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giuseppe-lippi
Reviews
Perry Mason: The Case of the Lost Love (1987)
Mystery Well Mixing With Drama
I used to be a fan of the black & white Perry Masons, but this was a more than unexpected surprise. As a television drama, it works exceedingly well, with an almost faultless screenplay and great acting. I LOVED Mr. Burr's Perry, all the more so because of his real suffering with a leg and difficulty at walking; and was pleasantly moved by this story of old romance, three main characters out of five that never married, decent people committing themselves to awful behavior, treason and deceit... All in all, what you used to call a very good yarn. Watch it and admire Jean Simmons, one of my favorite actresses in the Fifties and Sixties, doing her best to enthrall us again.
Inception (2010)
Good Fantasy Script in Action-Movie Packaging
What a bore, all these fighting, pursuing, exploding sequences in a film that purported to be a descent into dreams and the unconscious mind! The adult moviegoer inevitably says: ENOUGH of such simplistic shortcuts to box office. Hollywood films are not interesting anymore for the general audience AND the thinking viewer. All this said, "Inception" is not a terrible film: it is that hybrid creature, the ambitious potboiler. So the screenplay, the actors, even some special effects (see the weightless sequences towards the end of the movie) are interesting enough to make us sigh at the thought of where a mature treatment of the same subject could have led. On another level, one cannot stop wondering why the film's dreams are so visually banal. Nobody is asking here for another dream sequence painted by Salvador Dali like in the Hitchcock masterpiece, "Spellbound", but it seems absurd that nothing in "Inception" looks even remotely surreal or fantastic (some of the weightless scenes excluded). All in all, another disappointing fantasy that could have been a much more interesting film -- if only it had avoided to include such an embarrassing amount of platitudes.
Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Silk Stocking (2004)
I Couldn't Watch It for More than Ten Minutes
So this will be a spoiler in itself, but I didn't like the disagreeable character portrayed by Mr. Everett, nor the little quarrels with dr. Watson and Mrs. Hudson in the first minutes of its running time. But I left when the bourgeois family of high-society girls appeared for the first time. Holmes is a great Victorian invention, but I had the feeling that from Victorianism this made-for-TV film would only retain the china and affected manners, not the charm! And in fact, previous reviewers state that this is "much darker" than usual. Dark -- an adjective I once loved and now almost pity! Not for hardcore Sherlockians, perhaps, this could be recommended to any other lost soul.
Il trionfo di Maciste (1961)
Youthful Goliath's Sloppy Adventures.
After Tim Burton's "Ed Wood" resurfaced that dubious genius, some peninsular scandalmongers decided to find the local equivalent to Ed and declared Tanio Boccia (who directs here as Amerigo Anton), Italy's worst filmmaker ever. That's not to be taken without a grain of salt. More than anything else, Boccia/Anton was one of those directors who accepted everything, did not argue with producers, took his projects as just another job and never thought of identifying with them. The results are under everybody's eyes, but it has to be admitted that he would have never thought of a future, let alone international, survival of his modest output thanks to TV, videotapes or DVDs. In the case of "Il trionfo di Maciste", the boyish Kirk Morris (alias Adriano Bellini, a Venetian who also starred in Riccardo Freda's "Maciste all'inferno") is to be admired in the muscular chariots scene at the middle of the film, where he offers such a picture of sweat, fatigue and effort as to become a minor cult classic for voyeurs. Although I'm not a gay person, I can easily picture the enjoyment of this share of the audience before such a sequence. For the rest, a minor and quite slow output without the visual glamor of the best productions.