AND 100!
zennier wrote:
I don't know, I tend to talk to walls....
Really, what a fantastic choice. I'm very enthused about it. If only I would have listened to you sooner! My queue is going to be slated Italian for quite some time. With the Janus Film Project (or whatever they call it) showing L'Avventura (and Umberto D. - any good? I noticed it was directed by De Sica, who you've brought up several times, and is the imdb top 250...), I'm quite excited!
Umberto D. is probably De Sica's second most well known film, and everyone you will ever meet only has good things to say about it....except me. I thought it was heavy handed and contrived compared to something so subtle and quiet and ruinous as The Bicycle Thief. It just...gets...too...obvious. Have you ever read The Jungle? Umberto D. reminds me of that book. I know what it meant to the time period, and to exposing the depressed state of the labor class under belly, etc, but at one point I just got irritated at how obvious it all was. I think The Children are Watching Us is a little bit like that, but at least De Sica struggles with how to show something through younger eyes, and also its so much earlier in his career that I'll forgive him. But Umberto D. just doesn't work for me.
Scorsese has nothing but praise for it and its lead actor, though, and it has a higher imdb rating than even Bicycle Thief if I remember correctly, so I would never tell you not to watch it. In fact, I'd be interested in your thoughts seeing as how similar our tastes tend to be.
L'Avventura is excellent, however! Kinda disturbing, too. Antonioni was never someone who worked towards sympathy or emotional connectivity with the viewer the way De Sica did. You're incredibly frustrated by his characters, but you kind of realize they're just bored, and confused, and out of control, and in need of distraction. He also uses mis-lead suspense often as a vehicle to advance the story (and in leui of that emotional resonance). Here, a woman disappears and her friends go looking for her, in Blow-Up, well someone comes demanding a roll of film from a photographer who accidentally caught something in one of the frames, etc, etc. Its kind of like Hitchcock in Rear Window, where the mystery doesn't really end up being the primary focus. Antonioni takes it one step further, what begins as a mystery he quickly lets go of, and uses it as a springboard in which to explore the empty lives of her friends. But you do, in some distant way, feel bad for the lead woman, because she sometimes reflects on everything around her and gets depressed, even though she keeps going (should remind you a bit of Mastroianni in LDV).
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I've heard for Swept Away (yes, the original, heh) and The Seduction of Mimi, so I guess Wertmuller is more of a fixture in cinema than I realized. Interesting.
I know! She's the biggest person no one has ever heard of. Its unreal! I am so happy you guys checked her out, and that Seven Beauties may not be everyone's #1, but at least people found it food for thought. I tried to pick one that would purposefully be rough, as I know Pasqualino is not an easy character (in fact at times he's dispicable) and the entire idea of his wooing the SS Officer is at its worst interesting, and at its best (for me) quite engaging. I like how everyone responded differently to it.
