Reviewing Chelsey's Victory Movie -- Under the Same Moon **

I'm a little ashamed to admit that the Chelsey and Bryan Exercise Challenge (or whatever we were calling it) kinda fell by wayside a few weeks back. This happened for a variety of reasons. For starters, I went to Utah for a week for work and I wasn't about to use a hotel elliptical machine. Gross. Since then, we've both been working longer-than-usual hours, making post-work exercise more and more difficult.

Plus, we've been really lazy.

We're going to try to get back into it. At least I am. But, to be honest, the whole situation is so annoying that I don't want to go to far into it.

Updates aside, as Chelsey made clear in her last post, she was the victor during the last week of open workout competition. It took her...like...forever to finally pick a movie to make me watch. In the end she settled on Under the Same Moon or, in espanol, La Misma Luna. Last year, it seemed like the trailer for this movie was everywhere, but, to the best of my knowledge, it never played anywhere near us for very long.

That was a good thing.

I never thought the movie looked all that great. But, when it became available, Chelsey added it to her Netflix queue and we promptly received it in the mail. Then, it sat on our shelf for about seven months. We just never got around to watching it until now. And, now that we've seen it, it's clear that we weren't missing anything.

Under the Same Moon is the story of Carlos, a young Mexican kid living with his grandmother in Mexico years after his mother has moved to the U.S. He and his mom talk every Sunday morning on the phone, both dreaming of a day that she can afford to bring him to live with her. Predictably, the grandmother dies, leaving Carlos with only one option -- he must go to America on his own.

You can pretty much write the rest of the story from there. Carlos goes through a number of struggles, befriends a number of people all inexorably leading him to an all-too-cheesy reunion with his mother. Yay!

It wasn't the movies' generic-ness and predictability that made it suck. Movies can be predictable and derivative and still be good. Under the Same Moon sucked because it wasn't very good. It was oddly paced, poorly acted, and featured some of the most clunky dialogue imaginable.

If you watch the trailer below, you'll gather that, in addition to having a supposed heartwarming story, the movie is a commentary on the treatment of illegal immigrants in the U.S. The movie is supposed to be kind of an inside look on the issue. Virtually all the characters play some role in the illegal immigration story -- the coyotes sneaking immigrants across, the legal immigrants providing food and shelter to the illegal ones, the employers who exploit the immigrant workers, and the handsome devil with a green card whose fondest wish is to marry an illegal immigrant and find out that all their legal problems don't actually disappear. Okay, I'm not actually sure that that last one is all that generic. I also don't know what that character was doing in the story. He literally did nothing.

Anyway, the problem with this approach is that it doesn't come off as having been written by someone with knowledge of these issues. Instead, it plays like it was written by a couple guilty liberals with an ax to grind about U.S. immigration policy. Now, I'm certainly not an anti-immigration zealot and I don't want to get into a post about immigration reform. I'll just say that the issues are far too complex to be summed up on a bumper sticker. The writers of Under the Same Moon apparently disagree.

So, in the end, this was a crappy movie. It's actually worse than it looked. I actually think Chelsey agreed.

Here's the trailer.