Review of Machos

I can't believe it passes the Bechdel test, but somehow it does. The storytelling is great, and the performances are also remarkable. It does subvert some tropes and I was glad about at, mainly the fact that the housekeepers turned out to be real characters that did stuff for the plot instead of just filler. Héctor Noguera did an amazing job in this and he's definitely the most memorable one in this. It made great progress for the time in showing homosexuality, but they were still too afraid to give the gay character a love story when he was a big part of the story (come on, it's a telenovela! Give the guy some romance for his sake). The worst thing about this telenovela is getting to the point where you realize all of the men in the family will get happy endings that they do not deserve, even when a few of them are decidedly the villains of the story and have gone in no journey to learn from their mistakes and earn a decent everafter. Overall, it's a very interesting essay on masculinity and it laid out conversations that need to be had. It was the first non-Sabatini Chilean telenovela that I watched, so it was refreshing and interesting to see that it had a plot that advanced as you kept watching (as one would hope it does).