Archive for Tag portugal
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Such a great melodrama split in two parts, but I preferred the first one. The second is tinged with colonial disgust in every scene, always there in the background, you can never ignore it.
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The first third of The Day After Tomorrow or even Don’t Look Up, but with no budget, and good actors speaking technobabble. What a weird animal.
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Os Maias meets Rashomon, with an heavy dose of Lolita. The ingénue was the mastermind all along!
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That’s a joke with The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. Fitting, for a middle-of-the-road spy flick.
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Technically impressive biopic with incredible makeup and acting, in service of a crappy hagiography and bland story. The political equivalent of the effects driven extravaganza.
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Fuck yeah, a proper horror film made in Portugal. Just a bit on the nose, as our boy is called Edward Ipus. Ed Ipus, geddit?
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Autobiographical story of the life of an aunt of the author, from what I can tell. Freaking ruthless female Scrooge, hiding her avarice with “charity”, piety, and religious adherence. This feels like a gender-swapped The Fountainhead, with less ideological ranting, but keeping the long stretches of voiceover reading the book.
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Was that a Werner Herzog picture as the ersatz Hitler figure?
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Like a 100 minutes long TV episode. Fairly packed with jokes, a lower budget Airplane! or Top Secret!.
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Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas with less drugs and more cheap beer.
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Violence begets violence, silence continues the suffering, vengeful catharsis only delays the problem. In this case, for the next generation.
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Epistolary look into the commissioned officer experience in the Portuguese Colonial War. A more mainstream affair, compared to Hotel Império.
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The missing biopic of a forgotten hero. Many civil wars were avoided by his charisma, calm and quietude.
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What’s this, I don’t even… That cold opening sets the tone, but it gets progressively weirder and weirder. Goes to very dark places, but never raises above voyeurism and gratuitous shock value.
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Poetry that let itself be filmed. A very personal and fine arts take on familial loss. “Every frame is a painting” is rarely such an apt description, it is literally true in this film.
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Boyhood, without the boy. Burn my shadow away…
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[Cronenbergian](David Cronenberg){:.inner-link} body horror, Aronofsky-ish weirdness, and Halloween twisty serial killers, in a single esoteric package. It packs a noir atmosphere, with the requisite police procedural.
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How to spin nothingness into a far-right nativist rallying cry against foreigners, courtesy of a pliant press on a summer weekend.
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Ah, the good old forties, when two foot-ball teams could all do roman salutes before the match. Heil, Füsball!
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This title resembling a YouTube tutorial hides a muddled bunch of nothing with some French music as soundtrack. That imagined osmosis could make up for the lack of everything else.
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Troma still exists? Wow. This is right up their alley, but spoken in Portuguese. A much better output than Linhas de Sangue, against all odds (budget, ensemble cast).
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A modest proposal to serve man. This is an adaptation of a story by Fernando Pessoa, in his Alexander Search heteronyms.
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Ironically an hagiography, considering the title. It’s a condensed part of his life, mostly exposition, a rookie TV movie.
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Man is the real monster, and moving from the big city to bumfuck reveals the seething problems lurking beneath the veneer of respectability.
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The protagonist is fucking in heaven. Fucking, and fucking, and fucking in heaven. I want to fuck more, I want to fuck more…. Beware of the unsimulated fellatios…
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Cloudier Atlas. The same story, slightly tweaked through the ages, entwined between themselves.
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Nem mau nem bom, antes pelo contrário. How does this win so many awards?
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How to steal a newspaper from your wife between World Wars: force abortions in excess of 5 maids and assorted visitors, then accuse her of hysteria when she absconds with the driver.
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What the fuck is this? What the fuuu… No, life is too short.
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Oh my. The pretend edgy stuff. The pseudo-Robin Hood shtick. The cars wrecking cardboard boxes. The fade to black, oh god, so many fades to black.
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The Cliff’s Notes version. Über-depressing, almost makes you weep for idle rich aristocrats.
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Fucking hell, another “Estado Novo“-adjacent film with main characters who do no speak Portuguese? Dubbing a General who had such charisma that he forced the regime to rig elections against him, and then bury him in a shallow grave? Enough with the dubs already!
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One of those alleged faithful recreation betrayed by amateurish production values. There’s way too many boom mics appearing on the shot.
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The French version of Carnation Revolution. The director is Portuguese, but it’s completely French. The main characters are played by foreign actors and dubbed by Portuguese actors, without lip sync. That’s just folly.
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Filipe Melo does an Americana short. It deals with the fact that the death penalty is as American as apple pie.
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Meh, overplays its hand for such formulaic script.
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A crazy premise leads to a massive tear jerker. Nuts! No cockups here, I was unable to maintain a stiff upper lip.
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The fictional biography of Ricardo Salgado, by way of Os Maias. Direct political answer to Raiva. Visually, it’s almost 3 hours of people chain smoking and gobbling litters of whisky.
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Über hipster tale of real estate speculation, smoky clubs where not-hookers hook up, and massage parlous, with requisite happy endings. Fuggedaboutit, it’s Macao.
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Shaolin Soccer meets Bourne, featuring Mediterranean refugees. Never thought that last sentence could ever make sense.
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The bog standard story of a high-class prostitute who hoodwinks her clients and the cop to run away with a suitcase full of cash to Brazil. Her real name is Mary, surname had to be Sue.
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A failed attempt to make a sort of remake of Braindead, without the budget or the script. It has heart, but no guts.
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A crappy no-budget The Hangover years before that. Just like that popular “film” devoid of content, it spawned a franchise. Yet another proof that there is no God.
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A faithful adaptation of the seminal XIX century story, but poor in production values and plot. The important plot beats are presented in a matter-of-fact way, for such emotionally powerful moments.
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Cinema veritè, in 1930’s Alentejo. Structured like a revenge plot, mostly against metaphoric leeches represented by literal landowners.
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Standard “drugs are bad” flick. Despite being about heroin addiction, everybody is happy, and after a brief “Kum ba yah” all is good.
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An ultra depressing film about lowlife Blockbuster Clerks / drug dealers that bite more than they can chew and get their lives kicked down a notch.
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A demo reel for Hot Jesus. A box ticking enterprise. Not even worth it to finish the
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The superior crazy people film. All female cast in which some poor woman deals with mental illness by pretending her neighbourhood in Washington Street is 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
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Ensemble parody of action films in general. Low budget doesn’t mean low quality, but in this case that is not completely off the mark.
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Simple investigation into a murder that might have political connotations. Turns out it was a crime of passion and the political police are clutching at straws trying to extract meaning where it doesn’t exist.
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Hipster bullcrap. A low rent Spring Breakers.
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A scathing satire of Portuguese society. The script writer was a classy troll, and the fact that this was greenlit by the biggest broadcast network only makes it even funnier.
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PTSD-ridden ex-soldier goes insane after a partner kills himself.
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A road movie set in the Age of Discoveries. The main character travels through Asia in search of wealth and prestige and ends up shunned by the royalty.
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Made for TV simplistic take on the colonial war.
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One of the representatives of golden age of Portuguese cinema, it’s still hilarious. There’s an overarching plot of silliness and hilarious smaller bits which betrays its origin as vaudeville-esque popular theatre (known as revista).
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This is a remake of Open Water 2: Adrift. It’s better than it sounds, but I haven’t seen the original.
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This is a story about a group of fisherman from the outskirts of Lisbon that sink their boat in the mud in viewing distance from the shore, but since some are weak, old and/or injured, can’t get to safety before tragedy happens.
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Boxing is life, and so is debt collection.