cocoshell

After a long and, I have to admit, exhausting pursuit I finally laid my hands on a bad VHS copy of this old Colombian film about troubled teenage boys on the streets of Medellin slums. Highly recommended by quite a few people with similar taste in movies as mine, I was expecting a hidden gem, an accurate representation of everyday issues of youth life in a third world country's poor neighborhoods. Gee, what a shock it was to see this film has none of what I hoped to find in it. The title implies it should be about a certain Rodrigo, teenage school drop out growing up in a shanty town of Medellin with nothing but crime and aimlessness all around him, finding his only release in a dream of being a drummer in a punk rock band. If the director decided to follow Rodrigo's story, with an emphasis on his broken home and the reasons why he does ( or doesn't ) the things he does maybe the final result would've been at least an average motion picture. But instead of concentrating on Rodrigo's story and the gradual unfold toward his tragic ending, director Victor Gaviria goes with a stack of more or less uninteresting characters, grinding the storyline into incoherent pieces with no practical value for the viewer. I say uninteresting characters because we get to know absolutely nothing about them. Where do those kids come from? Where are their families? How in the world are they surviving? What is the reason for their apathy towards the world? The vague clues to those questions are placed here and there in course of the movie but they surely don't clarify the path those youths decided to take. Gaviria's piece has a lack of fundamental part in storytelling : humane characters. No matter of their nature, one as a viewer has to be able to understand their motivations, open the door into their lives to be able to comprehend it. You will get nothing of that in "Rodrigo D-No Futuro". The script is not in place either as I was struggling to keep my concentration until the very end. I have nothing against slow plots if they serve the purpose but this just drags on forever and one gets a feeling of pressing the eject button and throwing away this whole nonsense. From the 10th minute until approximately 85th you know nothing more than you did at the initial point. Just a perpetual motion on bunch of kids loafing around, wasting time, stealing vehicles, drinking, smoking pot..and listening to some really amateur, awful punk rock. What surprises me about "Rodrigo S" is a fact that supposedly it has a small, but devoted following among punk rockers and it doesn't even do the iconographic part of the job right. Since when do punk rockers wear t-shirts with swastikas?? I always thought punk rock movement is rigidly anti Nazism and I know for a fact that just a small outcast group of punk rockers( called skinheads ) embraced Hitler's ideology of hate. I don't know, maybe at the time when the film was made it was different in Colombia than here in the Western civilization. As I stated earlier, the characters are dispersed between limited screen time and therefore completely uninteresting since this should be a story about human lives, not a Steven Seagal flick where rationale does not matter. When the fateful events occur at the end of the movie you don't know what's going on nor why it happened. I've seen more than a few Latin American films that deal with the similar subject in a superior way ( Cidade de Deus, Pixote, 1st story of Amores Perros, Bus 174 ).... Gaviria's grave mistake with "Rodrigo" is not knowing what he wants the film to be : a pseudo-documentary with no content or a movie with documentary feel and no storyline??!! Whatever he had in mind did not work for me as I felt betrayed instead of touched as I should be. If you still want to see it go ahead but don't expect poignancy as you will not get it. "Rodrigo" could've been a much better movie if placed in the hands of a director with a vision, sensibility and dexterity of telling a story about unfortunate kids trying to swim in a hollow pool of nothingness...

Not recommended ( 4/10 )

I went to see Ring 2 just pro form, not expecting much from it. Even the first one wasn't that good IMO as it was a significant start of the pest called "let's make some money by remaking every single Asian horror movie we can get the rights to". The sole up side of Ring 2 would be a producers' decision not to go for another remake but instead the original script. However, that script proves to be weak, contrived and full of inconsistencies which makes it a tedious no-brainer. Naomi Watts and the kid are good but it's not nearly enough for a decent motion picture. The only ones who are really gonna love this film are teenagers whose mere purpose of going to the theater is to speak on their cell phones while "watching" a film and start a "i-can-scream-louder-than-you" competition. The Pg 13 rating tells you who they aimed it at. The Ring 2 is a huge step back for Hideo Nakata who lost a lot of my respect, specifically after I noticed he's behind a remake of "The Eye" as well ( that I know will suck big time ). Looks like Mr Nakata couldn't resist the $$$$$ call either..what a shame. If you want to see a real scary and well done horror with ghosts than try finding "Shutter" from Thailand and pray the vultures from Hollywood are not gonna ruin it with their lame remake.