MAKSQUIBS CINEMATHEQUE: TALES OF TALES / IL RACCONTO DEI RACCONTI (2015)

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(Hint: most of the posters will enlarge if you click on them.)

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Like just about everyone with an interest in the movies, I'm watching more films on DVD and going out to movie houses a lot less. Convenience trumps the better experience.
Of course, you lose audience interaction and the poor film now has to compete with all the comforts of home.
It's a bit like seeing Rembrandts & Titians in a book reproduction, or from posters with iffy color values, no texture or weight to the surface and the wrong dimensions . . . all while snacking on chips & soda. (Oops! You get that at your local cinema,too.)
The ease of instant movie gratification risks turning an art form (well, sometimes) into little more than low-grade eye-candy & mindfodder. So, maybe it's worthwhile to write a bit down on what we're all viewing, just to keep fully engaged.

DVDs: the latest opiate of the people meets the internet, where everyone's a critic.
God help us.

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Monday, November 6, 2017

TALES OF TALES / IL RACCONTO DEI RACCONTI (2015)

As cruel & grotesque as any Brothers Grimm, Italian writer/director Matteo Garrone (GOMORRAH/’08) took a huge risk adapting three fables of 17th Century fabulist Giambattista Basile along the lines of a 1980s Taviani Bros pic, but technically up-to-date/well-budgeted. Our Tales: Toby Jones, an absent-minded King with an obscenely large pet flea, marries his daughter off to an ogre in a contest gone wrong; her only hope of escape a band of traveling acrobats. Vincent Cassel, a sex-obsessed King who won’t rest till he beds the mysterious lady with the loveliest voice in his land, unaware the singer & her sister are old crones. And when post-coital savagery transforms the old girl into a young beauty, the sister left behind grows unhinged. Enough to ruin the magical deception? Then there’s John C. Reilly & Salma Hayek, childless rulers who slay a sea monster to gain fertility at great personal cost; with an added story element straight out of The Prince & The Pauper. Fascinating, gruesome, gorgeous, it takes Garrone a reel or two to find his form, tone & working rhythm. (Or is it the viewer adjusting to the deep end of the pool?) But the film only grows stronger & more confident, gathering steam as it organizes its many elements. At first, the decision to intercut three stories as narrative fugue, rather than play consecutively, seems a misstep, but quickly starts to pay off, adding refreshing variety between darkness & light/comedy & romance; and lending unexpected emotion to a finale that’s moving, justly earned & satisfyingly inexplicable. Technically the film is a gem, in design & detail as much as effects, deservedly all but sweeping the 2016 David di Donatello Awards. (The great lenser Peter Suschitzky seems to have retired with it.) And might also have picked up Best Pic had it not flopped in such spectacular fashion.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Apparently cast & shot with the English-language market in mind, the film was then barely released Stateside and seems to have even bombed in Italy, immediately positioning it as one of those classic Movie Folly Projects (think METROPOLIS/’27; INTOLERANCE/’16; LOLA MONTÈS/’55) that take decades to be properly acclaimed.

DOUBLE-BILL: TALE is precisely the film Pier Paolo Pasolini didn’t have the filmmaking chops to bring off in his DECAMERON/’71; CANTERBURY TALES/’72; ARABIAN NIGHTS/’74 trilogy.

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Monday, November 6, 2017

TALES OF TALES / IL RACCONTO DEI RACCONTI (2015)

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