And Starring Pancho Villa as Himself
The is a TV film that is impossible to tell apart from a “regular” film. I must commend them for the treatment of an obscure subject, since Mexico borders the US, shares some of its story but is virtually unheard-of in mainstream American films.
Francisco Villa is treated like the revolutionary underdog he was. Someone with massive charisma, very intelligent and with attention to detail, but someone not above using child soldiers or murdering people in cold blood. It’s neither a fluff piece nor a hatchet job. Ironically or not, takes liberties with history. It seems Dreben the Brooklynite machine gunner fought for the US, since he even did a speech of some sort in Arlington after The Great War.
Banderas hams it up like crazy but does a great job. Most of the other actors do too, except that girl that doesn’t get much to do.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.