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.)
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.)