From the start, Heli establishes the brutality and transparency of its setting. Opening with two men lying in the back of a truck, one dead and one barely alive, the drivers hang the corpse over a bridge in the middle of a town. Flashbacks show the man still holding on to life is the title character (Armando Espitia), a young steelworker with a wife and infant son. Heli’s 12-year-old sister Estela (Andrea Vergara) has a secret boyfriend, the 17-year-old cadet in training Beto (Juan Eduardo Palacios), and the two plan to secretly wed before running off together. Beto steals two bricks of cocaine from a recent drug bust, hoping to raise wedding funds by selling them, but it doesn’t take long before the police find out. Estela and Beto hide the drugs at Heli’s place, resulting in all three getting kidnapped and tortured.

Heli’s look at innocent people getting dragged into Mexico’s drug war is reminiscent of Gerardo Naranjo’s Miss Bala, except the two films take different approaches with their elegant camerawork. Naranjo used nonstop violence and action to show the intensity of living in a world where death is always around the corner, while director Amat Escalante prefers to linger. Heli catches up to its opening flashforward only an hour into the film, with the remaining 40 minutes focusing on the psychological effects of what happened to Heli and his remaining family members.

Escalante undoubtedly has a good idea, along with plenty of confidence in his filmmaking to get his points across (it impressed at Cannes last year, earning him Best Director). He uses the film’s desert landscape to full effect, showing how the cartel has nothing to hide, but the filmmaker saves his more damning statements for later. Heli’s most notorious scene, where Heli and Beto are brutally tortured, doesn’t take place in some abandoned warehouse. They’re strung up and brutalized in a living room, while young kids play video games and someone cooks dinner in the kitchen. For the average Mexican household, the horrors of the drug war have evolved from atrocities into banalities.

Banal would be a good descriptor for Escalante’s approach as well. His reliance on long, static shots and sudden, brutal violence make for a rote film, the kind of artsploitation popping up every year in the film festival circuit. Escalante takes the nihilistic route here, highlighting the hopelessness of the entire situation by focusing on institutional corruption or showing how violence and blood lust slowly become a part of Heli. A scene where Heli speaks to a policewoman about investigating what happened ends with the officer exposing her breasts to him, asking “Do you want some?” The scene is surprising, but its effect is laughable.

It isn’t the only time Escalante goes for shocks though; the film earned a reputation at Cannes for its scene of a puppy getting its neck snapped, along with a man getting lighter fluid poured on his genitals before they’re set on fire. These scenes, clearly meant to shock viewers, don’t really leave much of an impact. For all of its political and social messages, Escalante isn’t the only filmmaker using these kinds of tactics to get a rise out of audiences. It’s an uninspired approach, one that ends up evoking a more apathetic response than an outraged one. It’s too hopeless and overdone to generate anything more than a shrug.

In this installment, CJ, Bernard, and Dustin talk about the films we have seen recently including Joe Swanberg’s Happy Christmas, Cannes winner Heli, and the new Shailene Woodley film The Fault In Our Stars. We also share the Worst Films of 2014 so far and introduce a new segment called “Watch This” where we recommend each other a film to discuss. Our “Watch This” picks this episode are the highly acclaimed coming-of-age punk film We Are The Best! and Neil LaBute’s slow-burner Some Velvet Morning.

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Being that Steven Spielberg was the president of the Jury for the 66th Cannes Film Festival everyone who I talked to seemed to think that the Palme d’Or would be given to an American film, with Inside Llewyn Davis having the best chances to win. There was certainly a solid American presence at this year’s festival, but I anticipated Spielberg to pick elsewhere (at the very least to prove he is not biased just towards American films). The Palme d’Or ended up going to a French film called Blue is the Warmest Color, which earned fantastic marks from most critics. Sadly, it was a film that I missed while I was there but obviously plan to watch at my earliest opportunity.

See the full list of nominations.

The entire list of 2013 Cannes Film Festival Award Winners:

Blue Is the Warmest Color, (director Abdellatif Kechiche)

Inside Llewyn Davis, (directors Ethan Coen & Joel Coen)

Amat Escalante, Heli

Jia Zhangke, A Touch Of Sin

Ilo Ilo, (director Anthony Chen)

Like Father, Like Son, (director Hirokazu Koreeda)

Berenice Bejo, The Past

Bruce Dern, Nebraska

The Missing Picture, (director Rithy Panh)

Omar, (director Hany Abu-Assad)

Alain Guiraudie, Stranger By The Lake

The Ensemble cast of La Jaula De Oro

Fruitvale Station, (director Ryan Coogler)

Blue Is The Warmest Color, (director Abdellatif Kechiche)

Manuscripts Don’t Burn, (director Mohammad Rasoulof)

Blue Ruin, (director Hirokazu Koreeda)

The Past, (director Asghar Farhadi)

Like Father, Like Son, (director Mohammad Rasoulof)
Miele, (director Valeria Golino)