Reviews

"Colpo grosso", Italian for "big shot", brought strip-tease to Italian television. It was a game show, but the quizzes were mostly the occasion for comedic relief by host Umberto Smaila - a well-know face in the Eighties, formerly a member of the cabaret group "I gatti di vicolo Miracoli". Naturally, the "main course" of the show were the exhibitions of the strippers. A bunch of pretty ladies from all over Europe, called "ragazze Cin Cin" ("cheers" girls), or "Bandierine" ("small flag" girls) or by other funny names, danced to the music unveiling their breasts. They took off all their clothes except for underpants and stockings, generally. The cheerful ladies also sang songs, chatted with the host and took part in some quizzes as contestants. Normal contestants, including lads, had to dance and strip too, in order to gain points for the game, but it was a mild type of strip-tease, they kept their underpants on. The whole thing was indeed silly and not exactly family friendly, but it was somewhat entertaining, yes... erotic, but more "for laughs" than sleazy. Think of a burlesque show or of wet T-shirt contest being televised in a late evening show, sort of.

Although originally aired on a minor network, the Italia7 syndication, "Colpo grosso" soon became quite popular and around 1,000 installments of the show were produced in five years. For better or for worse, it was groundbreaking. Like it or not, it was a landmark of Italian television in the late Eighties.

The Shining is a psychological thriller about a man going insane in a remote grand hotel in the Rocky Mountains that is closed during the snow-ridden season. Jack (Jack Nicholson), an ex teacher and aspiring writer with a past of alcohol and domestic violence, gets a job as winter caretaker and moves to the soon to be empty hotel together with his wife Wendy and their child Danny. The plan is that he is going to have plenty of spare time to write his novel, which will show to the world he is not a looser after all. It won't take long before Jack's psychotic tendencies will show up, and the imposing solitary place will act as a haunted house on his hallucinating mind. Masterfully filmed by Stanley Kubrick. Don't expect a "scary movie".

As a kid I was an avid reader of Spiderman's stories, but as an adult I am less easily satisfied. "Homecoming" did not strike me as a masterpiece. After a while it was frankly boring. I don't mind the actors, they are generally good. It must be said though that the plot is pretty thin, the Baddie is laughable, and the scenes with young Peter Parker's friends at school make me think of a Disney channel series. Anyway I'm sure that the younger audience and hard-core fans will appreciate this movie. Even some film critics enjoyed it, thus I must be wrong.

Don't trust the ratings. This a fine movie with some good acting performances by a bunch of good actors and a fast paced plot that kept me glued to the screen. It has the tension of a legal thriller with some limited action scenes. The psychologies of the characters are interesting too, not just good or evil puppets, they don't always behave as you might expect in the beginning. This well crafted movie made me care for the main character and his family, a smart young lawyer that has all he wished for but suddenly finds himself between a rock (the Mob which he by the way represents as a lawyer) and a hard place (the FBI). The story has some dramatic moments yet there is a fundamentally optimistic mood, you never doubt there is going to be a happy ending as Hollywood prescribes.

I am not usually fond of special effects and this is not the kind of movie I would have deliberately chosen to watch, but I happened to run into Alita while zapping and immediately fell in love with her character. A deadly android and a very real teen at the same time, in a violent world where humans become cyborgs and cyborgs are endowed of human emotions. The plot spins around her and is not terribly original, having stolen ideas from classic sci-fi stories like Rollerball, Blade Runner and more, with the addition of a good deal of robot fighting, yet the mix is generally entertaining.

It's an exercise of style, and not in the best way. I quite liked how it starts, the magic of black and white, the feeling of an old noir film. But the plot is a giant hole, neither thrilling nor funny while it tries to be both, and the chemistry between the lead characters is just not there. Soon all the magic fades and you realize that you don't really care for the fate of those on screen, who did it, who loves whom, whatever. In a few scenes I appreciated the touch of the old master, Truffaut, but in the whole the movie felt artificial and uninteresting.

Why didn't they do a handwriting survey to find the killer? This omission made the story less credible. Yet, the characters are generally likeable.

I watched quite a few episodes of this lighthearted procedural drama so far. Some were great, some just good, but the show is entertaining as a whole. The premises make you think about the U.S. judicial system: with the assistance of an expert like Dr. Jason Bull (Michael Weatherly), a psychologist who masters the art and science of trial analysis, a lawyer could win almost any case as long as they pick the right jurors and press the right keys inside jurors' minds. Dr. Bull's clients are usually innocent, but you can't help thinking about the fact that the same technique would work with the guilty too, and possibly let them game the system, if they can pay for the service. That's interesting and disturbing at the same time. Dr. Bull does not work alone: he owns a consulting firm by the name of TAC - Trial Analysis Corporation, each of his employees providing a different skill that helps win the case. While each episode is self-contained, episode after episode we learn more about Bull and his team, who they are and what makes them unique, with personal subplots going on along several episodes. I must say I love Michael Weatherly in this show but I never was a NCIS fan, not my cup of tea.

I am not a huge videogame player, but I loved the original Doom and other id titles. So I was curious about this picture with some obvious references to the classic DOS game. Sadly, the movie is nearly B-rate science fiction, and it doesn't have the thrill and the pace of the game either. Actually it doesn't even feel like Doom. Mission failed, Sarge!

The opening scene with Amy Poehler is hilarious. Also, the relationship between the Ellis sisters, two women in their forties trying to get their act together, and between them and their parents, is promising at start. The two sisters are very different from each other, yet there is chemistry between them. But then, the movie gets dumb and dumber. The long "Ellis Island Revamped" party scene reminded me of an American Pie installment, with adults instead of teenagers. The picture has its moments, but for the most part it's embarrassingly unfunny. Like other reviewers noticed, Amy Poehler and Tina Fey can be better than this.

This picture is about two families living in an "ideal" small town in the Fifties, Suburbicon. The main plot, about the white family, is a dark comedy that has its moments. The subplot about their neighbors, a black family ostracized by the white community, makes a valid point about racial discrimination but is sort of stereotyped. All in all, not a cinematic masterpiece yet not so bad as they review it.

I watched a few episodes with Superintendent Larosière and the young Inspector Lampion, set in the Thirties , and some other episodes featuring Commissaire Swan Laurence and reporter AliceAvril in the Fifties. All of them bring a fresh approach to Agata Christie's stories, a touch of comedy and a glance at the society of the time, but let me say that the earlier episodes are far more intriguing than the later ones. My rating for this series would have been a 8 or even 9 for the Larosière and Lampion duo, but a 6 for Laurence and Avril. This series definitely makes a case for having per-season ratings for TV shows on IMDb.

Four words for this movie based on an Italian XVII century collection of fairy tales ("Lo cunto de li cunti" by Giovan Battista Basile).

Beautiful: the photography, locations, costumes, music, special effects, some of the acting.

Unusual: not your average fantasy movie. Like other reviewers noticed, it tries hard to be unique. Not always in a positive way, though.

Pointless: The first story's plot is intriguing, but the other two intertwined story lines are weaker. The combined result, ultimately, is confusing and annoying at times.

Disturbing: the gore scenes made us (girlfriend and me) leave the theater before the end. Sorry, not our cup of tea.

All in all, I would not recommend it, but if you don't mind disgusting scenes and you like slow-paced, puzzling, visionary stories, you might enjoy it.

Mix a cup of Sherlock Holmes with a quarter of James Bond, add plenty of low budget adventures, some comedy gags, a pinch of romance, the language and the attire from the Thirties, shake well, and you'll have Bulldog Drummond: a bunch of pre-war B-movies, if you will, yet with some intriguing elements and entertaining moments. "Bulldog Drummond Escapes" is one of the three "Bulldog Drummond" productions of 1937, and one of the high points in the series in my view.

A few words about Captain Hugh "Bulldog" Drummond for those who do not know him yet: charming and gentlemanly, but a man of action when needed, he is a former WWI British officer who spends his spare time helping Scotland Yard solve intricate cases. "Bulldog" is accompanied by deadpan, witty and vaguely surreal butler Tenny (my favourite character) and by useless, dumb friend Algy (a downer, usually unfunny), and is constantly on the verge of marrying his fiancée Phyllis (adventures will happen and delay the marriage, naturally). All these fictional characters were created by "Sapper", nom de plume of Herman Cyril McNeile, and continued by Gerard Fairlie after McNeile's death -their novels inspired more than twenty motion pictures, many of them in the Thirties.

Similarly to Sherlock Holmes and James Bond, the Bulldog Drummond title hero has been played, over time, by several actors, who gave a different flavour to each episode. In this instalment of the series, which tells of Captain Drummond trying to save a beautiful heiress in distress (played by Heather Angel), the leading man is Ray Milland, a young, bright British actor -a few years later, he won an Academy Award for Best Actor in Billy Wilder's "The Best Weekend". Ray Milland's Bulldog Drummond is charming and funnily flamboyant, but not as clever as he is supposed to be, so the mystery often steers to lighter tones and to comedy.

The result, however, is fast paced and involving, while the unfunny gags are kept to a minimum. "Bulldog Drummond Escapes" is no cinematic masterpiece, but it is enjoyable if you like the genre and if you concede to stereotyped characters and some holes in the plot.

Like other movies from that age, this old flick shows the signs of time, such as scratchy sound and random vertical lines. On the other hand, it is in the public domain, so you can watch it for free on the Internet, if you want.

"Flickan som lekte med elden" ("The Girl Who Played with Fire") is the second instalment in the cinematic version of the "Millennium" trilogy, the best-selling triplet of novels by Swedish author Stieg Larsson. It is an above-average sequel and an entertaining thriller, dominated by its female lead character, the tiny and troubled, yet skilled and resolute, hacker Lisbeth Salander, played by untypical Swedish actress Noomi Rapace. However, it is not as good as the first chapter of the saga, "Män som hatar kvinnor" (literally "Men Who Hate Women", but released to English speaking audiences as "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo"). The second episode, a must-see if you enjoyed the first one, tells more about Lisbeth's childhood and unveils her intricate relations with some horrible men who really do hate and abuse women. No wonder she, as an adult, fancies other women, as explicitly shown in a girl-on-girl scene. The story gets going when Lisbeth is charged by the police with three gruesome murders. Her friend, journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist), who is investigating international women trafficking in Sweden, tries to help her follow the track to the real authors of the killings, only to find out that... Enough said! Unfortunately, "The Girl Who Played with Fire" is not in the same league of "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo". The story in the sequel is not as fresh and intriguing; there are too many odd coincidences, unexplained events, and secondary characters not as deep as they should be. At times, it seems a brilliant "made for television" product rather than a motion picture for the theatres. I was not at all surprised to find out that indeed it was made for television, in the form of two episodes of 90 minutes each, later unified to a 129 runtime to hit the big screen rather than the little one. The extended cuts may account for some awkward turns in the plot, which were probably better explained in the uncut version and in the book. In the end, an enjoyable movie which could have been better, probably, had it been intended as a feature film from the beginning, thus not needing about an hour of the original footage to be taken out. My vote: 6.5 out of 10.

If "Reines d'un jour" (literally "Queens for a Day", also known as "A Hell of a Day"), were a good film, it might perhaps be renamed as "French Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown".

It tells of a day in the lives of four ordinary people living in Paris, whose stories run parallel and who casually meet and interact. In particular, it is about women obsessed by their complicated relationships with men, and who have a hard time finding love, happiness, or at least safe sex without unplanned consequences, either in marriage or in adultery!

Unfortunately, "Reines d'un jour" is not a good film. Do not believe the favorable reviews; it is a boring, clueless, bad film. It annoys viewers with poorly written dialogs, uninteresting characters, and unfunny attempts at irony.

To be fair, there are a few (not many) almost enjoyable moments, and some of the subplots have the potential to make a good story, perhaps, in other hands. However, even the catchy ideas are not developed properly, and the film never takes off. In the end, there is only disappointment left. It could have been fun, but it was not.

Some of the actors, such as Karin Viard, who plays Hortense, are not inexperienced. I guess they might be good in other movies. Too bad their performance is rather wasted in this inconclusive French production. As for the "magic" of Paris, with its usually beautiful scenery of the River Seine and so on, in this movie there is too little of it even to make a nice Paris "postcard".

In conclusion, even if you are searching for a silly yet entertaining date-flick about the follies of love in modern times, do not waste your money or your time with this dull movie, because of its absolute lack of wit, humour, or real feelings. My vote is 3 out of 10, but my girlfriend, who saw the film with me, gave it a 2.