The Alex Archives

            "Good Morning America, it is Charles Gibson, and it's Tuesday, September"           ​It is hard to ignore the influence the September 11 attacks had on the world and everything that exists in it. Media, culture, politics, society, security - all were affected and changed beyond recognition. Looking back to this event, now 23 years in the past, it is perhaps the nostalgia or the process of becoming an adult that often makes me think , everything was better in the 90s and 2000s, and perhaps I am just blinded by those ethereal feelings. Under all the grief and suffering caused by the attacks, there is a sense we lost something, I was only 11 months old when this event happened but I always had the feeling the world lost a certain type of innocence (for lack of a better word) and looking back to old videos from that era, it has always felt that way to me. In my teenage years I went through a period of music discovery, duri...

  Cast  - Kevin Costner, Sienna Miller, Sam Worthington, Jena Malone. Kevin Costner  - Director           "Looks like we got ourselves a bad man right here."           ​​For people, the idea of spending their time in a theater is becoming more and more difficult. Prices are increasing and the variety of films one can watch is not particularly attractive. Ironically, we are now seeing the proliferation of movies with a runtime that exceeds the 3-hour mark, from the ones that have been released not all are box office successes like Oppenheimer , in the case of Killers of the Flower Moon , even after its 10 nominations at the 95th Academy Awards it only made half of its production budget, naturally it is not hard to imagine that the casual viewer will be reluctant to see a Western with that duration, which sadly Horizon was. I think we can all agree that Westerns are a thing of the past, while Neo-Westerns keep exploring th...

            "How many doors do I have to break through until they stop locking me out"           ​Disney is a spineless company, they have shown time and time again that whenever they are faced with a controversy or backlash a change in their policies and approach to new stories will happen. During their battle with Florida´s governor Ron DeSantis they not only lost their perfect image with conservatives–something they were struggling to maintain since their recent movies and TV shows have been criticized by the diverse cast and stories–but also an active boycott by, what it appeared at the time, groups of conservative fanatics. It is November of 2024 and the culmination of these stories reached its peak when convicted felon and ex-President of the US Donald Trump was reelected to be the 47th president of said country. It is clear that everything is becoming more conservative, more than the previous 10 years. As expected, this is si...

   Cast  - Karla Sofía Garcón, Zoë Saldana, Selena Gomez. Jacques Audiard  - Director           "Habla, esta gente habla, pero ahora lo van a pagar."           ​As a Mexican, having to watch ignorant, simplistic, and often disrespectful depictions of how life is in this country is to be expected once in a while. There are countless examples of this in cinema, television, and the opinions of random Twitter users. Most of these are embraced, reclaimed, and even celebrated by large sections of the population, I doubt Emilia Pérez , with its soap opera sensibilities will be hated by many of them. For the more progressive outlets, critics from Mexico, and on Social Media, this is yet another example of a whitewashed representation of the entire country's way of living, its government, and attempting to tackle an issue that causes hundreds of thousands of dead and missing people every year without the proper education and g...

  Cast  - Yuumi Kawai, Mizuki Yoshida. Kiyotaka Oshiyama  - Director Tatsuki Fujimoto - Original Writer           "Then why do you draw, Fujino?"           ​​One of the most common complaints when watching a film is the runtime. When movies like Oppenheimer or Killers of the Flower Moon reach or surpass the 3-hour mark, it can be heavy to most viewers, but looking past the raw number of minutes it will take you to finish a movie this often rewards you with a much more intimate portrait of the characters, their mental states and why are they doing the things they do. This is not the norm, and many times the long runtime can feel clunky and unimportant. On the other side, we can get works like Look Back , that with a duration of 57 minutes fails to capture the essence of its two main characters and is more focused on giving us cute and emotional montages, trying to overcompensate the lack of character development. Look Ba...

Cast  - Diego Calva, Trinidad Gonzales. Alberto Barrera - Creator           "No sé porque nos la pasamos hablando mucho de amor y poquito de la amistad."           I would like to start by saying that as a cisgender man, I have a limited understanding of what being transgender and Muxe is, if this review is read as insensitive to those communities let me know so I can be educated on those subjects. I am not a big Television fan, my relationship with this art medium has been tarnished by the popularisation of streaming services and the incredibly low-quality shows produced by Mexican companies. In recent years, Netflix series have taken more importance in the cultural zeitgeist of this country than things made by any TV company in the land, leading to more variety of stories, communities, and scope than anything made before. With that being said I would have never expected a series like Secreto del Rio to be, not only Netflix's mos...