Despite the harsh criticism his last movies received by Italian critics, Dario Argento is still being given a coverage by Italian media, which are incoherently and blindly attacking his movies while praising him as a renowned master of horror. In their recent appearance on prime-time Italian television, Dario and Asia Argento just chatted and joked with their host, as Argento expressed some of his already known anger towards Italian directors and critics. But in an interview appeared yesterday on the Italian newspaper “Il Corriere della Sera”, Argento revealed some details about his upcoming movie, La terza madre (The Mother of Tears), the last chapter of the trilogy started by Suspiria and continued by Inferno.
Warning! Spoilers ahead.
Continue Reading "Dario Argento’s ‘La terza madre’ – News and Spoilers"...
Peplum films are almost totally left out from the recent revival of interest in Popular Italian Cinema. These movies were mostly marketed to teenagers, and they don’t have the appeal which makes actioners, thrillers and horrors so tasty nowadays. So, credit is due to Italian company Ripley’s Home Video for bringing to the DVD market some obscure but nonetheless interesting titles in the genre.
Goliath contro i giganti (Goliath Against the Giants in the states) is credited to Guido Malatesta. Actually, it was completed by Gianfranco Parolini (a.k.a. Frank Kramer), who directed most of the action scenes and is credited as artistic director. Stating Parolini’s own words, Malatesta was fired for asking the producers too much in order to build the scenery for a central naval scene. The movie is a co-production between the Spanish Procusa and the Italian Cineproduzioni Associate, as is the 1961 Sergio Leone’s Il Colosso di Rodi. Second unit direction is by Jorge Grau, who also worked as assistant director for Leone’s movie, and would later become a central figure in Spanish Horror.
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After a ten-year break, Giuliano Montaldo (Grand Slam, Sacco & Vanzetti, Time to kill) is going back behind the camera with a movie called St. Petersburg, about the last days in the life of Fedor Dostoevsky. The movie, budgeted at 7m euros, will start shooting at the beginning of 2007 and will be produced by Jean Vigo Italia and Rai Cinema. Curiously, Montaldo recently starred in Nanni Moretti’s Il Caimano (Italy, 2006) as an old master handling a lower-than-low budget movie about Cristoforo Colombo.
It ain’t little, but it’s quite strange. La sconosciuta (l.t. The Unknown Woman) is the surprisingly stunning new movie by Giuseppe Tornatore, known to international audiences mainly for Nuovo Cinema Paradiso, best foreign language movie at the 1988 Academy Awards. After directing Monica Bellucci in Malena in 2000, Tornatore dedicated himself completely to the big project on the Leningrad siege left behind by Sergio Leone after his death. La Sconosciuta marks a break from the overwhelming research work for the still-active project.
Continue Reading "Review for Giuseppe Tornatore’s ‘La Sconosciuta’ (Italy, 2006)."...
