A Bit Confusing, But Entertaining & Visual
Added 2/24/2009
This Spanish film is a strange one, a hard one to follow story-wise, but visually striking and interesting most of the way. The fact is wasn't always easy to follow will help me want to watch this again to see if I can figure things out better.
The story involves people with th ability to steal "luck" from other people and then taking it away from fellow takers. Make sense? I didn't think so. Despite the difficulty following and understanding everything, I still enjoyed this film.
The DVD transfer is sharp, too, and has good sound. It's an intriguing film and, perhaps, I should have waited for a second viewing when I understood more things about the story. Suffice to say I thought enough of this film to buy it because I knew I'd be watching this multiple times.
0 out of 0 people found this helpful.
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Purely luck???
Added 5/13/2008
The idea of this movie is that some people can steal luck from others.
The idea is brillant, but this movie could have been so much better.
I'm a big fan of foreign movies and I have seen this one on the shelf for years, but just got around to watching it.
The story moves at a good pace, but sputters in several places before a so, so ending!
Intacto (Intact) is worth seeing, only once!
0 out of 1 people found this helpful.
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Excellento.
Added 11/1/2007
Intacto (Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, 2001)
Juan Carlos Fresnadillo (28 Weeks Later...) began his feature film career with Intacto, an intriguing meditation on the nature of luck that wouldn't be out of place on your shelf beside El Laberinto del Fauno. While Fresnadillo stays tied much more rightly to the real world than Guillermo del Toro did in 2006's best film, the sense of wonder that pervades del Toro's masterpiece can be found here in equal amounts.
Fresnadillo's script, co-written with Andres Koppel, centers on Federico (Eusebio Poncela), who begins the film in the inner circle of the unnaturally lucky. He is employed as a cooler at a casino, but he works in a different way than most: by touching someone, he is capable of stealing that person's store of luck and adding it to his own. When he finds himself wanting to leave the job, he finds he's not allowed to leave with his stored luck; Samuel (Max von Sydow), the man behind all this, steals Federico's luck before allowing him to leave. Federico develops an obsession for finding others like him, training them, and overthrowing Samuel. To this end, he finds Tomas (Leonardo Sbaraglia), the lone survivor of a plane crash. Unfortunately, Tomas is a bank robber, so the law, in the form of Sara (Monica Lopez), is after him. Federico introduces Tomas to the world of "fluid luck", for lack of a better term, and the two of them, with Sara always in pursuit, get closer and closer to Federico's goal and the inevitable meeting with Samuel.
Despite the fact that this is a gritty, understated film-- it would not be outside the realm of validity to call it an urban fantasy-- Fresnadillo does not limit the scope of his vision to the concrete landscapes around him. This is a remarkably free-feeling film; I can't think of any other way to describe it. (This is depicted, specifically, in the casino, which is in a secluded place in the desert, well away from the rest of civilization.) The relentless realism with which it is filmed combines with the ludicrous premise to create a feeling that anything is possible, and that's what keeps the viewer riveted, even more so than the gloomy cinematography, the finely-tuned performances, or the truly original plot. An excellent piece of work all around. ****
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Great story!
Added 7/1/2007
I didn't mind the subtitles at all, for this movie has a great deal going on and you are soon submerged in the story. A man who survived a Nazi concentration camp believes good and bad luck can be 'transferred'. He runs a casino where luck is vital to the players and many often have 'high stakes' in some bizarre games played behind closed doors. For some, it appears they do have extraordinary 'luck', but can life's events really be that simple? I was very surprised by the ending and it prompted a long discussion between my husband and myself as to whether good luck actually exists for some and not others.
Chrissy K. McVay - Author
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what's luck got to do with it?
Added 3/12/2007
The odd thing when you watch the opening scene of Intacto is a weird feeling of deja vu as you realize the opening scene of the Cooler appears to be stolen from Intacto which predates it by two years. That said, I would agree with the more critical person who said that the logic of luck in the Cooler is a bit easier to follow that the concept of luck employed in Intacto. (The Cooler has its own problems, however.)
Possible spoiler alert. Like the Cooler, Intacto has a kind of feel-good message underneath it that love and emotion eventually have some impact on luck in the end, which doesn't quite work for me, honestly, especially not in this one. In order to get us there, the script connives to get the hero to wager unknowingly the luck of a woman he loves but that forced plot development seems simply to raise lots of questions about the mechanism of the bets and how a simple photograph carries with it anything about the person if that person has not agreed to surrender their luck (as seemed to be necessarily the case in another sequence); it confuses the issue of how exactly the luck obtaining process, which the film depicts but glosses over in the details, is supposed to really work. And it also just feels wrong in a movie of ideas like this one to imply so simplistically that true selfless love is supposed to bring good results (ergo the people who died in the camps instead of the Luckiest man in the world didn't love and so they didn't have luck?). Perhaps the filmmaker has a completely well thought out explanation of it all but it doesn't quite come across in the film and so it's hard to feel by the end of it any real satisfaction in the plot events.
Intacto does contain a number of very memorable and distinctive scenes of luck challenges or contests: the forest scene being probably the best of them. This is an odd film overall but it has a certain strange charm to it despite its pronounced failings, so I could see things to be gained from watching it if you're interested in the luck theme as I was.
2 out of 4 people found this helpful.
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A Bit Confusing, But Entertaining & Visual
Added 2/24/2009
This Spanish film is a strange one, a hard one to follow story-wise, but visually striking and interesting most of the way. The fact is wasn't always easy to follow will help me want to watch this again to see if I can figure things out better.
The story involves people with th ability to steal "luck" from other people and then taking it away from fellow takers. Make sense? I didn't think so. Despite the difficulty following and understanding everything, I still enjoyed this film.
The DVD transfer is sharp, too, and has good sound. It's an intriguing film and, perhaps, I should have waited for a second viewing when I understood more things about the story. Suffice to say I thought enough of this film to buy it because I knew I'd be watching this multiple times.
0 out of 0 people found this helpful.
|
Purely luck???
Added 5/13/2008
The idea of this movie is that some people can steal luck from others.
The idea is brillant, but this movie could have been so much better.
I'm a big fan of foreign movies and I have seen this one on the shelf for years, but just got around to watching it.
The story moves at a good pace, but sputters in several places before a so, so ending!
Intacto (Intact) is worth seeing, only once!
0 out of 1 people found this helpful.
|
Excellento.
Added 11/1/2007
Intacto (Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, 2001)
Juan Carlos Fresnadillo (28 Weeks Later...) began his feature film career with Intacto, an intriguing meditation on the nature of luck that wouldn't be out of place on your shelf beside El Laberinto del Fauno. While Fresnadillo stays tied much more rightly to the real world than Guillermo del Toro did in 2006's best film, the sense of wonder that pervades del Toro's masterpiece can be found here in equal amounts.
Fresnadillo's script, co-written with Andres Koppel, centers on Federico (Eusebio Poncela), who begins the film in the inner circle of the unnaturally lucky. He is employed as a cooler at a casino, but he works in a different way than most: by touching someone, he is capable of stealing that person's store of luck and adding it to his own. When he finds himself wanting to leave the job, he finds he's not allowed to leave with his stored luck; Samuel (Max von Sydow), the man behind all this, steals Federico's luck before allowing him to leave. Federico develops an obsession for finding others like him, training them, and overthrowing Samuel. To this end, he finds Tomas (Leonardo Sbaraglia), the lone survivor of a plane crash. Unfortunately, Tomas is a bank robber, so the law, in the form of Sara (Monica Lopez), is after him. Federico introduces Tomas to the world of "fluid luck", for lack of a better term, and the two of them, with Sara always in pursuit, get closer and closer to Federico's goal and the inevitable meeting with Samuel.
Despite the fact that this is a gritty, understated film-- it would not be outside the realm of validity to call it an urban fantasy-- Fresnadillo does not limit the scope of his vision to the concrete landscapes around him. This is a remarkably free-feeling film; I can't think of any other way to describe it. (This is depicted, specifically, in the casino, which is in a secluded place in the desert, well away from the rest of civilization.) The relentless realism with which it is filmed combines with the ludicrous premise to create a feeling that anything is possible, and that's what keeps the viewer riveted, even more so than the gloomy cinematography, the finely-tuned performances, or the truly original plot. An excellent piece of work all around. ****
0 out of 0 people found this helpful.
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