vulture’, who takes advantage of the thousands of people hit by cars in Argentina every year. Then, he’s…hit by a car in the end. This is followed by a subtitle that explains how ironic this is. Then quotes appear. Then quotes around the quotes in a parenthetical. Unfortunately I still didn’t understand the irony. They didn’t use the right font. So the director flew into England to appear after the film to explain to me that the character who made his living off of car accidents being killed in a car accident was ‘backwards angry total’.

Thank God I speak perfect Spanish.

I almost travelled to London to see it. The ticket stub would have been better.

The reason this film fails so spectacularly is because of its success, the glimpses of authenticity you get the various hospital and legal office scenes which have no connection to the story, including an especially amusing – but in no way ironic, Sr. Pablo Trapero – bit where two semi-comatose fight victims come to next to each other, and, realizing that it’s them who put each other in the hospital, begin to go at it again.

The filmmakers did their homework, but they lack the dramatic ability to incorporate these details into the story and main characters, who half-assedly flounder around in something about how being a junkie is interesting and sometimes being a lawyer is bad unless it’s good. It is the marked difference between NYPD Blue seasons 1-7, and NYPD Blue seasons 8-12. They both had ex-cop Det. Bill Clark for background, who, during the years he spent as a detective in New York, had accumulated the amazing stories of betrayal, redemption and mind-numbing stupidity that occurred over scoring drugs, hiding bruises, embarrassing contests of manhood, and yep, even car accidents.

In seasons 1-7, the show had Mr. David Milch who possessed both the apprehension of characters who behave against their own interests – behavior which is, well, ironic – and the ability to communicate this insight to an audience through dialog and story. Sr. Trapero, like Det. Clark on his own seasons 8-12, either cannot penetrate the heads of the characters, or simply fails to make them congruent to a new and intriguing world. Instead, they aimlessly wander about and check off their expected noir-y activities, and conveniently forget to make motivated choices. Characters like that deserve to die. In some sort of unspecified way, of course.