News for
Bellissima (1951) More at IMDbPro »

ad feedback

4 items from 2012

1 May 2012 7:30 PM, PDT | JustPressPlay.net | See recent JustPressPlay news »

Anna Magnani (The Rose Tattoo) yells, bellows, rambles, fights, and connives through the entirety of Luchino Visconti's neo-realist classic Bellissima, rarely if ever stopping to catch her breath. This alone would be something to watch, but she somehow manages in all that bellowing to be engaging and downright heartbreaking at moments. We should despise Maddalena Cecconi (Magnani), a stage mother desperate to give her too-young daughter opportunities that might have been withheld from her. And yet Magnani is such a large personality that no matter how bad she gets she's still a human being.

Cecconi is a singer and actress living in a loud, bustling tenement house in Rome with her husband, Spartaco (Gastone Renzelli) and five-year-old daughter Maria (Kewpie-doll-faced Tina Apicella). A break comes in the form of an open casting call for seven- and eight-year-old girls with a famous director in town.

Read more...

»

- David M. DeLeon

1 April 2012 11:48 PM, PDT | Alt Film Guide | See recent Alt Film Guide news »

Colin Firth, Meryl Streep Colin Firth tells Meryl Streep he should have been cast as Margaret Thatcher in Phyllida Lloyd's The Iron Lady, for he's British and Streep is not. Streep responds by telling him she can play any nationality, including Italian. As proof, she incarnates Anna Magnani in Bellissima. Well, something like that went on backstage at the 2012 Academy Awards ceremony. (Photo: Bryan Crowe / ©A.M.P.A.S.) Meryl Streep's Best Actress Oscar for The Iron Lady was her third. Streep's previous two Oscars were as Best Supporting Actress for Robert Benton's Kramer vs. Kramer (1979), featuring Dustin Hoffman, Jane Alexander, and Justin Henry; and as Best Actress for Alan J. Pakula's Sophie's Choice (1982), with Kevin Kline and Peter MacNicol. Only three other performers have won three Academy Awards: Walter Brennan as Best Supporting Actor for Howard Hawks and William Wyler's Come and Get It »

- Andre Soares

6 March 2012 9:50 PM, PST | The Hollywood Interview | See recent The Hollywood Interview news »

DVD Playhouse—March 2012

By Allen Gardner

J. Edgar (Warner Bros.) Director Clint Eastwood provides a rock-solid, albeit rather flat portrait of polarizing FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, covering his life from late teens to his death. Leonardo DiCaprio does an impressive turn as Hoover, never crossing the line into caricature, and creating a Hoover that is all too human, making for an all the more unsettling look at absolute power run amuck. Where the film stumbles is the love story at its core: Hoover’s relationship with longtime aide Clyde Tolson (Armie Hammer). In the hands of an openly-gay director like Gus Van Sant, this could have been a heartbreaking, tender story of forbidden (unrequited?) love, but Eastwood seems to tiptoe around their romance, with far too much delicacy and deference. The film works well when recreating the famous crimes and investigations which Hoover made his name on (the Lindbergh kidnapping, »

- The Hollywood Interview.com

14 February 2012 2:48 PM, PST | Alt Film Guide | See recent Alt Film Guide news »

Anna Magnani in (what looks like) Luchino Visconti's Bellissima At the end of Giuseppe Tornatore's Best Foreign Language Film Oscar winner Cinema Paradiso, small-town projectionist Philippe Noiret has died and the Nuovo Cinema Paradiso has become a pile of rubble. The bratty Italian boy Salvatore Cascio has grown into the classy Frenchman Jacques Perrin (like Noiret, dubbed in Italian), a filmmaker who sits to watch a mysterious reel of film the deceased projectionist had left him. It turns out the reel contains clips from films censored by the prudish local parish priest, whose family values found kisses, embraces, and bare breasts and legs a danger to society. Now, who's doing all that kissing, embracing, and breast/leg-displaying in that film reel? (Please scroll down for the Cinema Paradiso clip.) Here are the ones I recognize: Silvana Mangano and Vittorio Gassman in Giuseppe De Santis' Bitter Rice (1949); Mangano »

- Andre Soares

4 items from 2012