[REC], from Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza (love that name!), steals so flagrantly and often from so many other zombie flicks that its few surprises and scares may elude you due to your disbelief over so much recycling. I do not enjoy writing the above, as Mr Balagueró has given us one of my favorite horror films of all time, The Nameless (Los Sin nombre), as well as one in the terrific compendium of scary and witty little Spanish television films Películas para no dormir (Films to Keep You Awake): Para entrar a vivir (To Let). Mr Plaza made another of the films in that series, the fun and eerie Cuento de navidad (Christmas Tale).

Yet [REC] left me not just cold but actively angry. When, one full hour into the film (which is only 70 minutes plus credits), the left-overs manage to unlock a particular door to discover another (well, the second, really) plot twist, their dialogue turns irredeemably stupid. "We've got to get out of here!" one of them cries. Hello: they have not been able to get out of this building for the entire movie, even though that is pretty much all they've tried to do. Yet now, instead of trying further escape, they decide to bone up on this new plot twist by reading old newspaper clippings. Ah, these kids today.

I will say that the zombies look pretty good, particularly the last one - though her presence would seem to defy any logic or reason found in all known zombie lore. Because [REC] was a huge hit on its home ground (and its American remake Quarantine also drummed up pretty good business, clearly there is still an audience for this sort of thing. I'll be interviewing the [REC] team during this festival, so I hope they will allow me to talk about some of their other work - which I highly recommend. [REC] screens Sunday, December 7, at 6 and Saturday, December 13, at 9:30.

According to Todos Estamos Invitados (Everyone's Invited), Manuel Gutiérrez Aragón's new film and his best that I've seen since the magnificent Visionarios from 2001, to speak out about terrorism in Spain's Basque country is to virtually give up your life - and perhaps that of your significant other as well.

Gutiérrez Aragón, along with his co-writer Ángeles González Sinde, does a fine job in capturing both the immediacy and permanence of the danger to a professor who makes public his views against the terrorists and their leader who, even from prison, appears to continue to run the operation. Set, I believe, sometime in the 90s, the movie tells the story of this professor, his girlfriend, and a young man who begins the movie as a terrorist, loses his memory in an automobile crash during an attack and spends the rest of the film coming to terms with who he is, what he has done, and what he must now do.

As played very well by Óscar Jaenada, this young man becomes a kind of audience surrogate, for we see much of the story through his eyes, as he tries to determine whose vision - the ETA's or the Spanish government's - is more correct, and why. The writer/director dispenses with almost all back-story; we're immediately confronted with the situation and the necessity to do something about it. While some knowledge of the ETA will probably be helpful, the movie is riveting enough and its characters and events clear and strong enough to carry intelligent audiences along.

Gastronomy plays an interesting part in all this, as the professor and his friends meet regularly for a dinner prepared by each in rotation. In the first of these, fodder for a heated political discussion is provided by the provenance of the evening's entree, followed by the initial threat, which, for self-preservation, nobody but the giver and receiver seems to have heard. Among the movie's highlights is a beauty of a religious "confession," one of the more interesting and probing I have seen. The film's end is simple and extremely moving (the last line of dialogue is a beauty!), as well as frightening and sad. This situation is unending, Gutiérrez Aragón seems to say. Whether he is also saying that amnesia may be the best hope for a Basque solution, I should not assume. But given the evidence here, it makes a certain sad sense. How else can we truly forget the past (or learn to live with it)? Even considering the predominance of Catholicism in Spain, Christ's call for forgiveness hasn't yet - after 2,000 years - taken hold. The choice, then, would seem to be amnesia - or a lobotomy. Everyone's Invited screens Monday, December 8, at 6:20 and Saturday, December 13, at 3:15.

A historical melodrama that yanks us back to the late 1970s, just post-Franco, when Spain had opened up to modernity with a bang (in all its meanings), Rated-R (Los Años desnudos) gives us the story of three young actresses who get their start in "S" movies (which I assume to be euphemism for sex films). The three are played very well by Candela Peña, Goya Toledo and Mar Flores, with the men in their lives essayed by Antonio de la Torre and Tomás Álvarez (yes, that's one less man than woman, and this presents a few problems along the way).

Co-directors/writers Dunia Ayaso and Félix Sabroso capture the look of the era, as well as its back-and-forth fascist tendencies. (The police, who, in my experience, by nature lean to the right, are involved in one of the sharper, more unpleasant scenes in the film). It was not a sure thing that democracy would bloom just post-Franco, and this movie, as others I have seen from Spain, highlights that uncertainty. Yet the filmmakers also take a more negative/realistic view of the country's "opening up" to sex, sin and freedom than I am used to seeing. They feature interesting "pullquotes" from the mouths of various on-screen characters that focus our attention on meanings others than what we might be seeing visually. A sample, spoken to the Peña character by her gay cabaret artist friend: "You think things have changed because you show your tits in a film. But the men who go to see you are the same repressed, illiterate jerk-offs as 20 years ago!" Any movie that brings us into the porn scene (soft or hard) is likely to be taken to task for pandering, and Rated-R is no different. But overall, I think, the film succeeds more as history and melodrama than as turn-on (this is a recommendation, by the way).

Finally, there is more sadness than humor in the movie, but en route, you get quite a few laughs - chief among these is a "filming" scene in which the actresses decide to just mouth numbers instead of the dialogue that they have trouble remembering ("We're going to be dubbed anyway," one of them says). Unlike many films of this sort that catalogue characters' rise to fame and fortune and then their fall, this one is actually more interesting and involving during the latter period. There's a wonderful, expansive scene around a dinner table with Sandra (Ms Peña) and her family and another fine occurrence with Ms Flores and her surprise guest that cleverly unloads an entire back story via just two words that eventually identify the mystery character. Moviemakers take note: this is very smart writing.

The ending is particularly sad, not so much for what happens, as for what it spells out: Often when people achieve a new kind of freedom, like little children suddenly given the run of the house, they misunderstand and misuse it. Finally, for all their vaunted liberty, men, women and power remain pretty much the same. Rated-R screens Sunday, December 7, at 8:30; Monday, December 8, at 4; and Saturday, December 13, at 5:15.

Update, 12/8: James Van Maanen's conversation with Javier Cámera is now up at TrustMovies.

Posted by dwhudson at December 5, 2008 11:28 AM