Slow pace in the most part of the movie.

It's hard to see any effort in the film. There's no comedy to speak of, no real drama and, worst of all.

The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

Two siblings rival each other inside the world of professional soccer.This film is marketed as being from the creators of "Y Tu Mama Tambien", which is not only true but very wise marketing. But let us not be fooled, this film is not on the same level, even if it looks just as good and has the same folks involved.Aspects of it are quite good, and the Cheap trick karaoke is fairly amusing. But this rivalry of two soccer players is not very compelling. In "Mama", there was another rivalry between two young men, but that seemed more powerful. This is a situation where we feel no need to care about one or the other.

Against the backdrop of a professional women's baseball league, Penny Marshall's "A League of their Own" is best remembered for its sibling rivalry between wartime sisters Dottie(Geena Davis) and Kip Keller(Lori Petty), who goes head-to-head in the big game, a prerequisite of the inspirational sports film that completes the genre's form. Disparate from John G. Avildsen's "Rocky", and other movies of its ilk, in which nobody would have mourned Apollo Creed(Carl Weathers) had he lost, Marshall's film is unique because you're divided, happy as you are for Kip, the moviegoer also sympathizes with the loser(well, that's what the film is calibrated for), Dollie, who drops the ball after Kit blows off the third base coach's signal to stop, and proceeds to run roughshod over her sister in a violent homeplate collision. After all, Dollie was responsible for Kip's career. Similarly, in "Rudo y Cursi", it's the loser you feel for, Tato(Gael Garcia Bernal), whose penalty kick is blocked by his brother Beto(Diego Luna), who unlike Kip, loses too, while seemingly the victor, because he was supposed to throw the game. In both films, albeit circumstantially different, there are no winners where a winner is the genre norm. "Rudo y Cursi" is a sports film without catharsis, which puts this Mexican import in the same league as Antonio Cuaron's recent "Sugar", another underdog sports story that ends on a decidedly different key from its Hollywood counterparts.Neither Davis nor Petty(or Madonna for that matter) had a lick of baseball talent, but through the magic of rhetorical editing(quick cuts), wishful thinking prevailed, and the audience became co-conspirators in the fiction that Davis could swing for the fences with regularity, while Petty took the mound with an arsenal of effective pitches. In "Rudo y Cursi", when Batua the scout(played by Gullimero Francella) gauges the brothers' potential in a pick-up soccer game, he's the only witness, because the camera stays on him, having a cold one. This directorial choice is made time and time again, a self-reflexive and humorous aside about actors faking athletic greatness, as the moviegoer never actually sees Tato score a goal, nor Beto successfully defend the net; the moviegoer sees reaction shots, instead of first-hand accounts of athletic mimicry. There's no need for a double to do the tricky stuff(e.g. Moira Kelly and D.B. Sweeney's doubles in "The Cutting Edge"); there's nobody to double for. The montage, the most expedient way to persuade the audience that the actor is excelling at his/her sport(best recent example: Hillary Swank in Clint Eastwood's "Million Dollar Baby"), gets parodied in a scene where the soccer ball in quick succession, hits the back of the net from the off-screen leg of Tato, kicking in the negative space. When the benchwarmer finally sees some game action and scores his first goal, the moviegoer sees his family, in unison, shouting, "Goal!" instead of Bernal putting his best foot forward, literally, in a diegetically enhanced fantasy camp for actors. Not satisfied with only its atypical approach towards depicting sports in a sports movie, "Rudo y Cursi" is no etnography(like Gregory Nava's "El Norte", or "Mi Familia"), in which a western audience expects Tato and Beto to act in an explicitly prescribed way.More likely than not, the filmic norm of "wetbacks" in most narratives about the Hispanic culture, shows its people as the conscientious sort who send money back home to their destitute families they left behind. Arguably, in "Rudo y Cursi", the brothers go "gringo", as Tato lavishes his high maintenance girlfriend with exorbitantly priced gifts(for starters, a SUV), while Beto gambles his money away at back-room casinos. Where's mama's SUV; where's mama's house, the one that her sons promised to build for her? Mama does eventually get the house of her dreams, but not from her American-like sons. Like Ridley Scott's "American Gangster", mama gets her house from a gangster, her daughter's husband. Tato and Beto are people like us: Americans, "football" players who have American football player counterparts.(Tato could be Tony Romo, a player distracted by her excessively attractive celebrity girlfriend, while Beto could retired quarterback Art Schlichter, who had a severe gambling problem while throwing passes for the Baltimore Colts in the early-eighties.)

This film deals with the question of celebrity, more specifically the incapacity of talented people who come from lower level classes to really grasp an unique opportunity to ascend to an upper social and economic class, although having acknowledged this chance and desired very much to realize it. Rudo and Cursi demonstrate, in fact, their incredible blindness as to the many dangers they would eventually meet in their way to popularity and affluence. Being so terribly incapable, socially and psychologically, of recognizing those threats, they are easily entangled in them, finally sinking again into the poverty and the mediocrity they had come from.As in Mexico, also in Brazil and most of Latin American countries, soccer is one of few routes a boy who comes from the lower classes has, in order to improve his and his family's life conditions. And if he is a talented player as well as intelligent, determined and has the right contacts, we can imagine that he will really amplify his chances of success.However, this happy end is nothing more than an exception: the recurrent story we witness in all of these countries is that, without a minimum psychological structure and proper guidance, these youngsters – like Rudo and Cursi – are hardly able to take advantage of such an opportunity, and will almost inevitably become preys of those vultures – pseudo-friends, self-seeking lovers, dishonest coaches, drug dealers, clumsy or incompetent relatives, swindling partners and intolerant and sadistic fans – who tirelessly and possessively hover all the time around their victims.A short sequence in the film that, in my opinion, synthesizes a paradoxical point in the relationship between celebrities and their fans. The sequence has no more than one minute, and occurs at 1 hour and 11 minutes of the beginning: in front of a hotel, the soccer player Cursi is approached by two fans. Although they ask him an autograph, these men paradoxically also threaten the player's physical integrity, unless he succeeds in scoring against the opponent team, Nepaleros, in the decisive game, the next day! What is quite interesting in this scene is the fact that, being a famous soccer player in a country in which this sport is so popular, Cursi is inevitably surrounded by many of these frightening hooligans, who may be able to declare their total love to the player provided he never fails, but may also be implacable with him at the slightest fault.My theory is that we can recognize nowadays in the world of soccer not one, but two somewhat different categories of hooligans – although both are characterized by an irrational violence against their opponents. The first and most common category of hooligan is the "traditional" one, in which the individual is a proud member of an "army" formed around the soccer team he worships, aimed to systematically fight the adversary teams. These delinquent fans basically imagine themselves as "warriors" invested by their beloved organization with the mission of destroying Evil, represented by the other team. "Hooligans", a film made by Lexi Alexander in 2005 with Elijah Wood in the main role clearly exemplifies this category of criminal.A "second level" of hooliganism exists, however; and, although it may be less frequent, it is somewhat more complex: an additional psychological component may be present in his profile, besides the mentioned proneness to perform collective acts of violence. What I mean is that there is a special type of soccer fan who is so fanatically involved with fighting his team's enemies that the slightest possibility of failure in this mission is simply unbearable to him.My guess is that this particular kind of hooligan is mainly found in poor and emergent countries. Raised up in the local society's lowest socio-economic levels, many of these individuals had experienced poverty, abandonment, lack of values, violence and even abuse for the most part of their lives, in the miserable slums in which they grew up. It shouldn't, therefore, be a surprise to anyone that they come to show an abnormally great necessity of something – for instance, his belonging to such a group of "warriors" – to be strongly tied to.Add to this frame an permanent (and understandable) feeling of frustration, an intimately restrained rage and some not so conscious believes such as: "The world is evil", "I deserve more", "Nobody is reliable" and/or "The enemy is everywhere", and the scenario is ready for a violent reaction of such a fan against an insubordinate idol who eventually fail to correspond to this fan's paranoid expectations.Having written this, it is almost impossible for me not to remember the tragic murder of Andrés Escobar, central back of Colombia at the World Football Cup of 1994, who scored against his own team, leading to the opponent's – the USA – victory. Some time after that game, when leaving a nightclub in his own country, Escobar was shot eleven times by four men. Perhaps, in "Rudo y Cursi", poor Cursi was aware of this episode, when he eagerly tried to please those two fans who asked him an autograph!

This is a story about poor banana workers from central Mexico whose sudden success is illusory and whose lives go down hill, and it's played as a comedy. Carlos, in his directorial debut, is the brother of Alfonso Cuarón and the author of 'Y tu mamá también,' which Alfonso directed. This brings back together childhood friends and 'Y tu mamá' stars Diego Luna (who's Tato, nicknamed Rudo, or "rough") and Gael García Bernal (who's Beto, nicknamed Cursi, or "mushy," as in sentimental).'Rudo y Cursi' takes some care in the reading. Look at that often-reproduced snapshot of Gael, Carlos, and Diego lighting up. Gael with his head in a bandanna, Carlos in the funny hat, tousled-haired Diego with the sly grin. These are cool guys. And the actors, in the Latino world, are hotties. That is a lens through which to view what is a decidedly unglamorous film, that sometimes seems to be making fun of poor Mexicans, and often looks like a B-picture. The country world is mostly shot darkly, through blue filters, and the actors aren't highlighted but made boys nearly lost in a crowd scene, Breugel-style. They are also buffoonish, and pathetic.Tato and Beto are doing their thing in hicksville, Provincia Guerrero, when along comes Batuta (Guillermo Francella), a talent scout. For music or sport? He claims to both, but he's a double-talker. He's only there because the tire on his red convertible goes flat and he lacks a spare. So he watches a game of "futbol" and sees the two brothers, for they are brothers, though Beto is short and pretty and Tato is tall and thin with a little mustache and a sneer.Though they're not young (in real life the actors are now 30 and 31) they're good players and Batuta picks one, only one, to take back to Mexico City. He stages a goal shot, since Tato is an 'arquero,' a goalie, to decide who gets to go, and they cheat, but the cheating goes wrong, a sequence that will be repeated later. This movie, like 'Amores perros,' which also starred Garcia Bernal, swarms with spicy obscenities whose picante flavor a gringo can only guess at, and with cheating, and stupidity, which also a gringo may misconstrue as pathetic when they're meant to be droll. Beto gets picked first but later Batuta comes back and brings Tato to Mexico City too, repeating all the same clichés. Batuta also speaks intentionally trite, mock-philosophical voice-over lines, pretending to know all about the world, about sport, and about women, none of which he's all that good at, because he's basically a loser too, eventually reduced to a VW bug. But everybody survives, and though Rudo and Cursi return to the provinces in disgrace, loaded with debts after a brief round of national fame, thanks to a local drug lord's marrying into the family their mother gets the nice house by the beach she dreamed of and the debts, presumably, get paid off.Everybody admits they're essentially losers, and of humble origin. Batuta got called that, (conductor's) baton, because when he was attempting to be a soccer player himself his teammates on the street thought he was so bad maybe he could have done better as an orchestra leader. Likewise the fancy, sexy TV lady, Maya (Jessica Mas), seemingly inaccessible for Beto, till he becomes a soccer star and she suddenly notices him. He wastes money on her and then finds out she's dumped him when he sees her on a TV show cuddling with another soccer player. Tato is a jealous husband with serious anger management problems and a gambling habit exponentially worsened by a discovered weakness for cocaine. He has only lost the electric blender when he sneaks off and leaves his wife and kid in the country, but he manages to gamble away a mountain of cash he doesn't have in Mexico City.Beto's particular idiocy is that he thinks he must be a singer. He warbles out of tune and pumps an accordion but despite a small contract and a video arranged by Batuta of him singing Cheap Trick's "I Want You to Want Me" in Spanish, all he can get is an appearance at a small circus.This movie might make a whole lot more sense if you are Mexican. It was a little bit lost on me, though I can't say I minded the fact there's a minimum of "futbol" depicted on screen. This is a film about Mexico's national delusions and its contradictions, beautifully exemplified by the two thugs who threaten to kill Beto if he doesn't turn around his losing streak, and then ask him for autographs for their daughters. One revelation is that while Garcia Bernal is charismatic and the New Yorker once called him "impossibly handsome," Diego Luna is more convincing and more embedded in his role and seems the truer actor. As the "rough" Rudo, he's utterly different from the soft, aristocratic Tenoch of 'Y tu mamá también.' He's hard, abrupt, almost scary here. Carlos Cuarón seems to know what he's doing even if I don't; we should give him a chance to do more. 'Y tu mamá' was the more conventionally artistic film, more successfully designed to play to the global audience. But these three hip Mexican guys deserve credit for turning inward and doing something for the home audience. It sounds to my untutored ear as though despite their exploits in Hollywood and beyond, Gael and Diego can still spout the spicy Mexican vernacular as fluently as ever. I wish I were a little more in on the joke.