When I was a kid my fam­ily and I would rent a condo in Puerto Val­larta and go to the beach for a cou­ple of weeks every other year or so. It was great, and we’d just hang out and go to the beach and explore around. We did a booze cruise too, but since I was 7 at the time it didn’t mean very much to me, but at least we got to go on a big boat.

And the peo­ple of the area were very nice and we always had a great time there. It was fun.

So fast-forward many years later. To a month or so ago.

I had seen the pre­view for Amores Per­ros at the Inwood The­ater many years ago and remem­bered at the time that it had been said that it was a sort-of Mex­i­can Pulp Fic­tion, so when I saw it was going to be on IFC a cou­ple of weeks ago I set up the Tivo to tape it. It sat there for awhile, wait­ing for us, and we finally watched it.

Oh boy.

If you don’t know about the movie, Amores Per­ros fol­lows sev­eral groups of peo­ple in Mex­ico City in a non-linear story. There is Octavio, who is in love with his brother’s wife and wants to help her leave him, so he starts putting his pet Rot­tweiler into dog fights. There’s also a guy who is cheat­ing on his wife with a soap opera star and her dog falls down in this hole in the floor and then she falls into the hole and requires some sort of surgery and she can’t walk any­more. And there’s a home­less guy who’s a gun for hire, killing peo­ple for money, but all he really wants is to see his daugh­ter again and tell her that he loves her, so he double-crosses two busi­ness part­ners and steals their money and then.…

But that would give away the end­ing, which, like mostly every­thing in Amores Per­ros, is heart-wrenching and sad.

And what you see of Mex­ico City is hor­ri­fy­ing. It’s actu­ally worse than Man on Fire, which was also a film about a guy who’s seek­ing revenge for a kid­napped lit­tle girl in Mex­ico City. The only thing that Man on Fire has that Amores Per­ros doesn’t have is a guy gets his fin­gers chopped off. Or Den­zel Wash­ing­ton. He’s in Man on Fire, which makes the cool quo­tient of Man on Fire rise dra­mat­i­cally.

But still, Amores Per­ros is ter­ri­fy­ing. And I’m also glad I never paid to see it, unlike Trainspot­ting. I will never go to Mex­ico City after see­ing this film. Do I want to fear for my life, or that I might be kid­napped, or a fam­ily mem­ber might be kid­napped and then held for ran­som? What if I paid and that fam­ily mem­ber was killed by the kid­nap­pers? Or caught in a car chase where some­one is rac­ing an injured dog to the hos­pi­tal? Then again, the dog is a Rot­tweiler, so I wouldn’t feel too bad about it dying, but still, what if I was hit by those guys while dri­ving? And then a crazy home­less hit­man stole my wal­let while he was pre­tend­ing to help me? And what if a crazy home­less hit­man killed me while I was there? How much would some­one in Mex­ico City pay to have me killed if the Peso is so low to the dollar?

It bog­gles the mind. Give me a fake dreamy Mex­ico where the peo­ple are friendly and won­der­ful and no one will kill me if I decided to travel there. I’ll take Mex­ico in the late 1970’s for $1000, Alex.

What were some of Glenn Vance’s hap­pi­est mem­o­ries of trav­el­ing as a child?

You know the answer.