Reviews & Ratings for
The Ruination of Men More at IMDbPro »La perdición de los hombres (original title)

9 out of 10 people found the following review useful:
If he doesn't do it...then who???, 5 February 2001
Author: Kabult from Mexico

Arturo Ripstein is as critisized in mexico as oliver stone in the us...people hate his movies...usually for reasons that have more to do with him than with the movies themselves...

Since in the last five years mexico has started to produce films that are usually pretty light comedies, or smart comedies...or the hip movie of the moment Amores Perros, a deep, terrific drama about love in the city...critics are now turning their backs on ripstein, who keeps being the best director in mexico...

the reason they talk so much rubbish about him is that his movies are inhabitated by pathetic, sordid and often loser characters with no chance of escape or redemption...critics in mexico think, or tend to believe this a direct critic to mexican society...when this is actually a statement about certain type of persons in geenral, not only mexican...ripstein has a big influence from lUIS bUÑUEL. he worked for the master as an assistant director in his youth, and learned a lot from him...his films can be called Buñuelistic...only they are often more crude than the movies from the spanish director...

Remembering Ripstein's last films: Principio y Fin (a three hour drama with not even a smile for the audience), Profundo Carmesí (a serial killer couple story with all the gore but none of the glamour), and El Evangelio de las Maravillas (not as good, but incredibly weird story about a religious comune in which people learn everything from the movies), you get an idea of what you're up with this one, his self-proclaimed "first" attemp to "comedy"----VERY DARK, very acid comedy, let me say...

The film is shot in black and white and tells a very simple story about a couple of ranchers killing another one over a motive so ridicoulus you wouldn't believe it unless you weren't seeing this movie...in which, by the way...you're supposed to laugh...

The achievements of the film are simple: you get the joke, you don't laugh, but you get it...you don't get bored...you believe the outrageous storyline...you get absorved by it for hours after it's over...it's not ripstein's best work, but it's not as bad as mexican critics are saying...and with all those mexican filmmakers making comedies aobut yuppies, love stories a la kieslowski, political comedias and with movies as terribly filmed as Escrito ene l Cuerpo de la Noche, by Jaime Humberto Hermosillo, so theatrical and unchalleging cinematographicaly...who will make the surreal movies in mexico?? who will keep portraying the trash??? because wake up people, we have trash here too!!! Ripstein can say that!!!

5 out of 8 people found the following review useful:
The story of a corpse, 4 November 2002

Author: Edgar Soberón Torchia (estorchia@gmail.com) from Panama

Ripstein is México's most respected filmmaker. He belongs to the 1970's generation responsible for the so-called "new Mexican cinema", which produced some great works, as Paul Leduc's "Reed: México insurgente" and Felipe Cazals' "Canoa". Ripstein was one of the first to gain recognition with his very good B&W film, "Tiempo de morir" (1965), written directly for the screen by Gabriel García Márquez and Carlos Fuentes. It has rained a lot between this movie and his 1999 screen version of García Márquez' novel "El coronel no tiene quien le escriba". In the meantime, he married screenwriter Paz Alicia Garciadiego, and since their first collaboration "El imperio de la fortuna" (1986, from Juan Rulfo's "El gallo de oro"), Ripstein's cinematic world has become overblown, slow, morbid, grotesque and misanthropic. One cannot blame Garciadiego for this, but she surely has a lot to do with it. "Profundo carmesí"(1996), their retelling of the story told in "The Honeymoon Killers", is a good example of this couple's peculiar taste. In "La perdición de los hombres", Ripstein once again enters the world of misery, though his characters are not precisely outcasts as the fat nurse and her gigolo lover. This time he returns to his early free-style -it's even in black and white-, as he tells the stories of normal people, who choose weird solutions to their predicaments and whose dreams occupy the same space and tone as their daily actions on the screen. Garciadiego rarely paints a "nice" male character. So here there are not only one but three machos, who play baseball and believe that man's downfall is personified in women (in fact, the movie's title is a verse from a popular ranchera that goes "Man's downfall / Is the damned woman"). Garciadiego built her story a la "Pulp Fiction", with the first act told after the resolution, so one has to wait quite a bit to know why two of the guys kill their pal, known as the "King of the Baseball Diamond", while his widow fights for his corpse with his younger and prettier lover. I cannot deny it's funny. Sometimes very funny, mainly because Patricia Reyes Spíndola (as the widow, an underrated fine actress that Ripstein turned into a star when she played lesbian singer Lucha Reyes in his sordid 1994 biopic "La reina de la noche") is such a good actress, that she carries most of the film. On the other hand, Ripstein uses long takes by two virtuoso cameramen who follow the players dynamically in the tightest spaces. For me, who hated three Ripstein/Garciadiego films in succession ("Principio y fin" is the third) and avoided his most recent ones ("El coronel..." and "El evangelio de las maravillas"), this was a sort of reconciliation with their cinema.

3 out of 6 people found the following review useful:
2.5 stars, 14 May 2002

Author: Mike Weston (mweston) from Silicon Valley, CA

As the film opens, we see two men preparing to ambush a third man, who is walking along a trail with a wheelbarrow. They kill him, take him to a house, and steal his fancy boots. Later we are introduced to the victim's widow and his girlfriend.

To me, the film started slow, and didn't become very interesting until at least halfway through, although it was often funny throughout. Near the end we see the opening scene again, with context to understand better what was really happening.

This dark comedy is filmed in a dusty looking black and white. It's possible that if I had been less tired that I would have liked it better, but as it stands I can only give it a very marginal recommendation. Seen at the San Francisco International Film Festival on 4/30/2002.

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