Rodrigo D. No Future (1990)

Rodrigo D is not the best film ever made, it even has some glitches and in the version that I watched a character gets murdered in two different scenes (a confusing screw up). But this is what makes the film so authentic, the actors are natural residents of the slums basically acting themselves, and in reality many die before the movie is even featured. The slums are just a labyrinth of houses made from whatever material, and people just seem to walk from the steps to the roofs thanks to its disorganized assembly. Many of the rooftops are bare; this was to continue building in the future and rent the subsequent floors, but most roofs remained bare for the coming years. Pure authenticity portraying the internal feelings most higher classes and foreigners take for cold blooded assassins.If you are having a hard time understanding the scenes, or are looking for the movie online to watch with English subtitles, there's a good article post on Hubpages with the entire movie explained in English. Its called: "Rodrigo D No Futuro Complete Movie Online and Critic Review (with English subtitles)"

I f you are into a nice and safe Hollywood style of film like ¨City of God¨were poverty is cool, with cosmopolitan bourgeois actors like Seu Jorge, and there is in the end a happy ending (not to mention social commentary 25 plus years after the said incident...pretty cowardly), then please do not watch Rodrigo D: No Futuro. Mature ten, perhaps twenty years and see it then. The title of the film precedes what one should expect of the structure in the film....¨no future¨. There is no concept of time in this film which is why it is filmed in an aimless manner. ¨Pulp Fiction¨came out in 1994 and it was championed because it disturbed a traditional notion of time, BUT ¨Rodrigo D¨came out in 1990 (1988, in fact but released in 1990) and the conception of time or better said timelessness in the film is by far much more important than that of ¨Pulp Fiction¨. What is of key importance in the film is the final scenes when one is led to believe that the protagonist Rodrigo has committed suicide and then time is cut back, so we think or are made to question, to a scene that we think already happened: the murder of a punk by three bored street kids. The murder of the punk is presented in this ¨cut-back¨from the point of view of the victim where, after being shot what he (we) see is a body dangling in the trees, going no-where. We do not know if it is alive or dead, we can only assume that it is Rodrigo D's body just there, as if without a past and stagnant and, therefore, with no future. This movie is not glamorous, which is what makes it what it is. There are no John Travoltas. All of the actors were real street kids; Gaviria erases here the line between documentary and fiction and throws out the window the notion of the script, literally (rodigo jumps, remember). And this film as i mentioned above is not cowardly like¨City of God¨. It was filmed in the actual neighborhood where it is supposed to take place and not in some studio made to look like a beautiful Brazilian favela. The kids in the movie lived in this neighborhood and unfortunately due too their screen exposure four, to my knowledge, were singled out for execution for participating in social commentary of the present time. They were killed before reaching the age of 20 for being in this film. This movie really anticipates the acclaimed American film ¨Kids¨by Larry Clark except, again, the film ¨kids¨used actors who wanted to be mainstream actors, probably of the middle classes. ¨City of God¨ takes place 30 some years prior to the film's release, typical of the Hollywood political rule. Lastly, if it should be compared then at least in attitude it should be compared to ¨repo man¨, not because ¨repo man¨is as important but because both contain a certain aspects of Punk (when punk had just died) which is practically impossible to depict to-day. As for Punks who were swastikas, try Sid Vicious, New Order, and Joy Division. The taking of a fascist symbol and twisting its meaning by wearing it in degrading form just too annoy the REAL Fascist AT HEART was a punk specialty. do your homework.

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 )

This is a brilliant movie about Rodrigo and his friends, a group of punks who wander the streets of Medellin, getting high, stealing cars, listening to Punk and Heavy Metal music. They're stuck in lives of poverty, with no opportunities and no motivation to try to improve their lives. Their routine is interrupted only when the cops catch up with one of them (which is really an inevitability for all of them, sooner or later), or they get into a fight. Rodrigo dreams of starting a rock band, something that might give his life some meaning (he has no education beyond the 1st grade, has no job, and basically sits around the house all day listening to his family complain about how lazy he is). The movie depicts the world of Rodrigo and his friends with harsh realism, accompanied by striking cinematography, pulsing rock music, and a script with an ear for how these people communicate. While this movie is clearly influenced by "Los Olvidados," it also bears a resemblance to Alex Cox's great "Sid and Nancy" - we are invited to see the world in which these young rebels live, and to understand the ways in which it can destroy them.