Rating: 
Summary: GREAT!
Review: This is a great imported film from Brazil. The guy who plays Sergio is definitely a hottie!The extras are great too which includes the audition the lead actor did for the film. Very interesting answers to some bold questions. Great DVD to own!
Rating: 
Summary: Doesn't Compare To A Night A the OLD NYC Eagle
Review: This is a very interesting and unusual film.
Centering around a (very sexy) young man, who works as a dustman, and becomes obsessed by a man on his round. The film is about his descent into obsession, becoming a stalker, and his lust for anonymous sex.
Its well acted, and a brave and interesting film, if not a little too slow at times.
It must be said that the sex scenes are without a doubt the most explicit I have ever seen outside of pornography.
The extras are interesting and definately worth a viewing.
Rating: 
Summary: Interesting and brave
Review: This is a very interesting and unusual film.
Centering around a (very sexy) young man, who works as a dustman, and becomes obsessed by a man on his round. The film is about his descent into obsession, becoming a stalker, and his lust for anonymous sex.
Its well acted, and a brave and interesting film, if not a little too slow at times.
It must be said that the sex scenes are without a doubt the most explicit I have ever seen outside of pornography.
The extras are interesting and definately worth a viewing.
Rating: 
Summary: Beautiful Boy, Pretentious Director
Review: This picture is a mess of misused metaphors and confused imagery from start to finish. I was left scratching my head wondering who these people are and why they behave the way they do. Forgive me for expecting the film to provide any answers. First the good news - if you like beautiful boys, Ricardo Meneses as the twisted Sergio is one of the most gorgeous creatures to ever stand naked before a lens. Despite the hopelessly confusing script, his acting (such as it is) is amazing, especially if you take into account his age (18) and experience (his first film). It's too bad he had to be "discovered" by a director who thinks nothing of making his audience beg for each scrap of insight, and pretentiously expects the viewer to read their own interpretation into whatever nonsense he sees fit to set up as his next scene. I wanted to give it the benefit of a doubt, so after sitting through one screening of this erotically charged but confused tangle of a movie, I sat through it again, this time with the directors commentary on. Cheating, I know, but after shelling out all that money for the DVD I was hoping to gain some idea of what the hell was going on. I emerged from watching it the second time half in love with the beautiful young actor Ricardo Meneses, but with only a fraction of the respect I had for the director, Joao Pedro Rodrigues, after my first screening. And that wasn't much.
Sergio is a garbage collector for the city of Lisbon. He works a graveyard shift with an assortment of other oddballs, and in between collecting garbage he has a series of sexual escapades that seem impossibly jaded for one so young. While other boys his age are swimming or surfing, he's dressing up in a full-body suit of latex, having anonymous sex in men's rooms (including the most explicit act of fellatio I have ever seen in a non-pornographic movie) and exploring S & M adventures with any willing male he can find. Just so you know how kinky he is, in one scene he masturbates in the shower while strangling himself with the shower-massage cord. You really have to wonder where all this imagination comes from, until you realize that the writer-director has been harboring some pretty extreme sexual fantasies about his friendly neighborhood garbage men. Sergio has a female co-worker who is in love with him, but she's busy having sex with the foreman, and Sergio's only interest in her is to tease her sexually and then play cruel jokes on her. He finally meets a man who doesn't succumb to his charms, because he's obviously straight. This was not the first or last thing in this film I didn't get; when I was that age, and almost as pretty as Sergio, I understood that some guys just couldn't be had, so I shrugged my shoulders and moved on. Not our Sergio. He takes obsession to unheard of heights, especially for an 18 year old. He stalks the young swimmer, goes through his garbage, and steals his torn old swimsuit. Of course unrequited sexual obsession in films is not exactly new - remember Reflections In A Golden Eye? In that film, made in 1967 and still considered by many critics to be one of the ten worst bombs ever made, the male object of Marlon Brando's desire was almost as pretty as Ricardo Meneses, but that film had the advantage of a script that was at least coherent at times. In one of the first of many explicit sexual encounters in O Fantasma, Sergio, while walking his dog, comes upon a policeman handcuffed and gagged in the backseat of a patrol car. He proceeds to masturbate the cop to orgasm, leaving him tied up in the car and then running off to work, where he spends the rest of the night sniffing his hand and licking the residue. I was hoping that the director's commentary would maybe explain how and why the cop is tied up in his own squad car, but his sole comment on the soundtrack is, "You don't understand in the film why the cop is handcuffed". Excuse me, Mr. Rodrigues, but I didn't understand it in the audience, either.
Sergio's only tender scenes are when he takes care of the dog, a mascot of the sanitation workers. In one scene, Sergio is busy cleaning the dog dishes and doghouse with a hose, when he turns and sees the foreman standing in the door. He pushes past, their faces register some indications of conflict, and then the foreman shuts the door. The director's commentary on this action is, "The door closes, and you know what will happen, but you don't see it". Uh, no, I'm afraid the relationship between Sergio and foreman is the least developed of all the underdeveloped relationships in this film, so what will happen next is anybody's guess. Not that I really cared; Sergio is the only character in the script whose personality is even partially explored, and all we ever really learn about him is that he's sexually compulsive and kinky to the max. The picture goes on endlessly, with Sergio refusing to let go of his obsession for the young surfer / swimmer, until he has the most excruciatingly slow breakdown ever recorded in a movie. At the same time, what little there is of coherence also breaks down. The director's commentary infuriated me even more when toward the end, after spending most of the commentary praising the cooperation, beauty, talent and maturity of his young lead actor, he proclaims, "It is cruel to say it, but he wants to continue acting, and I think he will not act again. I will not use him in my next film...it's like his body has been used up". I haven't had the benefit of seeing anything else by Mr. Rodrigues, but if given the choice of viewing Mr. Rodrigues' next film or Ricardo Meneses next appearance I think I'd opt for the beautiful boy any day. After botching the attempted kidnapping of his beloved obsession, Sergio takes off to spend the balance of the film wordlessly running. The final scenes treat us to a guided tour of the sights, sounds (and by way of commentary) smells of a garbage dump. As Sergio wanders through the dump clutching a live rabbit he finds among the garbage ("I saw the rabbits there" says the director on the commentary, "so it's believable") the director, grasping for a final metaphor, remarks "He is like a cross between a bug and an insect" a comment that seems to me to be a cross between the idiotic and the insipid. He then ends this drivel after the slowest twenty minutes of film I've ever sat through by more or less telling us he didn't really know how to end it - like I hadn't figured that out a full ten minutes before the end credits started running. As Sergio continues to stumble on into the dawn before the final fadeout, the director says, "I could bring him back to the city, but that would not make much sense". The idea of a scene that might not make much sense didn't prevent him from filming the other 90 minutes of this drek - I dare say he should have gone for it.
Rating:
Summary: Undeveloped, unfinished art. Don't see it.
Review: With no expectations, I joined my partner in watching this movie. I was intrigued, because I share several of the main character's fetishes (including the central, dog/animalism theme). The movie reminds me of a college student's attempt-a movie based on "cool" gimmicks, poor research, underdeveloped ideas, and amateur video and audio work (technically speaking) that I could have done better on my Powerbook.
There is proof that the director filmed a bunch of disjoint scenes and pieced them together into a movie in the editing room. For those stupid enough to buy this piece of crap, simply compare the "eye candy" section of the DVD extras to the movie itself. Stuff is all jumbled out of order in the movie version.
Too bad. A potentially great film and the only thing worth seeing is the sexy star, who we may see again (as long as he doesn't need to talk much.)
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