Tied for the best movie I have ever seen

The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

I am only giving this movie a 1 for the great cast, though I can't imagine what any of them were thinking. This movie was horrible

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

This film has a lot of comments, so I'll confine mine to the character of Lourdes.The first time we see Lourdes on the escalator we can tell she is going to blossom. She watches Rafael until she sees her opportunity, then blackmails him into loving her. This seems unworkable and indeed it is. How can you blackmail someone and love them at the same time? Sometimes Lourdes seems genuinely in love with Rafael and wants nothing else but for him to return her affections. At other times (particularly when she gets a successful career of her own) she seems only to want to punish Rafael for ignoring her.I am having my own private Spanish film festival at the moment and it occurs to me that "machismo" is not a Spanish word for nothing. Maybe pure revenge would have been too much of a moral tale. Or maybe it would just not have been Spanish (I can't help thinking of *Woman on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown* when I think of Lourdes unwisely falling for Rafael).Three things I liked about this film: 1. Rafael is very aware of how shallow he is, but talks of how he will pursue hedonism nevertheless. 2. I loved Lourdes commanding her troops. They were supposed to look ugly but the way Lourdes strode, and high-fived her soldiers lent them a seductive power. 3. Don Antonio's eternally smouldering hair.

This is one of the funniest movies I have seen in a long time. Writer/Director Álex de la Iglesia took a simple premise and made a film that never lags in the laugh department. Although he has done well with fantasy in the past, comedy is definitely his forte.Guillermo Toledo (The Galindez File) and Mónica Cervera were hilarious as a lothario who accidentally kills his rival for manager, and the wallflower who knows his secret and helps him cover it up, only to get rid of all the competition and blackmail him into marriage.Iglesia's fantasy past comes into play with the victim haunting Toledo, sometimes headless, but always with a big knife in his skull.

I stumbled across this by accident and I am surprised that it didn't get wide release. Its a susbstanially funny movie and satire attacking one aspect of the "average Joe" Raphael (played by Guillermo Toledo) feels he is living the perfect life: working in an upscale department store as a handsome, well-dressed man, who haves sex with all the hot female employees (using the bed sets and the dressing rooms) while most of the other employees respect him. His only problem is a rival salesperson, who gets promoted over him. In a fit of rage, he accidentally kills him and the crime is witnessed by an mousy, unattractive sales clerk Lourdes (Monica Cervera). She vows to keep quiet, if he promises to go out with her. He agrees, but when she realizes she's got him wrapped around her finger, her demands of him increases as she forces him to do the 3 things he hates the most: marriage, settling down, and having children. As he's slowly driven insane by these developments, Raphael decides to get himself out of this rut once and for all.The film does a great job of skewering salesmen, particularly ones based on commission and the workplace rivalries, politics, backstabbing and etc. Anyone working in or who has been in such positions would sympathize. Home life, marriage and children gets attacked too as one of the funniest moments of the movie comes where he pays Lourdes's family a visit. The best acting in my book comes from Lourdes who's transformation from the shy, meek, clerk, to dominating, conniving woman is great if not hilarious. One wonders if she had this planned all along.But the problem I had with this one was the running length. Its a bit too long for a movie of this type, and as such, the comedy runs dry as it becomes more of a detective/character study flick, which it isn't really good at. While things end somewhat conveniently (albiet contrived), one wonders if they could've ended it much earlier with a neater ending.All and all, a nice and somewhat clever and funny little diversion thats worth the rental/viewing.

This Spanish film, Crimen Ferpecto, doesn't sound so appealing based on its fairly typical plot. Rafael, a women's department manager at a Spanish clothing store, is a womanizer concerned only with his own personal advancement and achieving what he believes to be a perfect life, is thwarted by Lourdes, a sales clerk in the same store, and a rather unattractive woman, blackmails Rafael into a relationship, after discovering a secret Rafael cannot have revealed.However, I was pleasantly surprised at how often I laughed out loud. Crimen Ferpecto moves at a fairly quick pace with lots of entertaining situations.First off, both Guillermo Toledo, as Rafael, and Monica Cervera, as Lourdes are convincing in their portrayals. What makes their performances enjoyable is their mutual ability to create interesting dynamics within their characters. Rafael, is, essentially a boorish lout, yet Toledo manages to make him sympathetic at times especially as his entanglement with Lourdes get more and more complicated. By the same token, Lourdes, the "ugly" sales clerk, proves, as a twist on the character type, to be just as ugly on the inside. They are constantly sparring, as Lourdes tries to rope Rafael into marriage, and he tries to remove her from his life. While amusing, the sparring, as the film reaches its climax, does get a little wearing. The first half of Crimen Ferpecto working better then the latter half.Also, a standout is Luis Varela as Don Antonio, Rafael's rival in becoming store manager. Without giving too much away of the plot, his character gets a surreal treatment and haunts Rafael as he attempts to deal with Lourdes. I thought some of the interplay between Rafael and Don Antonio were among the best in the film.Crimen Ferpecto is light entertainment at it's best. It offers some genuinely funny moments that are well conceived and executed. Guillermo Toledo and Monica Cervera also give stand out performances in their roles as Rafael and Lourdes with Luis Varela, as Don Antonio, backing them up admirably.