Change Your Image
dpernice
Reviews
La prima cosa bella (2010)
Widely disappointing
Having gone through most of Virzi's movies, I thought I was about to see a nice and elegant comedy as previously seen in "My name is Tanino" or "Caterina goes to the city". Instead, the film is drama lacking any type of perspective beyond the elementary and stereotyped Italian postcard of a '70s middle-class family. Characters are so much stereotyped that by the end of the movie I was feeling nosed. The plot is poor and predictable, and apart from the second husband, the other actors are simply unfitted. I'm afraid that Virzi wanted to assert new directing ambitions, but that these have finished to be widely disappointing. 3 for the effort, but subject, plot, direction and acting are a mess to a point that we ended up laughing at the scene of the mother's death.
The Tree of Life (2011)
Over-evaluated. The soundtrack's main theme is controversial
The title has been announced with all the fuzz one might think of, and it gained a wide support at Cannes. Still, it is a deception for it assembles sketches and fine images in the context of a movie lacking any plot. It is not an original artistic provocation, since attempts of this kind are far from new in twentieth century's European movie productions. It is not a purely pictorial movie, for it presumes to tell a story and not provide only images and sensations. And it describes the most obvious relation of conflict involving every human being on earth: the relationship between a son and a father. Their interaction is represented in the form of a patchwork of images and rather vague emotions (the kitsch music is sometimes tiring), and of course the atmosphere of 1950's mid-West US is a fine pictorial guarantee, but at the end it is largely deceptive. I was shocked to hear the soundtrack's main title, the one you can hear also in the movie trailer. Can somebody explain why they decided to put the Israeli national anthem (hatikvah) as the main title?? Although formally original, the main title is directly and integrally taken from the national anthem of Israel (try to compare them: they're just the same). That is surely a beautiful anthem, but still I don't see the connection.