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Ne parliamo a cena (2008)
Leo and Bonini, provide a funny and clever portrait of the times, never being vulgar.
Sex and Marriage
Sex and marriage.... do they really go together like a horse and carriage? What happens in bed after ten years of partnership and some children? Italian men play football once a week while the ladies gossip over organic meals... same issues, opposite points of view.
Over dinner four friends brag about their sex life, their wives over dinner elsewhere feel very differently about their sex lives. Disaster strikes when the couples confront each other over their usual Saturday dinner.
The central idea of this interesting and daring TV pilot presented at Rome Fiction Fest 2008, is to observe in a cynical manner the contradictory universe of couples over 30, starting with their sex lives.
The main theme of the series is: how does sex lives of couples who have been together for many years change? How do husband and wife still "young", but with 10 years of a relationship and a few children live their sex life?
Actors-Creators Marco Bonini and Edoardo Leo (also directing) sneakily let us spy on the taboo of married sex lives, starting from what goes on between the sheets: anxiety, frigidity, confessions of masturbation, blue pill, late orgasms, preferred positions, erection problems, erotic fantasies and small perversions within married couples.
By Lorenzo Crispi - saw it in Rome at the Cinema Adriano (Rome Fiction Fest) - July 2008.
Billo - Il Grand Dakhaar (2007)
Delightful comedy deserves wider exposure.
Posted: Mon., Jul. 16, 2007, 5:07pm Open Roads Billo Il Grand Dahkaar (Comedy -- Italy)
By RONNIE SCHEIB
A Coproducers presentation and production. Executive producers, Marco Bonini, Jacques Lipkau Goyard. Co-producer, Youssou N'Dour. Directed by Laura Muscardin. Screenplay, Marco Bonini, Mbacke Gadji, in collaboration with Muscardin, Lucilla Schiaffino, based on a story by Bonini.
An apparently insoluble romantic impasse resolves itself into double domesticity in "Billo," Laura Muscardin's joyous tale of a Senegalese fashion designer in Rome. Muscardin, whose considerably darker AIDS drama "Days" showed an equally impressive control of layered tone, has woven a lavishly peopled tapestry that feels at home in both a Senegalese village and a Roman junkyard. Neither an illegal-immigrant horror story nor a broad culture-clash comedy, quasi-documentary pic, with extremely personable hip-hop designer Thierno Thiam as the star of his own real-life story, skips gracefully through good times and bad. Delightful comedy deserves wider exposure. Pic opens on the reflection of a campfire in Billo's (Thiam) eye. This location, a beach in Senegal, segues quickly to a beach in Italy as Billo heads to Rome to make his fortune. Through his fellow Senegalese, Billo finds work selling pirated CDs and holes up in a junked car, finally relocating to a rented room, only to be mistakenly arrested as an Islamic terrorist.
Here, as elsewhere, Muscardin deftly balances comedy and ominous, Kafkaesque absurdity, as a no-nonsense female interrogator and an overeager defense attorney let their assumptions run away with them.
Billo eventually, and opportunely, finds a job with an upholsterer; a home with Pap (Paul N'Dour), a Senegalese sanitation worker who has lived in Italy for 10 years; and friendship with a gay couple doubly named Paolo (played by Marco Bonini, who co-scripted and exec produced, and Paolo Gasparini). Billo also finds a liberating if slightly kooky wife in Paolo's lovestruck sister Laura (Susy Laude).
There's only one problem: Billo also has a fiancée back in Senegal, his cousin Fatou (Carmen De Santos), whom he has loved since childhood. Near-identical scenes in which each woman begs a packing Billo to take her with him trigger a measure of angst in Billo until his marabout reminds him of the advantages of Islam, which allows up to four wives, magically banishing all guilt and responsibility. Interspersed throughout Billo's sojourn in Italy are flashbacks to his childhood in the village of Mballing, dropped simply into his present-day existence without strain or fanfare. Fascinated by the gorgeous, vibrant colors of the fabrics his family dyes, young Billo sees his apprenticeship as a tailor as both a calling and a way to become rich enough to sway Fatou's affluent, educated parents to accept him as a suitor.
Against the rigid rituals, clear class divisions and architectural simplicity of Mballing, Muscardin opposes a ditzy Rome -- complete with family dinners where a gay son and his lover, and a daughter and her black fiancé, are greeted with chirpy joy by mama (Luisa De Santis) and with glowering silence by papa (Mario De Santis).
Tolerance is not a simple matter of hugs and indulgence in pic's unexpectedly complex moral landscape. Beneath the surface looms a thorny mass of differences to be negotiated, with women doing most of the heavy lifting. Yet the characters are sustained throughout by a sense of inner balance, continually finding their footing in a flow of events that avoids both cutesy serendipity and the inevitability that tends to plague biopics.
Tech credits on this cooperatively produced low-budgeter further pic's carefully constructed casualness. Senegalese musician and co-producer Youssou N'Dour's score adds to pic's hybrid sense of identity. plussing pic's happily hybrid ethnicity.
http://www.variety.com/review/VE1117934199.html? categoryid=31&cs=1&query=maRCO+BONINI
Tutta la conoscenza del mondo (2001)
The cast is excellent, with Mezzogiorno a radiant heroine and Bonini, who has the looks of a younger Antonio Banderas, a rugged hero.
Posted: Fri., Apr. 6, 2001 All The Knowledge In The World Tutta La Conoscenza Del Mondo (Italy)
By David STRATTON
Twenty-nine-year-old director Eros Puglielli displays a precocious but uneven talent in "All the Knowledge in the World," his first cinema feature following a series of well-regarded video clips and video-films. While demonstrating considerable skills as a filmmaker, Puglielli is on less sure ground with a screenplay that attempts to straddle several genres, to ultimately diminishing returns. Fests may want to spotlight this up and comer, but commercial chances appear to be slender. Pic starts with a bang when Marco (Marco Bonini), a young would-be rocker, attempts to rescue Claudio (Claudio Guain), a wheelchair bound man who gets stuck in the middle of a railway track as a nonstop express approaches. Staging, filming and editing of this sequence is masterly, and gets the film off to a powerful start. Just as it seems both men are doomed to die, the hurtling train is stopped by a mysterious force in the shape of a luminous white creature, perhaps an alien, or maybe an angel.
Whatever caused their salvation, both Marco and Claudio are profoundly affected by the apparent miracle. The authorities won't believe Marco's story, and Claudio pretends he's forgotten what happened. But their lives are changed forever.
Claudio goes to live with his niece, Giovanna (Giovanna Mezzogiorno), and secretly -- and obsessively -- begins collecting material on sightings of aliens.
Giovanna, meanwhile, is besotted with self-important philosophy professor (Giorgio Albertazzi). They begin an apparently chaste relationship, which culminates in an "Eyes Wide Shut"-like sequence in which the prof turns out to be a member of a cult practicing some kind of witchcraft.
Marco becomes a top-of-the-chart rock singer but still seeks an answer to the miracle he witnessed. Inevitably Marco and Giovanna find one another.
Puglielli claims that this often strange and uneven film was made to pose basic questions about the very meaning of life, but it's much less profound than that. Yet even if it doesn't really hang together, much of the film intrigues and, occasionally, dazzles.
The cast is excellent, with Mezzogiorno a radiant heroine and Bonini, who has the looks of a younger Antonio Banderas, a rugged hero. Production values are very slick in every department, and the music is lively.
http://www.variety.com/review/VE1117797747.html? categoryid=31&cs=1&query=maRCO+BONINI
Miss Julie (2009)
Bonini and Margotta produce a real experiment that creates great acting performances.
Newyorker from 1946, Michael Margotta is a very interesting artist. Actor's Studio Member and StanislavskiStrasberg acting couch, Margotta is the fonder of The Actor Center. THE ACTOR'S CENTER - ROMA, is a not- for-profit organization where actors, writers and directors - meet every Monday at 11am in the city of Rome (Italy) to help each other to fulfil their highest potential and create a common vocabulary. The AC is now seven years old and it walked a long way. To celebrate the seventh turning point actor-producer Marco Bonini and Michael Margotta decided to create a special production in which they could synthesize what they learnt so far. So the choice to make a film out of one of the most performed shows of all times comes directly from the interpretative choices they made. - "Unexpectedly we found our self into an interesting and undiscovered land. The kind of experience we aimed for required a close up approach by the audience" explains Margotta, "We aimed for a theatrical experience where we felt these characters trapped right in front of us. It's an exciting place to be in which is not just theatre, yet not just cinema.". Why willing to do an Italian production of a Swedish author, performed in English? - "Simply because Strindberg's Miss Julie, has no land to belong to, has no time to refer to" says Margotta. Marco Bonini also adds: "Communicating a transnational conflict to transnational audiences is our main goal and that requires a transitional idiom. As a matter of fact the transnational language – weather we like it or not – is now English as well as it was Latin until the middle age". So Italian actors are back to speak to international audiences? -"they are indeed", they both agree.
Rome - Luigi Crescezio
Diciotto anni dopo (2010)
Edoardo Leo and Marco Bonini pick up speed on their way to a moving finale.
FILM REVIEWS 18 Years Later -- Film Review By Natasha Senjanovic, June 04, 2010 06:46 ET
ROME -- "18 Years Later" is a decade-long labor of love for actor and first-time director Edoardo Leo and his co-star and co-writer Marco Bonini (fresh off of French mega-hit "Camping 2").
Though it breaks no new ground in the family drama/road movie genre, the film has a gentle charm that grows as the story weaves towards a satisfyingly cathartic but not cutesy ending.
Winner of a special mention at the Rome Independent Film Festival, "18 Years Later" has been acquired by FremantleMedia, who will handle world sales. Already on its way to festivals worldwide, this intimate-but- universal story with art house appeal will serve the filmmakers well as a calling card for future projects. A remake may also be in the works with the potential U.K. distributor.
Brothers Mirko (Leo) and Genziano (Bonini) haven't spoken or seen each other since their mother died in a car accident when they were teenagers. Soon after, Genziano moved to London and became a successful stockbroker while the stuttering, insecure Mirko stayed to work as a mechanic in the family-run garage.
Eighteen years later, Genziano returns to Rome, for 24 hours, for their father's funeral only to discover that the man's dying wish was to have his ashes laid by his wife's grave, in Calabria. Which means his sons must make the trip to southern Italy in the antique Morgan in which their mother died, which he painstakingly and secretly rebuilt over time.
Mirko convinces his brother to take the trip. Naturally complications arise: The phone-addicted Genziano risks losing an important client, the brothers pick up a flighty hitchhiker (Eugenia Costantini) and, of course, the car breaks down. All the while the brothers only allude to their problems while their maternal grandfather (Gabriele Ferzetti) reveals the painful past to Leo's wife (Sabrina Impacciatore) in an interwoven subplot.
Bouncy music -- a blend of folk, Balkan and circus melody -- adds a light touch throughout a journey that smartly avoids being a postcard expedition through Italy. Nevertheless, the film takes a while to settle into its groove. In the first half, Mirko is too pathetic too often while Genziano is too much the straight man.
A middle segment, in which the brothers get picked up hitchhiking by a series of over-the-top characters, provides less comic relief than the shifting relationship between Mirko and Genziano.
Luckily, as the story and characters develop, so too Leo and Bonini relax into a more convincing, restrained chemistry, the script and Leo's direction pulling them back from pathos whenever they venture too close to the edge. The final, inevitable confrontation is well-played and genuinely moving. The last scene is a pearl that playfully wraps things up without imparting facile life lessons.
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr/film-reviews/18-years-later-film- review-1004095757.story