Day 2

Due to time constraints, I will be presenting these "capsule"reviews unedited.  When the Festival is over and life returns to normal, I will return to each film, rethink my review and edit accordingly.

The first half hour of Piazza Fontana: The Italian Conspiracy was like reading War & Peace.  The cast of characters and their associations were mind-boggling.  Coupled with dark camera work and dizzying editing, the task of reading the subtitles was almost painful.  The film is based on a real episode in recent Italian history and suggests that conspiracies are business as usual in Italy.  The left are all amoral thugs and the right are bureaucratic fascists who have no qualms sacrificing the lives of innocents to paint the left as the only cause of Italy’s woes.  It is well acted and deftly filmed but I found it so overly complex and ultimately unsatisfying that I cannot recommend it to anyone who is not fluent in Italian.

My second outing was equally frustrating.  Some of you may know that I have always held Peter Greenaway in high esteem.  He has often been described as [as rightly so] the most painterly of directors.  His extraordinary The Cook, The Thief, His Wife And her Lover leaves no doubt of his mastery of design, art direction and cinematography.   His latest, Goltzius and the Pelican Company is also visually stunning, highly stylized, and like much of his earlier work, erotically charged… to a fault.  I fear he may be seduced by the desire to shock.  This film closely resembles the look of his crazy take on Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Prospero’s Books.  The tale draws from works like the Decameron, The Canterbury Tales and the Bible.  It examines in lurid almost pandering detail all the forbidden sexual acts laid out in quasi-Judeo-Christian literature.  It is spoken in a manipulated, singsong, almost childish English.  See it for its beauty and clever effects but be forewarned; it may turn your stomach.

I could not be happier with my third choice of the day.  The Intouchables has been out for some time and recently ran in Santa Rosa; it may still be there.  Don’t miss it; it is a lovely movie with wonderful performances.  A wealthy paraplegic hires a street-wise ex-con to care for him and proceeds to show him the good life.   He affectionately introduces him to art and music and in the process learns even more from his caretaker.  This film has earned over 3 times what last year’s The Artist earned in France.  It is their all time highest grossing film.  Don’t miss it.

I closed out the night with Kon Tiki.  I read the book as a child and saw Thor Heyerdahl’s documentary of it.  I also visited the Thor Heyerdahl Museum in Guimar, on Tenerife in the Canary Islands.  I have always been intrigued by the story.  The movie does a good solid job depicting the difficulties of the journey but I found it a bit long and monotonous.  Still, I think it’s worth watching especially for the lead, Pal Sverre Hagen who is so like Peter O’Toole in Lawrence of Arabia as to be distracting.   The photo above is one I took of the pyramid complex in Guimar where Heyerdahl spent the last years of his life trying to prove that Canarios sailed to the new world and brought the ziggurat to  Central and South America.