![]() ![]() Carly and Mateo feel old enough to do anything except decide where to live. At least the wobbles in the casting add to Arango’s driving theme of displacement for two young men already in the liminal space of last-stage adolescence. ![]() Their classmates seem unable to find South America on the map, making it doubly insulting when bullies heckle them with, “Yo quiero Taco Bell.” (Playing Carly, Mateo Arias is so hirsute, he’s hard to accept as a senior.) Adding to the disorientation, the lovely Diane Guerrero plays his mother, but looks young enough to be his sister. ![]() (At least Cannibal Corpse T-shirts are the eternal metalhead uniform.) Arango, a Colombian himself, emigrated to the states in the late ’90s, when the film is less-than-convincingly set. “ Blast Beat,” an earnest dual coming-of-age drama written and directed by Esteban Arango, who co-wrote the script with high school friend Erick Castrillion, monitors the brothers’ misfit adventures when their upper-middle-class family is forced to move from Colombia to the outskirts of Atlanta. (Of the two actors, Moisés is actually 18 months older in real life, but channels convincing younger brother pique.) But he’ll swoop in, hair flapping like a vampire’s cape, to rescue his younger brother from the cops - and then scold Mateo himself. Carly, the sensible one, can’t prevent Mateo from dynamiting a dollhouse. Back home in Bogota, teen brothers Carly and Mateo - played by siblings (and Disney Channel veterans) Mateo and Moisés Arias - are metal-blasting, skateboard-riding punks, and reluctant partners in crime. ![]()
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