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m_montana wrote: Thu Mar 11, 2021 2:34 am A page for De Sica's Miracle In Milan has been up for days now.
Arrow Video's 2015 BD is a merely HD (1080p) release. The film had a 4K restoration by Cineteca di Bologna and was presented in Cannes Classics in 2019. And that's what Criterion is getting

domino harvey wrote: Sun Jun 18, 2017 5:25 am Miracolo a Milano (Vittorio de Sica 1951) De Sica moves from realistic portrayals of the lives of the destitute to an unexpectedly comic fantasy involving a cabbage-patch kid who exits the orphanage and enters a shantytown, quickly becoming a focal figure for all the cheery poor folk within even before a magic dove comes into play. The film is entertaining and embraces its fantastic elements in the final third with admirable gusto, but that only means this is a well-made bad film centered on a thinly-veiled superiority to these people that is all the more surprising coming from the so-called champion of the poor in Italian cinema.

I refute absolutely the notion that this film exhibits anything but contempt for the homeless characters which populate the narrative. Everyone here just looooooves being poor. It’s the greatest! You don’t have to do anything but beg, and you even get paid by a chocolatier for that too! Otherwise, work is a foreign concept and far from the minds of these empty-headed dolts who want nothing more than to celebrate squalor, sometimes in song. The displaced persons in this film are all cheerful simpletons, who, when presented with the opportunity to obtain anything via magical intervention, choose token symbols of the upper class (a fur coat, a top hat) rather than anything that would further their advancement out of this blissful state of ignorance (no one asks for a job or skills to obtain one). Are their newfound accoutrements comically contrasted with their surroundings and socioeconomic position? You know it, dude. Most of the gags in the film are at the expense of these flamboyant transients— they’re so wacky, the film keeps insisting! What a jolly sort these poors are!

The single worst moment in this film (and in any film I’ve seen in some time) comes when two peripheral characters, a widowed white woman and what I presume is an AWOL African-American soldier, who have been giving each other sad side-glances for most of the picture, have their fondest wishes granted in a fashion that gives O Henry retrospective charity. This sequence is offensive not for its racially-predicated make-up and punchline, but because it uses two non-jubilant characters solely to set up a mean-spirited and cruel joke at their expense, and both then disappear from the film once they’ve served this function. I guess if you’re not having the time of your life living in mud and filth, you deserve to get fucked over by a dove-clutching elf. After this, I wish I could say I was surprised that our protagonist’s solution to the central narrative problem of the film is to enact a suicide pact with all of the denizens of the camp, but that sounded about right. And the characters are of course gleefully cheerful as they Heaven’s Gate it up to the afterlife!

FrauBlucher wrote: Wed Jan 19, 2022 8:26 pmAnd then the characters that whimsically have their races switched was nothing for me but cringeworthy. What was the purpose?

domino harvey wrote: Thu Aug 19, 2021 5:54 am Do you think all the stars who signed on for Il giudizio universale realized they would be dubbed into Italian singing en masse a song to a black baby about how he's actually so beautiful that now he's white, or appearing in a movie in which one of the "jokes" is a sketchy adoption peddler trying to convince a young boy to go with him to be sent to American parents by lamenting that if the Italian boy won't go they'll have to send black children because "they're cheaper" and then promising the boy that he'll live in a house with a black servant, which he then illustrates by showing the child a photo of a monkey?

m_montana wrote: Thu Mar 11, 2021 2:34 am Miracle in Milan



Renowned filmmaker Vittorio De Sica followed up his international triumph Bicycle Thieves with this enchantingly playful neorealist fairy tale, in which he combines his celebrated slice-of-life poetry with flights of graceful comedy and storybook fantasy. On the outskirts of Milan, a band of vagabonds work together to form a shantytown. When it is discovered that the land they occupy contains oil, however, it's up to the cherubic orphan Totò (Francesco Golisano)—with some divine help—to save their community from greedy developers. Tipping their hats to the imaginative whimsy of Charles Chaplin and René Clair, De Sica and screenwriter Cesare Zavattini, adapting his own novel, craft a bighearted ode to the nobility of everyday people.

SPECIAL FEATURES

• New 4K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
• New interview with neorealism expert and film scholar David Forgacs
• Audio interview from the late 1960s in which director Vittorio De Sica looks back on his career, conducted by film critic Gideon Bachmann
• Interviews with actor Brunella Bovo and Manuel De Sica, the director's son
• Feature-length documentary from 2019 on screenwriter Cesare Zavattini
• Trailers
• New English subtitle translation
• PLUS: An essay by film critic Christina Newland and, on the Blu-ray, "Totò il buono," a 1940 short story by Zavattini and stage actor Totò that is the earliest version of the narrative on which Miracle in Milan is based