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Nueve reinas (2000)
Nine Queens - Fast-Paced and Full of Twists and Turns
Nine Queens follows the activities of two Argentine street-hustlers who team-up as partners for a day. Juan is a young man whose good looks and innocent appearance give him an advantage over the women that he cheats. He was taught some tricks of the trade by his father who is now in prison awaiting trial and regrets teaching his son how to steal. Marcos, the older of the two men, attempts to open Juan's eyes to the scams that are going on everywhere around them in the streets of Buenos Aires, where every thief claims not to be a thief. He sees Juan as being naive because the younger man expresses some sympathy for his victims and puts limits on what he will take from them. Marcos has no such remorse. He thinks of having a conscience as ridiculous and a hindrance to his trade.
The action suddenly becomes more intense when a former partner of Marcos introduces the pair to the scam of a lifetime. The man has counterfeited a sheet of nine rare stamps, worth hundreds of thousands if genuine. He plans to sell the stamps each of which display the image of a woman in profile, the nine queens, to a billionaire stamp collector. Unable to carry out the sale himself, the forger enlists Marcos' help in selling the stamps. Things quickly devolve into a series of struggles over who will get what percentage of the take as everyone who becomes involved uses their skills to overcome the obstacles to the sale, leaving the viewer uncertain about who is the hustler and who is being hustled.
The story is fast-paced and well-acted. Dialogue is in Spanish with English and French subtitles.
The Makeover (2013)
The Makeover - Light and Funny
The Makeover is itself a remake of George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion and the musical version of that play, My Fair Lady, but with an interesting twist; the genders of the main characters in the film have been switched. Set in Boston, The Makeover takes much of its initial energy from the contrast between the varied dialects used by the upper and lower classes of that city's population.
The film is a fun romantic comedy that is reasonably well acted and photographed. It could have been improved by continuing the musical score through the fades between scenes instead of leaving them silent, but this probably was not considered practical with a made for TV movie.