February 19, 2005  

Barile

My great-grandparents came to America in 1903 from a small town called Barile in the region of Basilicata, Italy — basically the “instep” of the boot. I’ve visited Basilicata twice — more on that in an upcoming series of posts — and, though it has made much progress in the last ten years, I often find myself calling it the West Virginia of Italy. Rustic and mostly arid, many of the towns in the region are built on top of or straight out from sassi, the caves carved into soft rock that have formed the homes of inhabitants since well before Roman settlement of the peninsula.

Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ was shot mainly in Matera, Basilicata, the town with the most striking sassi in the region. Shortly after seeing The Passion I learned that Gibson was merely following the Italian filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini in shooting a life of Christ in the region. In 1964, Pasolini released Il Vangelo secondo Matteo, a cinema vérité treatment of the gospel of Matthew using non-actors from Basilicata. I’ve read that Italian audiences actually demanded subtitles because the Albanian dialect of the “actors” was too difficult to understand. There’s absolutely no dramatic flourish in the film (a path Gibson diverged from in minute one of his film). This is Christ-as-peasant-among-peasants, seen from ground level. Call it Reality Hagiography.

The sassi of Barile form the backdrop of the “slaughter of the innocents” scene. It is hard not to laugh at the centurions as they scamper up and down the hillside slashing at mothers and babies (some of whom fly out of embraces a little too easily). The film is likely to irritate modern viewing sensibilities for one reason or another, especially since the English dubbing is just awful. But I applaud the effort in the context of when and where it was made. If you’re going to shoot Christ as a man of humble origin you’ll not err in choosing Barile as a home town.

Compare the shot from the film above to a panorama of the same caves, now private wine cellars, taken last year.

January 25, 2005  

Zombie comedy

Some people with whom I’ve shared my Netflix queue using the new Friends feature think I watch too much horror. True, some of the worst movies I’ve rented fall into this category. Maybe that’s what makes Shaun of the Dead such a great movie. On the surface this British “romantic comedy with zombies” is just a parody of the undead-run-amok flick. But also in way it is a double-parody, implicitly mocking the now-established horror parody subgenre (think Scream and its offspring).

The movie is simply hilarious. A scene where Shaun argues with his slackass friend about which of his vinyl record collection they should fling at approaching zombies approaches perfection. And you just know the whole time that the final stand against the hordes will happen at the local pub.
Describing zombie behavior, one of the characters notes that they are “Vacant, with a hint of sadness. Like a drunk who’s lost a bet.” This parallel between the modern slacker and the classic revenant runs throughout the film and provides seemingly endless fodder for joke-making.

OK, back to the crappy horror in my queue …

January 4, 2005  

Lamerica

Netflix finally got Lamerica, a film I’d been hunting for a while. This is a wonderful movie about two Italian carpetbaggers who come to Albania shortly after the fall of Communism and attempt to set up a fraudulent business. Well, that’s the plot anyway. What it is about is the way Italy has become a symbol of hope for the destitute Albanians, their own “America” across the western sea. It is an allegory of Italian fantasies about coming to the USA so many generations before. And it is a beautiful one at that.

December 5, 2004  

Donnie Darko

I’m late to the game on this, but no matter. Donnie Darko is the best film I’ve seen all year. I can’t remember the last time a DVD finished and I immediately jumped to the menu to play it again. (My normal post-movie routine is to visit IMDB to read the trivia on the flick.) Re-viewing is almost built into the movie itself. The dramatic fulcrum of Donnie Darko is the title character’s reaction to knowing how things will turn out before he should know. Donnie Darko is richly rewarding, bitingly funny at times (Patrick Swayze is absolutely superb), and even frightening. Apparently the director, Richard Kelly, was 26 when the movie, his first, was released in 2001. Goodness gracious.

Time travel, a creepy man-bunny, Michael Dukakis. It’s all there. Rent this movie.

Newer Posts »