Nadie Conoce a Nadie (Nobody Knows Anybody)

Rating:
Summary: Lost a star due to being entertainment, not art
Review: But what entertainment!!!

"Hollywood" apparently finds it hard even to just make pure entertainment like the studios used to be able to. Spain is making the best thrillers these days. These are films that don't insult the intelligence. So maybe they don't all have the depth of an Abre los Ojos. They're fun. Nadie Conoce a Nadie is fun.

The American studios (or most "independent" film makers for that matter) seem to be unable to release films that don't make you cringe in embarrasment sitting there.

You could do a lot worse than devoting a little time to this entertaining thriller.

The scenery is spectacular; the acting is good, if not Royal Shakespeare Company level. Eduardo Noreiga could easily be another pretty boy actor, getting by on his looks. In comparison with the average in Spain, maybe he IS another pretty boy actor getting by on his looks. The bar is just set higher. Compare Noriega's performance in Abre los Ojos with Tom Cruise' in the remake Vanilla Sky.

Or don't. This isn't life or death.

Rating:
Summary: Lost a star due to being entertainment, not art
Review: But what entertainment!!!

"Hollywood" apparently finds it hard even to just make pure entertainment like the studios used to be able to. Spain is making the best thrillers these days. These are films that don't insult the intelligence. So maybe they don't all have the depth of an Abre los Ojos. They're fun. Nadie Conoce a Nadie is fun.

The American studios (or most "independent" film makers for that matter) seem to be unable to release films that don't make you cringe in embarrasment sitting there.

You could do a lot worse than devoting a little time to this entertaining thriller.

The scenery is spectacular; the acting is good, if not Royal Shakespeare Company level. Eduardo Noreiga could easily be another pretty boy actor, getting by on his looks. In comparison with the average in Spain, maybe he IS another pretty boy actor getting by on his looks. The bar is just set higher. Compare Noriega's performance in Abre los Ojos with Tom Cruise' in the remake Vanilla Sky.

Or don't. This isn't life or death.

Rating:
Summary: Lost a star due to being entertainment, not art
Review: But what entertainment!!!

"Hollywood" apparently finds it hard even to just make pure entertainment like the studios used to be able to. Spain is making the best thrillers these days. These are films that don't insult the intelligence. So maybe they don't all have the depth of an Abre los Ojos. They're fun. Nadie Conoce a Nadie is fun.

The American studios (or most "independent" film makers for that matter) seem to be unable to release films that don't make you cringe in embarrasment sitting there.

You could do a lot worse than devoting a little time to this entertaining thriller.

The scenery is spectacular; the acting is good, if not Royal Shakespeare Company level. Eduardo Noreiga could easily be another pretty boy actor, getting by on his looks. In comparison with the average in Spain, maybe he IS another pretty boy actor getting by on his looks. The bar is just set higher. Compare Noriega's performance in Abre los Ojos with Tom Cruise' in the remake Vanilla Sky.

Or don't. This isn't life or death.

Rating:
Summary: if considering this purchase, PLEASE READ!!!!
Review: Interesting premise, great acting from an amazing cast.
why the 1 star? I would give it zero If I could. THE QUALITY IS AWFUL!!!!! When living in the states, A work collegue once lent me a bootleg dvd he got from chinatown. This was made by a guy basically hiding a camera and video taping through his coat.

well, this transfer was worse quality than that. If amazon would let return it for a refund, I would be quite happy. There should be some sort of quality check before this stuff can be released leagally.

Rating:
Summary: Three stars for the movie, one for the DVD
Review: NADIE CONOCE A NADIE [Nobody Knows Anybody] (Spain/France 1999): During Holy Week in Seville, a frustrated crossword designer (Eduardo Noriega) is contacted by a sinister 'organization' which plunges him into a nightmare of serial murder and terrorism, culminating in a tense stand-off during the height of the city's religious festivities.

Unusual thriller from Mateo Gill, which pitches Noriega (the Spanish equivalent of Brad Pitt, and star of recent Spanish classics like BURNT MONEY and THE DEVIL'S BACKBONE) into a world of paranoia and murder, ultimately forcing him to make the most catastrophic decision of his life. Gill and cinematographer Javier Salmones frame their widescreen images in a manner which suggests nothing less than cosmic forces at work, rendering the population of an entire city culpable in the moral destruction of an unwitting hero (illustrated by an extraordinary sequence in which Noriega is pursued by hooded figures through narrow back-streets lined with tourists who simply stand back and gape as hunters and quarry engage in a battle with toy ray guns!). The reason for all this mayhem stretches credibility, but the film - based on a novel by Juan Bonilla - is crafted with technical precision, and distinguished by an extravagant music score (by Gill's longtime associate and fellow filmmaker Alejandro Almenabar [OPEN YOUR EYES, THE OTHERS]) designed to convey the central character's growing isolation as he falls ever deeper into a city-wide conspiracy. A fine example of European commercial cinema, with scenes that rival Hitchcock or Argento at their most creative.

Readers are warned that the DVD currently available in the US from Venevision International looks and sounds like a DVD-R, lifted from a videotape recording of the region 2 version released in Spain by Sogepaq. The US disc features poor image quality and a wildly fluctuating soundtrack, and is markedly inferior to the original Spanish DVD. Furthermore, the scope frame is slightly cropped to around 2.10:1 (from the theatrical 2.39:1). A 'Making of' documentary is included (in Spanish only, without English subtitles), along with trailers for other movies handled in the US by Venevision. On this evidence, however, viewers are urged to stick with the original region 2 discs.

NB. Though featured on the packaging, the English title NOBODY KNOWS ANYBODY doesn't actually appear on the print itself.

103m 13s (PAL master at 25fps; originally 107m 31s)
2.39:1 (Panavision) / Letterboxed
DVD soundtrack: Dolby 5.1
Theatrical soundtrack: Dolby Digital
Spanish with permanent English subtitles
All regions

Rating:
Summary: Three stars for the movie, one for the DVD
Review: NADIE CONOCE A NADIE [Nobody Knows Anybody] (Spain/France 1999): During Holy Week in Seville, a frustrated crossword designer (Eduardo Noriega) is contacted by a sinister 'organization' which plunges him into a nightmare of serial murder and terrorism, culminating in a tense stand-off during the height of the city's religious festivities.

Unusual thriller from Mateo Gill, which pitches Noriega (the Spanish equivalent of Brad Pitt, and star of recent Spanish classics like BURNT MONEY and THE DEVIL'S BACKBONE) into a world of paranoia and murder, ultimately forcing him to make the most catastrophic decision of his life. Gill and cinematographer Javier Salmones frame their widescreen images in a manner which suggests nothing less than cosmic forces at work, rendering the population of an entire city culpable in the moral destruction of an unwitting hero (illustrated by an extraordinary sequence in which Noriega is pursued by hooded figures through narrow back-streets lined with tourists who simply stand back and gape as hunters and quarry engage in a battle with toy ray guns!). The reason for all this mayhem stretches credibility, but the film - based on a novel by Juan Bonilla - is crafted with technical precision, and distinguished by an extravagant music score (by Gill's longtime associate and fellow filmmaker Alejandro Almenabar [OPEN YOUR EYES, THE OTHERS]) designed to convey the central character's growing isolation as he falls ever deeper into a city-wide conspiracy. A fine example of European commercial cinema, with scenes that rival Hitchcock or Argento at their most creative.

Readers are warned that the DVD currently available in the US from Venevision International looks and sounds like a DVD-R, lifted from a videotape recording of the region 2 version released in Spain by Sogepaq. The US disc features poor image quality and a wildly fluctuating soundtrack, and is markedly inferior to the original Spanish DVD. Furthermore, the scope frame is slightly cropped to around 2.10:1 (from the theatrical 2.39:1). A 'Making of' documentary is included (in Spanish only, without English subtitles), along with trailers for other movies handled in the US by Venevision. On this evidence, however, viewers are urged to stick with the original region 2 discs.

NB. Though featured on the packaging, the English title NOBODY KNOWS ANYBODY doesn't actually appear on the print itself.

103m 13s (PAL master at 25fps; originally 107m 31s)
2.39:1 (Panavision) / Letterboxed
DVD soundtrack: Dolby 5.1
Theatrical soundtrack: Dolby Digital
Spanish with permanent English subtitles
All regions

Rating:
Summary: Good Spanish Thriller, Marred by Lackluster DVD
Review: The superhandsome Eduardo Noriega, who improbably looks like a combination of Peter Gallagher and Benicio Del Toro, stars as a crossword-puzzle writer for a newspaper in Sevill, Spain, depressed over his own perceived mediocrity as a novelist. One day he receives a cryptic message in his answering machine that the next crossword puzzle he is supposed to run in the paper must include the word gadversario.h Meanwhile, Sevill preparing for a citywide parade for the Holy Week is struck by a series of bizarre murders of the clergy, which eventually escalate into full-blown terrorism.

I sort of hoped that it would be a cerebral whodunit, maybe a little like MEMENTO, but it rather disappointingly turned into a Hitchcockian gwrongly accusedh thriller, with showy special effects thrown in. It is slickly made, for sure, and is never boring, but it somewhat falls short of the level of artistry displayed by Alejandro Amanebar or Guillermo Del Toro. Still, it will be a pleasant diversion to those looking for a good thriller with exotic locales and beautiful women.

And I am sure we will see the North American cult of Eduardo Noriega develop soon. This guy's got charisma! FYI, he also stars in Guillermo Del Toro's DEVIL'S BACKBONE and Alejandro Amanebar's ABRE LOS OJOS (OPEN YOUR EYES, badly remade as VANILLA SKY) and TESIS, all available in Region 1 DVDs.

I think I would have enjoyed the film more if DVD presentation was a little better. At least on my players, the transfer looked rather dupy, as if cribbed from an old VHS. The colors were seriously muted, details were fuzzy. The audio was even worse, full of cracks and hiss.

Rating:
Summary: Three stars for a movie, and negative 5 for the DVD quality
Review: This is a first well made film by Mateo Gil, Amenabar's cameraman and close friend. I give the movie 3 stars, because if you have been in Sevilla during Holly Week and its pandemonium you would relate to the film, not in a negative way but in its folklore and Sevilla's allure. The narrow streets of el Barrio Santa Cruz, the Cathedral, and the Plaza de Toros la Maestranza are wondrous sites. Yet, due to the quality of this video it all collapses, so No One Knows Anything with this dvd rendition.

The film is a thriller, slow paced at first and then it picks-up. One has to understand Spain's budget constraints, lack of "Hollywood Style Studios" to get into this film. So one must suspend ones disbelief in this film and enjoy its ambience and dialogue. The acting is superb with European Spanish international actors, Eduardo Noriega (Open your Eyes [the original film where Vanilla Sky failed], Thesis, Warriors [Guerreros]), Jordi Molla (Blow, Bad Boys II, and The Alamo) Natalia Verbeke (The other Side of the Bed, Son of the Bride) and Paz Vega (Sex and Lucia, The other Side of The Bed, Carmen.)

The Venevision DVD IS a ripoff of Spain's PAL version. The sound and video quality is horrible, and I would even question the legality of this Venevision production company, since it is altering the original from Sogepaq PAL films. The original dvd has many other hidden features, such as playing the game. Finally, it is my judgment, that until Venevision International DVD/VHS versions cleans up their practices of bad reproduction quality, I would recommend stiring away from them. Buy as others have said, the original DVD from Spain (they are afordable). Go to www.elcorteingles.es or www.fnac.es and order it, it will take a while to arrive. And yes, you can play them in todays regionless dvd players such as Daewoo, Apex and Cyberhome. The Spanish film industry will thank you and you will also discover Spanish films with all the goodies, French, English, Catalan, Spanish tracks and/or subtitles, wide screen, or full. Thus, you will end up Knowing Something for Nothing.

Rating:
Summary: I Know Myself - Good, but not "Great",
Review: This little film from Spain has a story to tell, too bad it takes place mostly in the beginning. It deals with hidden witches covens which are scattered throughout Sevile Spain and it has as its main character, a pseudo-intellectual who writes boring crossword puzzles for the main paper, "El Hergizito". Soon he finds himself in a mysterious world of terror which he can not fathom. I was quite interested until the story became a cliche taken from American films and then it became just average on the whole. Most of the derailment took place in a scene where there are numerous men in hoods shooting laser guns in a 'game" that really looks stupid, from there, we learn that the coven of 'Satanas" wants to destroy Seville. His former roommate is the brain child of a group of degenerate loser and misfits, whom he later blows up in another absurd scene, (why kill them off?). The ending is typical and even expected, because he finds the evil guy and shoots him dead, and at the end, it was all just a novel, but we aren't sure are we?



Rating:
Summary: Very good thriller that follows the Spanish tradition
Review: While I was watching this movie there was one thing I could not get out of my head: it looks as if the script had been written by Arturo Perez-Reverte. This in itself means considerable praise for the director and screenplay writer Mateo Gil, who adapted a novel by Juan Bonilla, since Perez-Reverte is one of my favorite authors. Before discussing other aspects of the film, I must say that I did not notice any of the problems mentioned by other reviewers regarding the quality of the DVD. I am not an expert in technology, so the reason for this may be that my DVD player adapts better than others to different formats, but I really do not know.

Simon Cardenas, played by Eduardo Noriega is a writer suffering from writer's block, who in the meantime works creating crosswords for a newspaper in Seville. At the start of the last Holy Week of the millennium he gets a strange message on his answering machine. The caller requests that he uses a particular word in a set place in the next crossword puzzle or there will be consequences for Simon's friends and family. The word in question is "Adversario", and Simon decides to play along; but this leads to a series of attacks starting with the release of Sarin, a poisonous gas, inside a church.

Simon decides to start investigating and searching for the source of the attacks, and that is how he meets Maria, the journalist that is in charge of the investigation for the newspaper. From then on, things get really interesting, when more attacks are noticed, and Simon and Maria get involved in the action. Also, Simon's roommate (Toad) starts acting weird and has some suspicious items in his possession, leading to a certain level of paranoia in Simon. Whether this is justified or not, only time can tell.

An interesting script and reasonably good performances make this an enjoyable movie. If you like to discover new places, the impeccable sights of the city of Seville will give the movie and added flare. For those of you that are used to American thrillers, this film may provide a break from the norm. If you have read authors like Perez-Reverte, you know what I mean, since in the Spanish tradition, you do not always find the extremely twisted plots or the consistent happy endings you see in American films. Whether you will get these elements in this movie or not is for you to find out.