The Legend of 1900

Guiseppe Tornatore, Italy, 1998 (8.2*)
Happy Birthday, Guiseppe, May 27th, 1957!
The movie is definitely unique, about a man who spends his entire life on board an ocean liner and becomes a fantastic piano player for the ship's orchestra. The award-winning cinematography of Lajos Koltai coupled with the direction of Tornatore, director of the Oscar®-winning Cinema Paradiso, Malena, and Star Maker, makes this film happen for many, it's simply gorgeous to see.

The story begins with a man pawning a trumpet, the hearing of an obscure fragment of music on a recording, and the window to the memory of wonderful times is opened once again. We are invited into this memory through a magical tale.

Tim Roth has one of his most demanding and interesting roles in this - he plays the man whose lifetime home is the floating cruise ship, he never leaves it, fearing the outside world. Thus the ship becomes a supplicant mother, whom he never knew, he was found on the ship in a basket. Since a child, he has become an expert pianist on the ship through constant practice, and at one point Clarence Williams comes on board as the arrogant Jelly Roll Morton, who challenges Roth to a piano duel, certainly one of the film's highlights. Pruitt Taylor Vince has his best career role as Roth's best friend, a trumpet player on the ship.

The film is complex and can be said to be about many things, both physical and metaphysical. This ambitious semi-epic covers four decades in a man and a ship's life - it paints a picture of a world only this one man could know. It certainly has the air of a fable, a light fantasy, in which it's possible to live your lifetime within a cruiseliner, sheltered from the outside world like an unborn baby.

This got 7.9 at IMDB, but only 58 from Metacritics, so the public likes it more than the critics.

Winner of 15 awards out of 20 nominations

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Short Cuts 3

Lately I've seen more films to avoid than to recommend. Here are the latest ones, all by major directors as well.

Persona (Ingmar Bergman, Sweden) - the kind of Bergman film that Woody Allen and others parodied or copied, consists largely of facial close-ups (beautiful b&w cinematography by Sven Nykvist as usual) of two actresses he was involved with romantically: Bibi Andersson, who plays a nurse to Liv Ullman's actress having a mental breakdown. (Bergman and Ullman became involved after this, her first film with him.) Not much happens except a lot of angst, and a few shots of arc lights or film which critics claim is "Bergman deconstructing cinema as we knew it then" - Whoopee, I always love a good artistic deconstruction. Thankfully a short film at 90 minutes; the best thing here are Liv Ullman's lips. She was 25 at the time and admits, "I didn't understand Bergman, but he was an icon". Example of Bergman's excess: one 5-8 minute scene is shown entirely twice, once showing the speaker, Bibi, once showing the listener, Ullman. Wow, how radical (zzz..) You could do a whole movie that way; and the viewer sits through everything twice, but its 'art'. 5* (of 10)
Note: Bergman's highest ranked film critically, at #40, with Seventh Seal (My pick) just behind at #52 (a knight plays chess with death during the plague in the middle ages; what could be more fun?)

The Star Maker (Guiseppe Tornatore, Italy) - another Tornatore (Cinema Paradiso, Malena) directed film, and like these Malena, was filmed in Sicily. This is about a talent scout for a Rome film studio, who travels about the countryside taking screen tests for locals to submit to agents in Rome. The story starts very well, as we're shown local Sicilians with faces of great character and life, and it feels like Tornatore himself was duplicating the story's narrative. Somewhere midway however, he picks up a teenage virgin who is dying to escape her boring life working in a convent, and the story goes downhill from there. As a film and Tornatore fan, I eventually felt ripped off by the plot development and conclusion. What began as a warm-hearted romantic comedy filled with hope became serious and unrewarding. One expects better from Tornatore relative to the story itself. Beautifully shot scenes of Sicily (a beautiful ancient amphitheater in one scene) and its inhabitants however. 5* (of 10)
Note: the dvd cover is inaccurate; the girl did not resemble Lolita, but was a dark-haired, black-eyed Italian beauty; she never once wore sunglasses either. "Shoot the Poster Maker"

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Malena

Guiseppe Tournatore, 2000, Italy (8.2*)
From the director of the classic Cinema Paradiso (Oscar® winner for Foreign Film), if you enjoyed that film you should also like this one. Tournatore again returns to his childhood for inspiration. In this, a young teenage boy in a small Sicilian seacoast town named Renato, excellently portrayed by Guiseppe Sulfaro in his first role, begins the film by getting his first bicycle. To the other boys, this bicycle represents manhood (for Renato, it’s long pants!). On the same seminal day, he discovers the beautiful married woman (whose husband is at war in Africa for Italy), Malena, whom his friends watch walk to town daily (then the whole town watches her shop). Melena is beautifully played in her first film by former model Monica Bellucci, and luckily for us, we get to see just about all of her beauty, as Guiseppe realizes that he is now becoming a man, and begins to spy on Malena, even in her private moments. He later defends her against the town gossips, which is just about everyone, as all the women are jealous of her beauty and the attention she garners from all the men.

The truthful pain of this story is that the boy cannot make himself older (she’s twice his age) and be the man Melena might need, as her husband does not return, so we feel Guiseppe’s helpless torture. Tournatore said that “the greatest love is all is unrequited love”; it’s a theme that also dominated Cinema Paradiso; the first love is almost always unrequited in Tournatore’s films, and it shapes his characters lives. The film starts as a romantic comedy, then turns serious as the war affects all these residents of the town, perhaps the story’s biggest shortcoming, the shift in mood and tone. The towns of Siracusa and Noto looked stunningly like the Renaissance paintings of Caravaggio, apparently untouched by war or time for centuries, as we see in many beautiful shots (the cinematography received and Oscar® nomination). We also hear another beautiful Oscar®-nominated score by Ennio Morricone (who has scored six of Tournatore’s seven films). Another rewarding and nostalgic film by Tournatore, whose fans won’t be disappointed.

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Cinema Paradiso

Guiseppe Tornatore, 1988, Italy (10*)
Best Foreign Film (AA, BAA)
Cinema magic about the magic of movies. A beautiful epic film about growing up with a life that revolves around a cinema theater in a small town in Sicily, and the effect of films on the local townfolk, and one boy in particular, played by Salvatore Cascio as a kid and Marco Leonardi when grown up.

The story starts when a projectionist, wonderfully played by Philippe Noiret, befriends a boy whose dad is missing during the war and who hangs out at the theater whenever he can. The story follows him from boyhood to adulthood, all tied together with movies. Eventually, as an adult, we see the boy all grown up, and now a filmmaker himself.

An all-time top 10 for me, the dvd release also includes the longer director's cut, almost an hour of additional footage (but not really necessary to the story). Winner of both an Oscar® and a BAFTA for foreign language film, something that only five films have done. The others are: Babette's Feast (Denmark, 1988), Almodovar's All About My Mother (Spain, 1999), Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (China, 2000), and The Lives of Others (Germany, 2006).

Currently ranked No. 74 on the IMDB top 250 (as of 5.4.11)

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