The other day I happened upon this list of movies filmed or set in Puerto Rico. I thought this was so cool, so I set out to find some that looked familiar. I didn’t realize that so many famous movies were set there. Movies like Lord of the Flies, Jacob’s Ladder, even the new one The Men who Stare at Goats.  Some I did know were filmed there like  Captain Ron, Feel the Noise and El Cantante as well as the upcoming Rum Diary movie.  

I was interested in checking out a few of the other lesser known movies and found a movie with a name that intrigued me: Casi Casi which means literally “almost, almost” or more closely in English to “just barely but not quite”. The reason this title caught my eye is because when I say my name in Spanish when introducing myself “Cassie” sounds exactly like “Casi”. Most Spanish-speaking people look at me strangely, as most English-speaking people would look at someone strangely if they were named “Almost” as in “Hello, my name is Almost, how are you?” So, instead I usually introduce myself in Spanish with my formal birth name of Cassandra. And people relax a little more. “Ahh, Cassandra… que bonito el nombre” they will say, or “Oooh, Cassandra, la mujer de las telenovelas”. Apparently there were some Spanish soap operas where there was an protagonist (or was it an antagonist?) whose name was Cassandra. Usually Cassandras in these types of shows are somewhat psychic as well so kind of mysterious…Here’s an article about the Mexican actress Anette Michel who plays Casandra in the telenovela Pasión Morena.

Anyway, I wanted to see Casi Casi and so headed off to the local library to see if they had it. Which they did! Britton and I watched the DVD about a week ago and thought it was pretty good. It’s a low budget movie, but has a simple story line about a bunch of high school teens who get in trouble when rigging a school election. It is classic Puerto Rico with some of the slang Spanish (the whole film is in Spanish with English subtitles), games (dominoes), clothing (the kids wear the traditional uniforms),  salsa dancing and they even take a trip to old San Juan. It really gives the flavor of contempory Puerto Rico from the teenage perspective.

I thought it was a fun, cute movie with a great title 🙂 Check it out.