Stevens Reviews

Dana Stevens' take on Rudo y Cursi was pretty similar to my own:

It's tempting to think of Rudo y Cursi as an eight-years-later sequel to Y Tu Mamá También, but, unfortunately, this movie works that one's magic in reverse. Whereas Tu Mamá turned a seemingly flimsy story—two horny kids take a road trip to the beach—into a meditation on love, death, and growing up, Rudo y Cursi takes on serious subject matter (poverty, addiction, economic exploitation) and renders it uniformly banal. Still, the movie has its minor pleasures, most of them provided by the chemistry between Luna and Bernal...

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Eventually, the brothers wind up playing on rival teams in Mexico City, where they earn the nicknames "Rudo" (rude) and "Cursi" (which the press notes translate as "corny," though in the context of the movie it seems to imply a lack of masculinity as well).

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Carlos Cuarón's screenplay is rambling and unstructured but full of vibrant dialogue. As in Y Tu Mamá También, the insults the two leads hurl at one another are creatively filthy. But a laborious voiceover in which Batuta philosophizes about the parallels between soccer and life soon begins to grate.

I was interested in seeing how they translated the title. "Rudo" doesn't mean "rude" so much as "tough guy". "Cursi" would be harder to translate, but "sappy" seems better than "corny", basically because of the context (almost always romantic) Stevens wonders about. But since both "Rudo" and "Cursi" are used as nouns rather than adjectives in Spanish, shouldn't they have been translated as such? How about "Fighter and Lover"?

For those of you who prefer Stevens frequent forays into (in my opion) overpoliticization and overinterpretation, this Star Trek review is rife with it.