Rating: 
Summary: "¿Qué carajo es un chichipato?"
Review: OK, I thought the film was great. The bond between Alexis and Fernando - improbable to most "normal" people because of the huge age difference - makes perfect sense: Fernado is the last surviving member of his family, and Alexis' surrogate family - his gang - has been completely wiped out by rivals. They are both alone. I liked the black humour of this film. I even laughed when some people were shot. But I think I was supposed to. After all, this film depicts an absurd, "magical" reality. My BIG complaint is the DVD. I speak Spanish. The "standard" variety. This film had a lot of Colombian slang (different from that of Spain or Mexico, where I live) and I think it would've been great to have had subtitles IN SPANISH as well. That would be a great help to people studying the language too. I thought the whole point of DVDs (apart from the superior picture quality) was the possibility of adding "bells and whistles". Interviews with the writer (Fernando Vallejo), director and actors would've been great. My advice to fellow Amazon purchasers is avoid the DVD and get VHS. It's cheaper! :-) Better yet, see it in the cinema.
Rating: 
Summary: Shroeder's Best
Review: This is, by far, Barbet Shroeder's best effort. Perhaps his familiarity with the language, the country and its people themselves are contributing factors although Shroeder (Playboy August 2001) tells of the many problems and dangers he encountered while filming in Medellin.I have not yet read Fernando Vallejo's novel, on which the film is based, nor have I visited Columbia so I can deal with Shroeder's work at face value only. Still I was able to appreciate his accomplishment at a number of levels. As an introduction to the streets and los barrios of Medellin I was fascinated. As a documentary of the lives and sufferings of the resident populace I was moved. As cinema I was greatly impressed with the performance of German Jaramillo who plays Fernando, a man so jaded with life that he has surpassed the fear of death yet has difficulty making his exit for any number of reasons... One last love, a visit to a long ago cantina or church, the sound of a once familiar melody. His youthful lover Alexis (Anderson Ballestros) by way of contrast kills rather than engaging in senseless argumentation, or to preclude personal affront but most of all to avoid being killed. The pace of Alexis' life can only be slowed by sexuality, sleep or death. The music which soothes him is loud and frenetic. His sometime outward languidity cannot hide a turbulence bred of violence and danger yet he is unable to watch as Fernando mercifully kills a suffering animal. The killing portrayed here is not for those impressed with the Hollywood blood-bath type featuring good guys vs bad guys where the good guys somehow always prevail by way of superior cunning or fire-power. Here there is no justification. Only futile vengeance and self preservation. Nobody is right. No one wins. Shroeder keeps the film short and uses a bare skeleton of plot to extend the running time to ninety-eight minutes. It is only slightly more than enough and Shroeder can be forgiven for conforming to acceptable feature time length considering what he has been able to achieve. The dialogue is superb, cutting away the veneer of myth and civilization, as humanity is reduced to an insane parody of breeding, feeding, dying and removal of bodies. In one memorable scene Fernando rails sardonic at the determination of residents to dump corpses down a mountain side in spite of a sign clearly prohibiting the practice. Vultures circle above awaiting the opportunity to feast on the distorted carrion. The soundtrack ranges from pasodobles to Maria Callas and is beautifully integrated into the moods of Fernando and his youthful lovers. Anyone interested in how much can be communicated through the art of cinema should see this film and see it more than once -- in a cinema.
Rating:
Summary: The Satanic emissary, Mephistopheles from Faust......
Review: I've been slowly getting acquainted with Central and South American journalism - and what strikes me more and more is the resignation and sadness that seems to inform so much of it - it's as if the world were portrayed in terms of bankruptcy, incompetence, poverty, and cruelty that just can not be overcome, no matter what. It's very consistent with a gay-subject matter film now playing, "Our Lady of the Assassins," [La Virgen de los Sicarios], also set in Columbia. This is a movie about this despair. The central character, Fernando relentlessly embodies a spirit of negativity towards absolutely everything - even his young loves (teen-aged boys) are assassins. Considering the director's last name (Schroder) I'd guess there's a literary allusion here from his own background. In Goethe's Faust the Satanic emissary, Mephistopheles, is memorialized as " "Der Geist der ewig verneint," the Spirit which forever denies, and that's certainly Fernando. He's as much a cause of that spiritual "Colombia" as he and his loves are symptoms of it. After all, if you deny any salvation, you must repeat the hopelessness of everything, make hopelessness inevitable. Step by step Fernando exposes young Alexis to the death to which that boy is destined, a strange "being hatefully in love," as one of Alexis' lines has it. He's that ill-starred boys' codependent as, time and again, he does nothing to avert the youngster's fate, and everything that almost provokes the inevitable. Fernando, in his own rejection of hope, is as much a death-bringer as his young assasins, whatever his protestations. The proof of this guess at a literary background for the film is Fernando's reminiscence that in childhood he had a family parrot named Fausto. There it is, Goethe's great work, and the key to Fernando's unwittingly Mephistophelian character. Fernando's despair is less than his own "negation" of all trust, all hope. He's in despair of himself, and, in that, I suppose, serves as a metaphor for self-reflective Colombia. Vargas Llosa, the Peruvian novelist, recently pointed that out in the Latin American character, that profound distrust of all social institutions, that spirit of negation which undermines them even as people struggle to make them work. On one hand there's passionate self-sacrifice (even like young Alexis who throws himself in front of Fernando) and, on the other, profound corruption by mistrust of everything that might work. No accident, that the film is replete with themes of faith and utter doubt, salvation and slaughter in one character. Fernando's despair is I think true but obvious; what's truer and beneath the surface is his own fatal negation of anything that might relieve his despair. Inevitably he loses one boy (whom he makes no effort to save), and, when he's offered a second chance, tries to save another when it's too late. So much of Latin America has something of this at work in it - those themes of love and death get handled with quite some consistency in those somber films. The predecessor of that film, by the way, was Rodrigo D, a cinema verite treatment of the youngsters' gang battles in Colombia in the eighties. By the time the film was ready for release, seven of its twenty "street boy" actors were dead through that senseless, inevitable violence.
Rating:
Summary: camcorder, schmamcorder...still remarkable
Review: this film would destroy hollywood if it could. in fact, the whole city of medellin, as chaotic and nihilistic as anything i'd ever witnessed, would gladly settle their issues with hollywood in a good-ole fashioned machete fight. but they can't, so the people (that is to say the drug runners, the real leaders of third world middle-south american countries) celebrate their dope deliveries to the states with a huge barrage of fireworks. it seems all is the remarkably fitting setting of the cynical fernando (a retired writer returning to his hometown to die). this movie could be considered the extreme polar opposite of phillip lee williams work, the sentimental american novelist who wrote 'the heart of a distant forest' which detailed a retired professor returning to his family's cabin in the wisconsin? wilderness to die...in peace. fernando's fate as a free living sage in modern day middle america's largest city is an ugly one, without peace or humanity. here, god resembles a monster. and for the eye-opening experience alone, our lady is worth the view. the acting is perfectly suited. throughout the film, i didn't have to ever stop and critique the actor's credibility. the whole experience will seriously suck you in. in some ways, the video quality is the perfect media for adapting the novel: gritty, realistic, portable, etc. it was really really nice to finally find a movie that doesn't require high production values. this is like the great lo-fi of music. it ain't diltuted and could definitely plow it's way through most of american film. if you are of a thinking mind or film afficionado, do not let this get by you!!! clean transfer, but still on a camcorder...
Rating: 
Summary: Watch it...AGAIN !
Review: This movie is worth seeing again. If you see the movie, you will WANT to see it again.
The subtle nuances of the film and character interplay are excellent! Fernando's sardonic wit is wonderful.
The camera work is amazing, and the pasodobles are great.
It is too bad that this movie's subject matter has hindered it from more acclaim. Another example of the many great films that didn't come out of the plastic Hollyweird movie machine.
Great characters, great director, great movie...see it, AGAIN!
Rating:
Summary: believe it or not, its real
Review: i have read so many reviews of this movie saying "it's too fake, the violence is unconvincing." i am a colombian who has experienced gang violence and crime. what people do not understand is that colombia is not compton, where the police come and record a crime. here are some facts less than 3% of crimes in colombia are successfully prosecuted, a rate lower than that of the old west, a time and place taht was supposedly lawless the murder rate in medellin (the city where the movie is set, where my family lives), including rich neighborhoods and slums is 465 per 100,000, compton, california (the birthplace of gang violence in the US and home of gangsta rap) was only 80.2 per 100,000 in 1987 (when things were supposedly much worse) as far as the filmmaking itself, i cannot say it si a well made movie, my interest is solely in teh subject matter the homosexuality adds a confusing dimension to the film that is not necessary when portraying violent crime in the most dangerous place in the western hemisphere RENT, DO NOT BUY and yes, the violence is real, contrary to what you may think living in the suburbs, medellin is the most murderous city in the world, 6 times as murderous as compton, california
Rating:
Summary: One of the BEST films ever made!!!
Review: I do not praise films easily, but here is a movie that just BLEW ME AWAY, with its subtle recounting of a man's dying wish and finding ephemeral relationships in a lawless land. The violence is never gratuitous, beautifully shot by a seasoned filmmaker. This is no doubt his best work to date - and the most underrated.
A MUST SEE.
Rating:
Summary: Amazing!!!
Review: Shocking, enlightening, transformative and unforgettable, this film will burn itself deep into your psyche. One thing I found particularly interesting is that the film's subtext of pedophilia, a very loaded subject in the USA, is inconsequential and not the least bit upsetting - its the abhorrent and omnipresent violence of Columbia that makes this story so powerful. A real education!!!
Rating:
Summary: Quite Disturbing
Review: This low budget, thought provoking film will most likely not leave you with a smile. This is a raw, harsh film which serves as a candid look at life in an extremely dangerous city. The atheistic overtones cry out at parts, and scenes of children getting drugged up, and random shootings made me cringe. The acting is understatedly excellent, the atmosphere created by this work is so effective that I will not be forgetting it anytime soon.
I can't comment on the quality of the dvd, as I saw a copied version from one of my Colombian friends. But the movie is so good, buy it regardless.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent
Review: The movie is excellent, powerful, and thought-provoking. It is very realistic in the sense that it is not far from happening to our world. The corruption portrayed is a reminder of the dangers of the society that we live in. Many examples of this grim reality exist in the world today.
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