The Scapegoat (2012)

Based on the novel by Daphne du Maurier, first published in 1957.

*mild spoilers follow*

Two men who look exactly alike meet by chance. One of them is an unemployed teacher, the other an aristocrat and industrialist. The industrialist is in a tight financial spot, and flees with all of the teacher's belongings and documents. The teacher takes the other man's place.

Apparently a TV movie. The plot has some seriously dubious zones. The rich guy's motivations are not clear, but one can always imagine that they weren't clear even to him. A more problematic point is how this guy supposed he was going to profit from murder. It is very unlikely that he would, in my opinion. Anyway, the film has a more serious problem, having to do with style. The protagonist is a "sensitive" guy, a fact noticeable not only in his actions, but also in the dialogue and its delivery; this is a characteristic of recent TV productions (and even some cinema), which affects even stories set in earlier times (in this one, it is the fifties); moral strength is always associated with mild manners.

Rating: 33

World War Z (2013)

The world is being taken over by the living dead. A former United Nations operative is summoned to find the origin of the disease, or something that would lead to a vaccine, or anyway something that would prevent the destruction of mankind.

North Korea has stopped it: they had all the population's teeth extracted. The joke is interesting, the rest of the film is strictly routine, or downright nonsensical.

Rating: 20

Naked Gun 33 1/3: The Final Insult (1994)

Drebin retires from the police force, but is called again to help in a case of terrorism. The villain is serving time, and Frank goes undercover as an inmate. The plot is to plant a bomb at the Academy Award ceremony.

Another funny installment. Intelligent humor, albeit a little predictable at that juncture.

Rating: 52

A Missa do Galo (1982)

The year of production is 1980, according to the end credits, so the IMDB year above may be wrong.

Based on a short story by Machado de Assis, first published in 1894.

On Christmas Eve, during an evening, a married woman is at her house with a young man who has come from his small town to visit Rio, and is awaiting the hour of going to Mass.

Overall an interesting short, with a very interesting female lead, Isabel Ribeiro, a woman of exotic beauty, and a fine actress to boot.

Once Upon a Crime... (1992)

Remake of 1960 Italian movie Crimen, released in America as And Suddenly It's Murder!

Several people meet on the train to Monte Carlo, and a dog is found. In town, a crime has occurred, which may implicate these people, and a few residents.

Interesting comedy with a crime mystery at its center; its difference from a whodunit lies in the fact that the viewer knows all the suspects to be innocent, except for the real culprits.

Rating: 50

Un éléphant ça trompe énormément (1976)

English titles: Pardon Mon Affaire; An Elephant Can Be Extremely Deceptive

A group of middle-aged friends get together for tennis regularly. Étienne is married and has never been unfaithful; his wife decided late in life to get a Law degree. He is lovestruck by a woman who comes one day to the public service facility he works at. Simon is a doctor with an overbearing mother. Daniel is an unmarried jokester  with a secret. Bouli is a chronically unfaithful husband whose wife just left him.

Good comedy. The structure puts Étienne in the foreground, and his friends provide minor subplots. Étienne's adventures are very amusing, but his friends' are not quite on the same level. Overall, it is an agreeable film, with a humorism which avoids vulgarity without being overintellectualized.

Rating: 57

That Touch of Mink (1962)

A rich man makes a love proposition to a poor young woman, wherein marriage is not included. After some reluctance she decides to accept it, but somehow things keep going awry.

Not much to say here, there is enough clarity in the narrative except for one point: what makes the man change his mind about marrying the woman. The tacit reason for it is that in the process he falls in love with her. How much of an explanation this is I don't know, since it leaves out how exactly that occurred. An "Occam's razor" explanation for his behavior is simply that her last ploy works, that is, he becomes jealous, or afraid of losing her, or even sharing her with other men. This is not made explicit in the movie, and anyway is a bit simplistic, in my view. Finally, I thought of a third explanation which is also by no means apparent in the movie, but is arguably a logical consequence of the events. She sets a date with a public servant, in her opinion the lowliest man she has ever met. A quick analysis, however, shows that the only notable difference between this man and the man she is in love with, aside from their respective manners and physical appearance, is that the former is poor and the latter is very rich. This may very well have dawned on the rich guy when he is confronted with his purported rival, and been a cause for his being ashamed. The only way out of that is to marry her.
Seen in awful pan-and-scan.

Rating: 54

La piel que habito (2011)

English title: The Skin I Live In.

A plastic surgeon keeps a young woman in a room in his secluded countryside clinic. Is she his prisoner, or his patient?

Vertigo, Les yeux sans visage.
Frankenstein too, because this film is made of many different films and plotlines which have an imperfect interconnection.
Good score. Main actress is stupendous.
Overall, entertaining and unfocused, well-made but, contrary to what some have stated, not especially "thought-provoking".

Rating: 58

Toys (1992)

The owner of a toy company is dying, and decides his offspring is not good enough to take over, so he calls his brother who is a general. After the succession there is a clash of opinions and worldviews between the late owner's son, who has a childish personality, and the new boss, who has some plans of his own.

Interesting comedy, with quirky characters, offbeat sense of humor and an extravagant visual design, not to mention a bold plotline which is somewhat prophetic regarding so-called drones and the like.

Rating: 57

The Seventh Veil (1945)

A psychiatric patient reveals her story during treatment. She lost her parents and was placed under the guardianship of a relative. He was an emotionally cold yet possessive person who took an interest in her musical education.

My, to think this was their idea of a chick flick back in the 40's. Humanity sure has come a long way (or has it?). Not much more to say, it is a weak movie, in spite of good performances and a remarkably atmospheric initial sequence.

Rating: 17

Haywire (2011)

A secret agent does a job in Barcelona, rescuing an allegedly kidnapped journalist. She is then convinced to do a new job in Dublin, where strange things happen.

Well-filmed thriller, with lots of fighting and foot chases and car chases. The plot has some black holes, or vague spots, but one should not ask for too much. The mood is somewhat different than the usual, the cinematography has some seductive tonalities. Not a bad film, not a masterpiece.

Rating: 55

Page Eight (2011) (TV)

A member of British intelligence receives a document from his boss which reveals the existence of clandestine political prisons in several parts of the world. Concurrently, his neighbor, the daughter of an anti-Israel activist, starts flirting with him. Add to all that the internal power struggles within his department, and you have this drama in a nutshell.

It is reasonably well-written and well-directed, but its essence is of the silly kind, a childish liberal fantasy very much in accordance with the tide of the times. The peculiarly slow diction of the main actor may prove charming to some, but this viewer became weary of it in the long run.

Rating: 39

Temporal (1984)

Short.

A gnostic sect meets in a big house. The owner's daughters are holding a youth party that same evening.

O Sanduíche (2000)

Short.

A couple is splitting, but their emotional ties still persist. A rehearsal of a play inside a movie, the making of which is in public exhibition. Interview with spectators.

Fire Down Below (1997)

A Federal agent is sent to a small town to investigate toxic waste dumping on abandoned coal mines.

Routine actioner with a few nice set-pieces and that's about all. The country-rock score is intrusive, but there is a reason for it: the leading player (and co-producer) is the author of most songs.

Rating: 40

East of Eden (1955)

Second viewing. The first was on April 12, 1987.

In 1917, the U.S.A. has not entered the war yet. A man has two sons, his wife has left him a long time ago. One son feels unloved by his father, and looks for his mother, who owns a nightclub (and whorehouse, probably) in the adjacent town. Etcetera.

Remarkable drama, with melodramatic tinges, and symbolic ones, verging on abstraction. Great and many themes are approached. Christopher Mulrooney makes some insightful considerations, "knowledge" is, according to him, a central theme. This is most apparent, I think, in regard with the mother, who was kept a secret, and is the pivot of a crisis.
As happens in melodramas, or, to use a different expression, in stylized  storytelling, a joke aspect is inevitable. Cal's gauche quest for love is doomed from the beginning, he goes about things the wrong way (well, he is human and he needs to be loved, just like everybody else does -- hey, what do you know, he is like the guy in that Smiths song...). That does not prevent things to be straightened out in the end, though -- if things can ever be straightened out, that is.
To reach its punchline (and beyond it), the film goes through several lyrical moments, all of them wonderfully acted.
Seen in ugly pan-and-scan.

Rating: 72 (up from 69)

We're No Angels (1955)

Second viewing. The first was on November 17, 1990.

Three convicts in Devil's Island escape from prison but remain on the island, awaiting a ship that they can board. They are hired to fix the roof of a shop, and end up befriending the shop's owner and his family.

Interesting comedy, about the complexity involved in moral judgments, to which many different factors and points of view must be considered. Its screenplay is well-conceived, albeit not exactly brilliant (and probably not aspiring to be so). The expertise of the director and the good cast make it enjoyable, on a moderate scale.

Rating: 51 (up from 35)

Crin blanc: Le cheval sauvage (1953)

English title: White Mane

A wild horse is coveted by the village ranchers (or whatever they call them in France), but they can't keep it imprisoned. A boy wants the horse too, and the horse happens to like him.

A 40-minute film (IMDb reports a five-minute-longer length), with a simple story and extensive footage of wild horses. I do not know whether they were coached or simply observed. Anyway, nothing great, although people seem to admire it.

According to my rules, I should rate the longer version, but not the one I have watched, a weight off my shoulders.

Tico-Tico no Fubá (1952)

Second viewing, at least. Last viewed on an unknown date, certainly before 1987.

Pseudobiography of a composer. The film tells the story of a man from a small town who works as a public servant but whose real vocation is music. He meets a beautiful circus horserider and falls in love with her, arousing his fiancée's jealousy.

Perfectly mediocre Hollywood-patterned Brazilian biopic. Everyone concerned is very professional, I watched it with curiosity. I saw a cut version, which did not contain the following conversation (which begins at one hour thirteen minutes fifty-four seconds into the movie and is one minute eight seconds long) taken from a subtitles file.

Zequinha: ... e você, Luís, toca flauta.
Luís: Não conte comigo.
Z: Por quê?
L: Depois de amanhã, parto de novo para São Paulo. O inventário, Zequinha. O inventário.
Z: Ah, eu vou reunir todos que saibam tocar algum instrumento, ...
L: Certo, Zequinha. Vai reunir onde? Onde?
(?): Aqui, não.
Z: Já sei. Na farmácia do meu pai. Nos fundos.
L: Seu Abreu não vai gostar da ideia.
Z: Ele não conhece meu pai. Quando ele souber que estou formando uma orquestra, é capaz de fechar a farmácia e decretar feriado nacional.
L: Bonito. Sempre gostei desta valsa. Por falar nisso, você sabe que mandou essa música para o Vitale sem nome?
(?): É preciso arranjar um nome para ela, heim?
Z: Branca.

Rating: 32 (unchanged)

Le ballon rouge (1956)

English title: The Red Balloon.

From the Internet Movie Database:
---quote---
A boy makes friends with a seemingly sentient balloon, and it begins to follow him. It follows the boy to school, to the bus, and to church. Boy and balloon play together in the streets of Paris and try to elude a gang of boys that wants to destroy the balloon. (...) Written by alfiehitchie
---unquote---

I did not like it as much as most people seem to have.

Sands of Iwo Jima (1949)

The films follows the actions of a Marine squad in World War II. We see them receive training, then participate in the taking of Tarawa, and lastly in the taking of Iwo Jima.

Not a bad war movie. It has most of the right ingredients, including good action sequences. My main problem with the movie is that the screenplay is very formulaic: the characters, their problems, and their problems' resolutions comply, most of them anyway, to certain established and predictable dramatic patterns.

Rating: 52

Like Father Like Son (1987)

A magical potion allows two persons to exchange bodies; a doctor takes it and is transplanted into his son's body, and vice-versa. For a few days, they have to perform each other's activities.

The screenplay per se is not very interesting; the fact, however, is that the film has its moments. The direction is extremely competent, and from this angle one might say that the screenplay does at least offer enough opportunities for the display of directorial virtues. Occasionally it gets really good, like when the son-in-his-father's-body is with the hospital director's wife at his house on a date that goes terribly wrong. This film also has one of the most realistic scenes of a beating of a high schooler by another that I have seen.

Rating: 44

One, Two, Three (1961)

Second viewing; first was on January 25, 1990.

An American executive working at a West Berlin branch of his company is forced to take the boss's daughter as a guest. She gets herself, and thus also her host, into trouble, and the executive must summon all his resourcefulness to minimize the damage, so as not to hamper his prospects for a promotion.

An exercise in fastness, which pleased me immensely at my first viewing, but now not so much, given perhaps my increased aversion to a number of vulgarities in its humor, and the whole contrivedness of the concept, which aims to keep the rhythm in constant excess, even with sacrifice of the quality of the contents. But there is a good percentage of the film that is really good, and the cast, particularly the lead, is up to the task at hand.

Rating: 66 (down from 82)

Zelig (1983)

Second viewing; first was between 1983 and 1986.

In the form of a documentary, it narrates the adventures of a man possessing supernatural chameleonic capabilities.

Visually it is funny, and furthermore it is punctuated by funny one-liners, but the two things - the verbal and the visual - are quite independent of each other. The plot is not really funny, except for the fact that Zelig after the treatment is more undistinguished than before the treatment (because his undistinguishability was his distinctive trait), and perhaps this is the film's secret irony. At first sight, the film seems essentially an amusing but frivolous affair, but on further thought it ends up being a bit of a satire on frivolity, taking the 20s, which were the frivolous decade par excellence, as its target.  That the film's frivolity is just a mimickry, that the film mirrors its protagonist, who looks like that which is near him, is perhaps another hidden irony in a film that is not perhaps as great as it is curious.

Rating: 60 (down from 73)

Freakonomics (2010)

Several short nonfiction movies: (1) the effect of people's names on their lives; (2) how corruption appears, focusing specifically on Sumo wrestling; (3) understanding the drop in crime rates in the 90s; (4) a case study on monetary incentive to improve students' performance.

I would be hard pressed to describe its theme; they do it in the movie, and their description is bogus (what does the episode on abortion have to do with incentives of any kind?). It is mostly an interesting movie (the first segment is too weak, though) -- mildly so, to be more precise, but I haven't read the book, so...
What I don't understand is what is so unusual or revolutionary about it, it seems to me they coined a new name for something which was already there, or isn't even one thing, but several.
But I agree this is sound thinking, and hopefully it will educate some people. Kids and teens should watch it, I think, and read the book (but I haven't, so...).

Tequila Sunrise (1988)

Second viewing; first was on August 6, 1989.

Dale McCussick is a retired drug dealer who was never caught. He is friends with Nick Frescia, a police lieutenant, now assigned to the district (is that the word?) where McCussick lives. They both develop a romantic interest on Jo Ann, a restaurant owner who thus becomes involved with the criminal universe that surrounds both men. The FBI has the firm purpose of convicting McCussick, which puts Frescia on a personal conflict of interests. An old friend of McCussick's who is a major drug dealer in Mexico requests his collaboration on a new deal.

Not much to say about this film; although I did not recall much of it, I seem to have had similar degrees of liking on both viewings. It is a well-made and pleasant film, very well-written on the microlevel, by which I mean the scene-by-scene basis, the dialogue, etc. On the macrolevel, i.e., the general plot, and the characters' behavioral credibility and consistency , it did not convince me much, especially the girl's behavior, which remains all but an enigma to me.

Rating: 63 (unchanged)

The Hustler (1961)

Second viewing; first was on November 25, 1989.

A hustler, in this film's context, is a guy who makes a living out of conning other people into playing pool with him for money. He is actually much better than he pretends at first. Eddie is one of those, and his dream is beating a certain experienced player. He meets Sarah, a lonely woman, and she falls in love with him.

The pleasure I took from this film is derived from the great expressivity of the emotions it evokes, which are almost abstract. The plot makes use of the 'Sarah' character to instill a greater dose of drama which the game by itself wouldn't be able to provide; the result has a definite moralistic undertone. The screenplay is sufficiently refined to steer clear of absurd propositions, but I suppose it is not free of feminine clichés, and this is definitely not the most attractive aspect of the film. The psychology of gambling is an important theme, derived mostly from Dostoevsky, but here it is a game of skill, an important difference. As I said, the film tends to abstractness, and too much analysis of its logic would not do it much good. The director does an excellent job, one of the best I have seen, of bringing out the essence of the story through actors' faces and gestures. The cast responds well, and Gleason should be singled out for a stunning performance.
Seen in pan-and-scan.

Rating: 84 (down from 97)

Bullitt (1968)

Second viewing; first was between 1983 and 1986.

A San Francisco police detective is assigned the protection of a mafioso who is about to testify in a Senate subcommittee.

Although it seems blasphemous to deny it the 'classic' status, for it has several commendable virtues, chief among them the perfect filming technique and an ingenious plot, it has some script shortcomings which weigh disfavorably on my assessment. First, a scene which is perfectly self-parodic, and has become (that is, if it were not already) a cliché among cop movies: a cop's girl somehow blames the cop for being 'contaminated' with the violence he has to witness in his job; in Bullitt, this behavior is so perfectly unjustified, and done in such earnestness too, that it becomes anthological in its absurdity. Another point which I took issue with, and more problematic, since it seems to pervade the whole movie and ideologize it, is the characterization of a politician as the incarnation of evil; again, it is an established cliché in movies, but here, unless there is some element which escaped me, there is absolutely no grounds for such an exaggerated position. From what I gather, the film equals a disagreeable person (and, sure, prone to resorting to exchange of favors for persuasion) to a dishonest, unprincipled one.

Rating: 58 (up from 48)