Y tu Luna también: A Wonderful World (2006)

An interesting, whimsical satire—heavy-handed but amusing. Extremely light on Diego Luna, who only has a brief cameo, but I was entertained.

One cold rainy night, a homeless guy named Juan Peréz looks for shelter and winds up teetering on the ledge of a high office building. He’d ducked out the window to avoid getting caught inside and then got locked out, but onlookers think he’s contemplating suicide. The situation gets heightened further because of the building itself—it’s the office of Ministro Lascuráin, who claims that his economic policies have wiped out poverty in Mexico. Now it’s looking like Peréz’s potential suicide is in protest of a government that turns a blind eye to its citizens living in poverty. Needless to say, Perez’s drunken accident is about to kick off a national firestorm.

The subject matter is dark, but the satire is pretty broad and goofy. Still, I enjoyed it. After we open on Lascuráin giving a self-congratulatory speech, we’re treated to a long montage of Peréz seeking shelter from the rain. He stands outside in the cold, looking in on a happy suburban family with an honest-to-goodness white picket fence while “What a Wonderful World” plays in the background, and he’s thrown out of a church as the priest swears at him. Meanwhile, Lascuráin attempts to get ahead of the scandal with the help of a trio of pencil-pushing advisors giving him worst-case scenarios, and Peréz’s pals start to wonder if they too can get some cushy hush-money perks if they threaten to jump off a building.

Several of Luna’s castmates from the Narcos franchise are in the cast. José María Yazpik (Amado) plays one of Lascuráin’s advisors, while Joaquín Cosio (Don Neto) plays one of Peréz’s buddies. As I was watching, I couldn’t place Damián Alcázar, who plays Peréz himself, but after checking IMDb, I realized he was the head of Cali—he mainly appeared on the main show, but he was in one episode of Narcos: Mexico. The acting is mostly silly and fun, skewering the subject matter with gusto.

Incredibly little to say about Diego Luna here. He has a brief cameo as a TV reporter near the very end of the film. Less than a minute of screentime, I’d say. IMDb credits him as Reportero en Estocolmo, so at least I wasn’t expecting that much—if your character doesn’t have a name, there’s a good chance that their role isn’t very big.

Recommend?

In General – A soft maybe. It’s silly but entertaining.

Diego Luna – Naw, he’s barely in it and has almost nothing to do.

Warnings

Thematic elements (including discussion of suicide,) language, drinking/smoking, sexual references, gross-out humor, and comedic violence.

Neurodivergent (Headcanon) Alley: Ned (Pushing Daisies)

*A few Ned-related spoilers.*

Going back to one of my first serious TV loves, Pushing Daisies. I was so deep into this show back in the day. I watched a couple episodes from season 1 because Raúl Esparza was a guest star and he was one of my major Broadway guys at the time. I went into the show knowing absolutely nothing about it and came away sort of bewildered but determined to have more of this series in my life. As I’ve said before, Pushing Daisies is the first show that made me specifically seek out its showrunner, leading me to Wonderfalls (with bonus Lee Pace!), Dead Like Me, and later Hannibal. When it was on the bubble during season 2, I wrote letters to ABC every day. This show grabbed my brain and my heart and wouldn’t let go. Is it any wonder that it’s neurodivergent as hell?

A big source of my love, of course, is Ned, the man who makes pies and wakes the dead. Back when I wrote my Favorite Characters post on Ned, I attributed a lot of his traits to his powers and his traumatic experiences in childhood: discovering that he can bring dead things back to life with a touch of his finger, learning the caveats to those powers in devastating ways (including his mother permanently dropping dead with a good-night kiss after he revived her the first time,) and being abandoned by his father and sent to a bleak boarding school. No doubt Ned has a ton of trauma that contributes to him craving routine and consistency, hesitant to connect with others despite being lonely. And yes, some of his issues with touch are down to his magic powers, not wanting to inadvertently bring something dead back to life and vigilant not to permanently kill his alive-again dog or childhood sweetheart with an accidental second touch. Those things are definitely factors.

But those traits present themselves in very autistic ways, and besides, there’s no rule that says he can’t have magic powers/childhood trauma and also be autistic (hello, Matilda!) Ned tends to speak at a rapid pace in a low, flat tone. He stress bakes when he’s worried, both because the familiarity soothes him and because pie is his strongest connection to his late mother. He can find it really difficult to talk about his feelings—sometimes he can’t bring himself to speak at all, sometimes he broaches an issue with extreme reticence, and sometimes he blurts it out in moments where he just can’t help it.

Ned’s power is governed by three incontrovertible rules, and he’s added all sorts of additional rules and protocols to that, along with inventions that help him out with Digby and Chuck. He makes a long-handled petting device for Digby, installs a plexiglass divider in his car so Chuck can sit in the front, and wears slippers with bells around the apartment so both Chuck and Digby will hear him coming. This displays creativity and ingenuity, not to mention some solid tinkering skills. That said, Ned is surrounded by characters who, while also ND-coded, are not driven nearly as much by structure and protocol as he is. He sometimes views that as a good thing, getting help to come a bit more out of his shell and be adventurous, but when other characters ignore or actively break his self-imposed rules, he gets anxious, which can make him feel uptight and like he’s the problem.

In the initial run of Pushing Daisies and through several rewatches, I was bugged by a storyline in season 2 where Ned struggles with Chuck moving out of his apartment, eventually becoming roommates with Olive. It felt to me like Ned was trying to control Chuck—maybe not even entirely consciously, but it came across as possessive in a way that I didn’t like. On my latest rewatch, though, viewing this storyline through an autistic lens helped me contextualize it more. It’s not that Ned is trying to control Chuck and prevent her from spreading her wings beyond him. It’s that he’s being hit with a lot of change really fast, he doesn’t know what this means for their relationship, and he kind of feels like having a problem with this makes him a jerk. He’s a guy who loves his girlfriend and is badly navigating a new situation that makes him feel really uncomfortable. Even though Chuck is just across the hall and likes the “Parisian” flair of his-and-hers apartments, Ned has lost some of his solidity and is kind of spiraling about it. And while he likes Olive and is glad for Chuck to have a friend, he also feels left out and worries that maybe Chuck doesn’t need him anymore.

Chuck, of course, isn’t doing anything wrong, and Ned does ultimately come to terms with the fact that he can’t make her stay. But his difficult feelings about the whole thing aren’t wrong either. Mainly, it’s just a tricky situation that both of them could’ve handled better. I have to say, I really like it when a neurodivergent interpretation helps me feel greater empathy for characters I love in storylines that frustrate me (see also, Keeley Jones and KJPR.)

Other Doctor Lives: Criminal Record: Season 1, Episode 8 – “Carla” (2024)

*Episode premise spoilers, which include spoilers from episode 7.*

Season finale of Criminal Record! I know that the show has been picked up for another season, and as I’ve been watching, I wasn’t sure how that was going to work—I assumed this season would wrap up the Adelaide Burrows murder case, and I couldn’t really picture how they’d move on from there. Like, would it be more of an anthology show like True Detective? But now that the season is over, I can kind of see how the show could be continued.

In the last episode, June confronted Hegarty about the recording she discovered of him coaching Errol through his false confession. Despite the immoral and illegal tactics he used to close the case, Hegarty is still confident he’s got the right man, and he offers to go through the case records with June to prove it. When that search reveals a glaring hole in the original investigation, Hegarty is just as anxious as June to chase down the leads he missed back then. This becomes even more urgent after someone leaks the recording of the emergency call that started June down this path in the front place—not only is the real murderer still out there somewhere, but now the audio of his girlfriend Carla saying he brags about killing Adelaide is all over the internet. June and Hegarty are forced to work together before the leak costs Carla her life.

That’s right—these two have had each other in their sights all season, and now they’re reluctantly teaming up. It gives June a different perspective on Hegarty and the initial murder investigation. While what he did to Errol is still horrifically gross and unethical, she’s able to see the difference between him and some of his goons, who are more nakedly and enthusiastically racist. Hegarty has huge, unconscionable blind spots that contributed to him dropping the ball in a very consequential way, but he does ultimately want to arrest the right people, not just whoever’s convenient.

So the two of them comb through the evidence and try to find the real killer, racing against time before he punishes Carla for the leak that she had nothing to do with. The situation is urgent enough that both June and Hegarty can compartmentalize and stay focused on the investigation, but neither June nor the show lets Hegarty off the hook for his past actions. In the quieter, less high-stress moments of the episode, June repeatedly takes Hegarty to task: for missing critical evidence the first time around, for coercing Errol’s confession in such an awful way, and for not analyzing why he succumbed to such a perfect storm of corruption in this case in particular.

While I don’t get behind all of the show’s choices here, I think they strike a good balance with Hegarty in the end. Like I’ve said the last few episodes, the show is able to explore the motivations behind his choices without excusing or justifying them, and I’d say that bears out here. And although there are certainly plenty of cops who are openly, grossly racist, like some of the characters we see on this show, it’s a more interesting narrative to me that Hegarty isn’t one of them. That he views himself as a good detective and wouldn’t think of himself as being prejudiced, but that he still does some truly terrible things and goes down an intense road of corruption to cover his ass afterwards. That his biases are one of several reasons behind his actions. And that it ultimately doesn’t matter whether or not he’s done these things because He’s an Evil Racist: whatever his reasons, Errol’s life has been destroyed either way. This is a more interesting, more complex story, and it gives Peter Capaldi more to do than if Hegarty had been characterized more like his cronies.

Accent Watch

Scottish.

Recommend?

In General – Maybe. I don’t think it succeeds in everything it sets out to do, but it has some interesting stuff going for it.

Peter Capaldi – I think I would. Capaldi turns in a strong performance here, and it goes places I didn’t expect at the start of the series.

Warnings

Graphic violence, copaganda, language, drinking/smoking/drug use, and strong thematic elements (including gaslighting and references to suicide.)