Some extra Heridas stuff

Here is Carmen's page, with some awesome Heridas de Amor editorial.

http://tryingtotranslate.blogspot.com/


Her original posts: Best and worst actors of Heridas de Amor

Now that I have (somewhat) gotten over being disgruntled about the extreme lameness of the last episode, here are some thoughts on Heridas de Amor:

BEST ACTRESS: Diana Bracho (Bertha). She made a ridiculously over-the-top character believable, and I enjoyed watching Bertha turn from a seemingly sweet lady into a raving maniac.

Runner up for best actress: Nuria Bages (Fernanda). She managed not to annoy me even though all she did was cry (and pronounce death sentences on all her patients). Good work.

BEST ACTOR: Sergio Sendel (Cesar). This isn't really fair to the other actors because I tend to prefer villains. All Cesar did was snarl, cry a little, and then snarl again. But he genuinely gave me the creeps. If these characters were real, I'd rather meet Bertha than Cesar. I wouldn't even want to pass Cesar on the street. So I call that good acting.

Runner up for best actor: Ernesto D'Alessio (Juan). I'm sure this will be a controversial choice, but this guy deserves a medal for convincing me that he, or anyone else on this earth, could love and worship that snivelling idiot Renata.

Which brings me to... WORST ACTRESS: Ingrid Martz (Renata). It's not her fault that the character was so poorly written, but she did nothing to make me like Renata. From the first episode to the last, all I wanted to do was slap her.

WORST ACTOR: Luis Xavier (Roman). Again, maybe the actor is not to blame. Maybe it was just bad casting. But I never believed that he really loved Amparo. There was zero chemistry between them.

Now for the most important categories of all:

BEST HAIR (FEMALE): Susana González (Liliana). I hated the character but loved her hair. (Miranda's hair was far too fussy for my taste.)

WORST HAIR (FEMALE): Paola Riquelme (Erica). Hideous hair cut!

BEST HAIR (MALE): This award goes to Guy Ecker (Alejandro) because he was the only male actor who seemed to have any chest hair.

WORST HAIR (MALE): Marcelo Córdoba (Daniel). It looked to me like he was wearing a wig.

I have a lot more to say about this show, but I'll save it for my next blog post. If you agree or disagree with my comments about the actors, please let me know!



A little more ranting and rambling about Heridas de Amor

I just posted this comment about the last episode of Heridas de Amor at the Caray Caray blog, and I agree with myself so much that I decided to post it here, too:

I think the writers of this episode (a) hated the actors (b) hated the show's producers, and/or (c) hated the audience, because this is the most idiotic ending to any show I have ever seen.

Cesar getting killed in a random car accident? Gee, why didn't George Lucas think to kill off Darth Vader that way? Just have a space ship accidentally fall on his head. And Sauron, maybe he could have tripped on a pebble and broken his neck and saved Frodo the trip to Mount Doom!

This episode made even silly "Peregrina" look like Shakespeare.


...OK, enough ranting. What did I like about Heridas de Amor?

First of all, I thought it was very well directed. The scenes didn't seem static; there was usually some weird camera angle to keep things interesting.

Also, the settings were varied -- I didn't feel that I was seeing the same handful of sets over and over. (My only gripe about my favorite telenovela, Piel de Otoño, was that almost every scene seemed to take place in a restaurant; I didn't notice the same kind of repetition in Heridas de Amor.) I especially enjoyed the scenery in Tabasco. Beautiful.

I liked the music, especially the theme song.

And of course, the main villains were great. Bertha was intriguing, and I found her believable for all her nuttiness. It was an especially clever touch to give her that dog -- I can't think of another film or TV villain who goes around menacing people with a big attack dog. Very scary.

I also liked the unholy duo of Bertha and Cesar. It was fun to watch them getting drunk and puzzling together over why no one loved them for their wicked, wicked ways.

NOW SOME MORE COMPLAINTS. I don't understand why the writers didn't do more with Bertha and Cesar at the end of the story. Is it believable that they could remain holed up in Cesar's apartment when the police were looking for them? Or that they would make no real effort to escape for days on end, even when they still thought they had access to Cesar's stolen money -- that Cesar would just sit around drinking, and Bertha would visit the hacienda to confess to all her past crimes, with no profit in it for her?

Maybe the fight went out of Bertha after Guapo raped her. But then why did she continue hanging around with Guapo? They shot Charo, and menaced Santiago together, AFTER the rape. Did Bertha give up hope and decide to commit suicide because Cesar rejected her after the rape? I can believe that, but the writers should have made it plain by having one big final blow-up between Bertha and Cesar. As it was, it seemed Bertha gave up all her evil schemes simply because she knew the show was about to end.

WHAT I EXPECTED TO HAPPEN: I thought Cesar, the more human of the the Unholy Duo, would become so attached to Bertha that he would start trusting her, and then she would (of course) betray him. Then Bertha herself would be killed by her own dog. So both villains were done in by their own "wounds of love."

Alternately, Cesar could have flipped his top, killed Bertha in one of his trademark rages, then regretted it, realized that he loved her in his own twisted way -- and then have been killed by Bertha's guard dog. Of course, all of this should have happened while they were carrying out a grand revenge scheme against everyone they threatened during the course of the show. Maybe they would have been holding Amparo hostage at the time -- after all, Bertha made some dramatic threats against Juan's family, but she never carried them out.

What I liked most about this show was that it opened up so many possibilities for future storylines, and it disappointed me that so many promises were never fulfilled.

UNEXPLAINED MYSTERIES AND UNRESOLVED PLOTS: How did Alfredo Luque survive being shot and thrown into the river? Who saved him? Why didn't he ever go to the police about the shooting?

We know Tomasa's sons disposed of Alfredo's body at Bertha's behest. Then Bertha kidnapped Nuria to keep Tomasa quiet. Tomasa's sons both died at some point. How did they die? If Bertha killed them, how? Why not kill Tomasa, too? Where was Nuria's mother during all of this? None of this makes sense.

Whatever happened to the portfolio of Alfredo Luque's designs? Did Alejandro get it back?

Who is going to inherit Alfredo's fortune? Florencia's baby? What, if anything, does that mean for Alejandro and Daira? Why did Alfredo make such an insanely complicated will, anyway?

How did Bertha manage to kill the two doctors in Germany? Why did it take the police eight months or so to release the security camera photo of her?

Whatever happened to that guy who tore up all Pamela's photographs? For that matter, what happened to Pamela's career as a photographer? After the first few episodes, her camera seemed to disappear. Too bad; I thought that was going somewhere. Marrying her off to Luciano was predictable, boring, and pointless.

Did Daniel (Julio's son) fall out of love with Carola, or just fall off the face of the earth, taking his brother Angel with him?

And (I'm speaking now as an ignorant American) if Juan was so incredibly poor and low-class that Renata and all her friends recoiled from him in horror, how did he manage to become a doctor? Is medical school free in Mexico? And why did Renata treat Juan like an unwashed street urchin -- doesn't a doctor have any status at all in Mexico? If Fernanda was the best cardiologist in Mexico, why was she living in a supposedly bad neighborhood? If the neighborhood was so bad, why didn't Amparo and Francisco ever lock their front door? Is any of this true to real life in Mexico, or is it just silliness?

Another mystery: Why was a good-looking guy like Francisco single for so long? Which leads me to...

THE ROMANCES THAT NEVER HAPPENED

1. Daira and Francisco. Around the same age. Both attractive and single. She was rich; he hated rich people. She was flaky; so was he. A match made in telenovela heaven. So what happened?

2. Fernanda and Julio. Clearly even Julio could see that Rebeca was an idiot. But at the last moment, the writers decided to redeem her and get her back together with Julio. It would have been more interesting if he'd fallen in love with Fernanda and Fernanda had felt horribly guilty about the whole thing. She was so good at feeling horribly guilty, so why not?

3. Santiago and Andrea. I know he was a priest, but he spent an awful lot of time holding Andrea's hand, didn't he?

4. Carola and Joel. I didn't care what happened to Carola because I didn't like her much, but I figured Joel was hanging around in the background for some reason, and eventually he'd come out of the shadows and start gazing adoringly at Carola while she gazed adoringly at Juan. But nope, it never happened.

Or:

5. Juan and Carola. Renata could have realized finally that a nice poor man is better than a rich psychopath (Cesar). She could have gone running, like Scarlett O'Hara, back to Juan, only to find he didn't give a damn anymore because he had decided to marry Carola. That would have served Renata right.

WORST STORYLINE ON THE SHOW: Yes, as you can probably guess, I think the worst storyline was the marriage of Juan and Renata, because it was never really resolved. She finally accepted him after he agreed to move into her mother's big fancy house with her (because oops, she needed a daddy for Cesar's baby). And Juan, supposedly Mr. Nice Guy, never bothered to apologize to Carola for using her, then dumping her the moment Renata wanted him back. And these two fine people will now be raising Cesar's demon child together. And I'm supposed to find that romantic?

BEST STORYLINE: The death of Lisania. It was shocking and chilling, and it's the thing I'll remember most about this show.

The other scenes I will remember most: Bertha taunting Rebeca by eating chocolate fingers after Fabricio's kidnapping; Charo's apparently lifeless body on the kitchen floor after Guapo shot her; and Bertha stabbing herself so she could feel a "wound of love." The first two scenes were memorable because they showed just how cold and lethal Bertha could be. As for that last scene, ugh, I'd like to forget it, but I don't think I will.

That's enough of my ranting and rambling for now. Please tell me what you think.


I had the following comments:
Carmen I couldn't agree more with your worst hair award. I think that may the worst hair I've ever seen on TV that wasn't intentionally bad. That poor actress had to go out in public like that when she wasn't shooting the show. She deserves something extra for that. Maybe that's why she got written out of the show? The focus groups kept puking when they saw her hair so they wrote her out. Or she quit out of shame. Also, as a hairy-chested man myself, I appreciate the love for the chest hair. A couple extra awards - Hottest babe on the show: Pamela, no contest. Liliana was hot too but Pamela's character had self-confidence where Babe Lawyer did not, making Pamela infinitely hotter. Biggest idiot, male: Luis Alberto. First, short skinny guys can't have that huge head of hair, it makes them look like a bobblehead. Second, this guy got duped by Cesar, then made the unforgiveable mistake of falling for the hot but way messed up in the head chick from the office. Horrible move, didn't we all learn back in high school and college that these messed up people never change? You are doomed to a lifetime of snot-nosed whining from your woman now LA, congrats. Biggest idiot, woman: Miranda. Renata may be a more popular choice, but at one point she seemed to be getting her head straight, Miranda never did. She just bounced from one person to the next, believed everything anybody told her, hated people one minute and loved them the next, or vice versa, kept whimpering after that loser Fabricio after he confessed to nailing her sister for years and dumping her. She takes the cake. This has been quite an entry, sorry for the length but I got on a roll. If you've read my recaps this won't surprise you. Thanks for the good posts/opinions!

Check out Carmen's site as well as caraycaray.blogspot.com