Bombon el Perro
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Like Waiting for Godot — in which nothing happens, twice — Bombon el Perro is without event or significant drama. Unlike Waiting for Godot, Bombon el Perro doesn’t make you think about the futility of all endeavour. The film isn’t egotistical enough to want to tell you any truths about the human condition.
Instead, it tells the story of a man who is given a pedigree dogo after performing a kind deed and how that changes his luck (he had been sacked previously) and leads him into the world of dog exhibiting and stud farming. This is done realistically, like Ken Loach, but it doesn’t adhere to the conventions of realist cinema where something awful must happen to nice people. After having watched the half-baked trash of Role Models, I found it incredibly cleansing to watch a film which doesn’t accord to any cinematic conventions.
Role Models, the new film with Paul Rubb and Stiffler from American Pie isn’t awful, indeed, it fulfills the contract it makes with the audience relatively well, providing a few funny jokes, some misogyny, and a heartwarming ending, but it is unbelievably formulaic. From the first scene, you know exactly what is going to happen: Rudd is a malcontent in a banal job who wants to find meaning but won’t do anything about it. When his girlfriend leaves him, he gets into a scrape is colleague, Stiffler (playing exactly the same role as always), and they are forced to do 150 hours of community service or go to prison. They reluctantly do the community service with troubled children (one is racist caricature of a smart alec black kid, the other McLovin from Superbad) and, what do you know, learn trite lessons about being nice and stuff.
Bombon el Perro, by contrast, refuses to play along to any formula. There is no judgemental moralizing about characters, instead we see people as they are.