I did not have great expectations when I started watching Monster Hunter, the 2020 movie based on a popular videogame property by Capcom. I never played the videogames, and I had a very sketchy idea of the setup. All I knew was there is Milla Jovovich in it – and I quite like her – and that it was written and directed by Paul W.S. Anderson, a man that should be hanged and quartered for what he did to the Three Musketeers.
So, you get an idea of what I was expecting.
Category Archives: Media
Us and time: The Dig (2021)
Based on a novel published in 2007 inspired by real events, The Dig, that is currently streaming on Netflix, is a straightforward historical drama, built on the 1939 excavation of the Sutton Hoo mound. Ralph Fiennes is Basil Brown, a self-taught archaeologist that is hired by upper-class lady Edith Pretty (as portrayed by carey Mulligan) to excavate in her land in search of hidden archaeological remains.
The movie is beautiful to look at, and takes its time to linger lovingly on the British landscapes in which much of the action takes place. A number of plots intersect in the story, that refreshingly gives us the relationship of two individuals that have no sentimental or sexual involvement whatsoever, but just a shared love and awe for history and the passing of time.
Along the way, the film finds the time to portray the effects of class on academical endeavours and research – Brown’s a lower class farmer, considered little more than a digger by the archaeologists that try to step in once the treasure’s unearthed, and the archaeologists are still just middle class when confronted with the rich upper class miss Pretty. The way in which the social class dance is carried on is part of the fun of the movie.
And we also get a romantic story, involving two side characters – quite superfluous, but at least played with elegance. Indeed, the movie (and the novel) play fast and loose with some historical elements to add flavor and romanticism – as I mentioned, somewhat superfluously.
At the core of the story, there remains the relationship between people and history, and the very intimate relationship each one of us has, one way or another, with time itself, and what we make of it.
An excellent movie, filled with great actors and beautifully shot, it’s highly recommended.
The Day of Memory
January the 27th is the Day of Memory in Italy and everywhere else, in which we remember the millions that were murdered in the Nazi concentration camps – many of which were Italians, sent to the camps by our own government. As those that witnessed the horror are passing away, it becomes particularly important for us to keep the memory alive, so that nothing like this can happen, ever again.
And because I believe, like Leonard Cohen did, that the Nazis were also defeated by songs and stories, here is some music…
Mutant monsters and changes of plans
I’m writing a new story for my Patrons, and today I was planning to finish it and translate it in Italian (all that I put on Patreon is bi-lingual) but then something happened that caused me to reconfigure my schedule: a friend informed me that Matinee, Joe Dante’s 1993 movie featuring John Goodman and Cathy Moriarty, is available on Prime. And I’ve just paid the annual fee to Prime.
And Matinee’s a movie I’ve been wanting to re-watch for 27 years.
And so I put my short story on hold, and sat back and enjoyed the movie, Joe Dante’s love letter to 1950s B features and a homage to B-movie giant William Castle, the man who gave us loads of cheap creature features and some of the unlikeliest promotional gimmicks.
Continue readingThirty-five years after: Subway (1985)
For the next episode of Paura & Delirio, the podcast I co-host with my friend Lucy, we’re going to discuss Nosferatu, both the Murnau original and the Werner Herzog remake. As we usually do for our podcast, we are re-watching the movies to freshen up out impressions.
And as I was watching the Herzog movie, I remembered I saw it first in late 1985 or early 1986, and I checked the movie out for one reason alone – it features Isabelle Adjani, that I had first seen a few weeks before in a completely different movie: Luc Besson’s stylish thriller, Subway.
And so I stopped Nosferatu, and dug out Subway – because while I’ve seen the Herzog movie quitre a few times since 1985, it’s been thirty-five years since I last went town in the underground with Isabelle Adjani.
Continue readingFilm Stories
My complete run of the first seven years of Ciak magazine, Italy’s premiere movie magazine, was scrapped while I was serving in the Air Farce – my mother decided all that useless paper was just a waste of space, and she threw it out. Granted, by that time I had stopped following the magazine, because I did not like the editorial approach anymore, but it was still a colossal loss for me: through that magazine I had started to look at the movies in a different way.
One of the reasons why Ciak was not cutting it anymore was, of course, that by the mid-90s I had started reading foreign movie magazines – Empire, Premiere, a few odd copies of Film Studies and Midnight Marquee, a couple of Fangoria, even a few issues of Cahiers du Cinema. Those were spared the Great Motherly Purge, because they were stacked in boxes and did not look like a bunch of magazines on a shelf.
Continue readingIt’s all fun and games until… – The Last of Sheila
The Last of Sheila is a 1973 mystery movie that I first saw somewhere in the early ’80s, during a long summer, and indeed, what’s better than a good chiller on a hot summer night?
Or in a cold winter night – and so I re-watched the movie last night, to see if it was as good as I remembered.
Well, mostly it was.
The basic premise: Sheila was killed in a hit-and-run accident. One year later, her husband reunites a number of friends on his yacht to play a game. How the game is connected to Sheila’s death is part of the mystery.
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Karavansara 