Reviews

What works well in the movie is the light touch of the director in creating a simple story and modulating masterfully the amount of melodrama in it. Camera work is excellent, acting laid back and realistic. From a small town East of Milan, the man without gravity takes the plunge to a worldly fame after a complicated childhood. Will he enjoy it? There is a lot of Miracle in Milan by Vittorio de Sica: the simple logic of the main character, his apparent meekness, his upbringing without a father in a modest but disciplined house, and his progressive experience of a world where compromise and ambivalence is a daily occurrence. Worth seeing it, if you like magic realism.

Nothing new in the lazy script: the different man/woman perspective on erotic desire, a poor unimaginative dialogue, many scenes borrowed from previous 1960's Italian comedies (Signore e Signori, Sedotta e Abbandonata come to mind). However, it is mildly entertaining and worth your time, if you like the genre. Probably the most original episode is the Fantozzi's like behavior of a desperate herbal remedies rep that is dying to get laid at a corporate meeting dinner, and progressively downgrades his aim for a bed companion in the course of the evening. The acting is a bit limited and as a consequence characters are flat and uninspiring.

Visually interesting movie, with visions of modern costumes that must have inspired Piero Gherardi. Acting is good, dvd quality good, Roth is very bubbly in her role. The plot does not make much sense in the 21st century, but it is significant for 1930: empowerment of women and value of eroticism. A philandering husband who hints at the value of passion in marriage and the damage it causes when it flickers and dies, the undercurrent is sexual and well expressed in the technical and morality limits of the Era. It also shows how a rather plain wife could turn into a vamp with the appropriate costumes, script and make-up, hinting at the extreme power of photo plays to create images of personality that trascend the actress. Overall a fair movie by Cecil De Mille: recommended.

Visually and emotionally reminds me a lot, in many scenes, of Fellini's Satyricon or Bob Guccione's Caligula. Those are not movies for everyone. The great illusion of photo-plays comes at a human cost: those made famous are wasting their health and wealth, those would be famous are exploited and abused. It's a mad desperate race that creates the illusory and escapist factory of emotions, trends, fashions, commentary and fake that becomes real real. The ambitious project shows the underlying ambiguities of cinema as an Art form. After taking inspiration from the French director Jacques Demy for La La Land, Mr. Hurwitz is now borrowing from Federico Fellini, and presents us an ambitious movie about the pitfalls of cinematic art.

I will focus mostly on Louise Brooks performance in the movie. Overall, the film is more than enjoyable, mixing elements of classic western and modern hard boiled scripts. It kept me interested in the developing narrative. The DVD edition available on Amazon for $ 14 has a very good transfer quality and excellent sound and dialogue. They must have found a good quality, early generation copy of the film for the transfer. Louise is impeccable in her performance and well worth the price of the DVD. She has lost that timeless iconic quality present in the 1920's movies (well visible when you watch them, and her persona is inevitably shining and stealing the scene, her acting decades ahead of the time). However she is very coherent with the narrative and she develops well the character of a sister of the airplane pilot trying her best to improve the odds of a budding business. It is amazing to think she was just one year older than John Wayne. Could Overland Stage Raiders have represented a new career start for Louise? Yes, yes and yes. However it would have required a better understanding, in 1938, of her State of the Art performance in her 1920's movies. I believe the cult of silent movies performances was far away from the public and the critics of the late 1930's, and the expertise necessary to bridge her career to a new beginning lacking in most, if not all, Hollywood's directors and Studios. In my opinion, she could have well continued acting had she met, say, Ingmar Bergman or Michelangelo Antonioni, and continued to gift us with superb performances and roles for the next forty years.

Enjoyable as a document of the voice of Louise Brooks. Her voice was fine. The problem of transition was more complex. After becoming an icon of the age in silent movies, the sudden appearance of her voice along with her filmed image shattered the imaginary of her silent movie acolytes, who had imagined but not heard her voice in photoplays. We perceive the same artistic surprise when a novel is transposed in a movie, when a B&W picture is colorized, and an innovation in sight and sound is introduced. Along the same lines, 1080p when introduced on home TVs and DVD Blu-ray sources had the unexpected effect to "show the set" on some old movies and especially on some old TV serials like MASH, Friends and ER, because lightning and direction was for 480i video sources.

Another example is the transposition of comic strips into movies or cartoons: it was very difficult for me to appreciate The Peanuts in movies after an extensive and prolonged love for The Peanuts comic strip: my imaginary of Snoopy and Charlie Brown was shattered once motion and voice was added, and the pleasure I felt reading the strip simply was not there in the least while watching the cartoon.

So, in the end, it is true that Louise Brooks career was damaged by the sound recording of her voice, however the problem was not her voice quality, but the sudden appearance of the voice in an imaginary context where she had become a silent icon and allowed countless movie viewers to have a personal and imaginary idea of what her voice should have been.

Louise Brooks is an eternal icon of intense and complex feminine sensuality, transcending time. Any photoplay, including this badly preserved short talkie, is worth watching and collecting as a timeless artistic expression and document of her contribution to adding joy and pleasure to this world.

The show is light and entertaining, the acting reasonably engaging, the script could benefit from some improvement. The storyboard is a classic single girl exploring opportunities, made more entertaining by her progressive coming out as a talented tv director.

There are so many similarities between this movie and the later La La Land: the perils of a relationship during times of rapid changing professional fortunes, the overall narrative tones, and the music score.

It is a fundamental movie to start the arc of Chazelle creativity, and while the obvious budgetary constraints are interfering with the narrative, there are many great shots and great Music.

Definitely recommended if watching movie is for you not exclusively entertainment but also part of an investigation of the true quality of the Art: expressing something fresh that can only be conveyed by potion pictures.

The ambiguity of filming his wife along with his lover in real life adds to the high artistic value of the movie. Giulietta Masina seems unhappy and Sandra Milo hints to a guilty conscience in each of their scenes. Fellini, with his keen hypersensitive eye must have been well aware of this. Only recently Sandra Milo has admitted to a long sexual relationship with Fellini, on a feature on the Criterion DVD of 8 1/2. The autobiographical element adds a specific tension to the narrative and acting of the two dames of the movie. Was Giulietta aware of Fellini liason with Ms.Milo? I believe so, and it shows in the movie.

Photography is pitch perfect with color just the right shade and brilliance. As the fashion was driven by the new dyes developed for textiles, it is a sign of scholarly respect to the best evidence of what was like in the first quarter of the 1800's in England. Anya Taylor-Joy is sublime and coherent with the literary description. The soundtrack is also well chosen and appropriate in both diegetic and non-diegetic portions. A great artistic result.

War is about survival. This movie is about survival after losing everything in war. Karin descends into destitution and hints are present about how she survived the loss of her Country to the Soviet Union, the loss of her husband and of her comfortable life, moving into a life of refugee camps. Cynical and calculating she finds her way out of a displaced person camps in Italy marrying an Italian POW returned from South Africa. This was enough to displease the viewers who liked his anti-fascist film "Roma Città Aperta" and dictated the cold critic and public reception in 1950. The movie itself is a masterpiece: its narrative is documentary of Karin difficult adaptation to the circumstances on a remote island of the Eolie group, its different culture and lack of women's emancipation, and within the limits of the expressive canon of the 1950's shows in a peculiar and profound way the troubles of survival in the harsh conditions of Europe for refugees from Eastern Europe and the cultural shock they endured after the end of the war. Its paradigm is salvation and discovery, and the beauty of Rossellini is also in the avoidance of many of the Hollywood tricks to explain too much.

A raunchy sexy comedy inspired by Boccaccio's tales, old husband young wife plot. Some surprising twists to the plot in the embryonic me-too movement and woman's choice of when and how. Stunning Edwige Fenech.

As a practicing anesthesiologist, I am often wondering who supervises the medical details. This episode has an extremely unrealistic scene in the ICU when Quinn is awakened from his drug induced coma. Starting from the taping of the endotracheal tube, to the drugs called out in the code that follows the extubation, and to the obstructing airway that every ICU practitioner would correct with a chin lift (but in the sequence is left obstructed), there are gross errors in the recreation of a realistic scene. It is a pity, because one is left wondering how many could be the technical errors in the other specialized areas, like hacking, shooting and communicating securely.

While we know that the excellent Homeland is "just a movie", technical realism, as the one pioneered by Michael Crichton in his "The Andromeda Strain", usually adds to the overall feeling of quality of the product.