Giuseppe Tornatore

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Dylan
Joined: Wed Nov 03, 2004 1:28 am

#26 Post by Dylan »

Free Translation of the above:
Awaiting a nomination to the Oscar, Tornatore films in his native Sicily

ANSA ROME.- Italian director Giuseppe Tornatore, Oscar winner for Best Foreign film, "Cinema Paradiso", and present 2008 Italian candidate for "La sconosciuta", today confirmed to have begun his "most personal" project in his native Sicily.

He discussed that the filming of "Baaria" will begin on Monday around Bagheria, the city near Palermo where he was born 51 years ago, and in Tunisia.

"It is a matter of a project that wanted to do inside ten years, but the producers, enthusiastic, they insisted so that did it now instead of 'Leningrad'", admitted Tornatore, known by being stingy at the moment of to speak of its projects, and a lot more when touches part of its biography.

Tornatore reported that the plot elapses between the decades of the 30 and from the 60 of last century, "with environments, suggestions and personages of my infancy and of some of the ones that I have known for the stories of my more elderly kin".

"But although they will be inspired in real people will be personages invented of a film choir that will include 200 actors, a few famous, and many not professional that will give greater realism to the history", added, completely cured of the injuries suffered when was assaulted in a Roman neighborhood, in September.

"Baaria" is one of the many names of its Bagheria native, by-product of the Arab and that remained in the local dialect, and Tornatore promises that besides the present emotion in all its movies "there will be also a lot of irony".

With this it film, Tornatore returns to the Sicily that launched it to the fame with "Cinema Paradiso".

"Me agreement that the great writer Leonardo Sciascia telephoned me after to have seen and told me, 'Peppuccio, continues doing movies on Sicily and you will not mistake never'", recalled the filmmaker, that recognizes not to have followed so al foot of the letter that counsel.

For the director "to film is a pleasure, but not one must think that when do not I film I am without doing nothing: all the contrary thing, always I am doing something, mounting a film or preparing it, thinking up hyphens and thinking about actors and places of filming".

"Baaria" is an Italian-French coproduction and the filming will last 15 weeks, the double one that a normal Italian movie.
Despite a beautiful score and nice camera work, I found "Sconosciuta" very disappointing and seriously doubt it will be nominated for an Oscar (especially since "Leggenda" and "Malena," his greatest films by a mile, weren't). With that said, as a filmmaker who has made some very good films over the years, I will always look forward to his next. "Baaria" sounds like a more personal project, which is always a good sign.
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kieslowski_67
Joined: Fri Jun 17, 2005 9:39 pm
Location: Gaithersburg, Maryland

La Sconosciuta

#27 Post by kieslowski_67 »

"La Sconosciuta" is one of the biggest surprises I had the whole year. Masterful direction, a wonderful story, a beautiful Morricone score, and a heatbreaking lead performance that was arguably the best lead female performance of 2006.
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Dylan
Joined: Wed Nov 03, 2004 1:28 am

La Sconosciuta

#28 Post by Dylan »

I personally found La Sconosciuta disappointing, certainly the weakest film he's made. As I said above and in the linked thread, it has a beautiful score and some nice camera work.
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rohmerin
Joined: Mon Aug 07, 2006 2:36 pm
Location: Spain

Re: Giuseppe Tornatore

#29 Post by rohmerin »

Baaria is a mess, it's a terrible long film. There's no script, only a sucesion of tableux vivants about the life of a boy -teen -man and how the small town becames a city in Sicily.

From Cabiria (1914) to Tre fratelli (1981), Tornatore tries to tell us the History of Italy, but he's not Bertolucci, or Taviani, Ettore Scola, Dino Risi or Giordana who were able to make a handful of masterpieces about History or portions of Italy during the 20th century.

There are tributes to a lot of Italian films. One sequence seems Novecento, another is the copy of Allonfasan, I cento passi, Baditi a Orgosolo, and so on ad nauseam: Hands over the city, I mostri, il mafioso (we see hoe Lattuada and Sordi filmed it in Baaria) but this is not the evocation of Ettore Scola about La docle vita in the middle of his masterpeice C'eravamo tanto amati.

He even includes a self tribute: echoes, costumes, characters from Cinema Paradiso or Malena came back.

Even the Morricone's soundtrack is deja vu. ](*,)

DEJA VU 100%
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Michael
Joined: Wed Nov 03, 2004 4:09 pm

Re: Giuseppe Tornatore

#30 Post by Michael »

I am also with you, rohmerin. Baaria is simply awful. Waste of time, very loooooong dry jack off on Tornatore's early success. Was it Italy's submission for Best Foreign Film last year?

Tornatore's cinematic magic has long dimmed.
Numero Trois
Joined: Sun Sep 20, 2009 9:23 am
Location: Florida

Re: Giuseppe Tornatore

#31 Post by Numero Trois »

I concur with everyone else, except more emphatically. La Sconosciuta is atrocious. I really don't know what the director was thinking with this one. It's not so much the white sex slave angle that's the problem. It's the mind numbing brutality he uses to reveal the plot threads as the film goes on. And you could drive a Hummer through the ending's plot holes. The film looks and feels exactly like your garden variety Hollywood thriller both in its incoherence and its empty technical slickness. All in all it's a blunt, stupid mess.
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rohmerin
Joined: Mon Aug 07, 2006 2:36 pm
Location: Spain

Re: Giuseppe Tornatore

#32 Post by rohmerin »

I have just seen my non legal print of The Best Offer that has been released today in Spain but the Italian have put the Blu Ray on the market one month ago without knowing that we, Spaniards and Chinese too, download all.

After winning all the David Di Donatello last week, and receiving his best reviews since... Yes, Clouzot and Hitchcock could have liked this thriller very much. Smart and original. But I prefer one thousand times La sconosciuta.
I have missed a more haunting Morricone's score.

Great, great, great Geoffrey Rush acting. The look of the film, very cold, very Central Europe, very Austro-Hungarian, mixing a lot of cities, Trieste for instance.

Trailer (that trailer tells so, so much)
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