Mexican directors Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, Alfonso Cuaron and Guillermo del Toro are “stealing Hollywood’s thunder now. They’re doing exactly what the French” — nouvelle vague-ists Jean-Luc Godard, Francois Truffaut, Eric Rohmer and Jacques Rivette — “did in the 1960s. Birdman bears much the same relation to Batman as Godard’s Breathless did to The Maltese Falcon: it converts a Hollywood formula into its own kind of free-form jazz. [And yet] the Three Amigos are the children of globalism, as conversant in franchise formulas as they are in Mexico’s indigenous cinema. Working away at the fault-line that separates north from south, blockbuster export from indie import, they are bilingual, speaking Hollywoodese but making up their own grammar and syntax.” — from “Hollywood’s Mexican Wave,” a piece by Tom Shone in Intelligent Life magazine, January/February 2015.
