fusillo

Merry Christmas, unbeliever. :-)

Baiubadu......... Baiubadu........ Baiubadu....... Baiubadu....... etc...

Isis, be careful because Fausto is going to get angry...

The palastorchester is an orchestra that showcases material from European and American authors of the twenties and thirties. I saw them in concert a couple of years ago and, how can I put it, they rock... Max Raabe and his companions are also real goofballs, as they demonstrate live in various ways and on record with their two Super Hits (successful commercial ventures...). Their version of "Sex Bomb" is a blast... But the best comes when they play Porter, Gershwin, Weill, Stolz, etc... Oh, and don’t you dare repeat the things you said about Max's voice. :-)

A little curiosity: Hunter S. Thompson's funeral was quite bizarre. According to his last wishes, his body was cremated and the ashes shot into the air from a special cannon... The whole event took place during a ceremony attended by various figures, including the writer's family and friends, many hell's Angels, and Johnny Depp. The latter filmed a documentary, the title of which I don't remember, and which was shown during the 2007 edition of the festivaletteratura in MN... I had promised myself to go see it, but various commitments prevented me from doing so... Who knows, maybe it can be found in some corner of the web...

On "the best youth": it is certainly the story of a family, or rather the story of those kids. Giordana decided to make a film with Luigi Lo Cascio, Alessio Boni, and Fabrizio Gifuni after seeing how those three, who had also lived together in an apartment in Rome, celebrated the David di Donatello awarded to Lo Cascio for "I cento passi." And for me, their camaraderie (let's not forget Claudio Gioè, Jasmine Trinca, Adriana Asti, and all the others including Scamarcio :-)) is the most beautiful thing about the film. The History is there, but it remains in the background. Telling almost forty years of history, with all its intricacies, in the six hours of a fiction whose protagonists are more or less normal kids honestly seems like an exaggerated claim...

I really liked the film when I saw it in the theater, a bit less when I watched it again on DVD... I don't see the rhetoric, though... Vortex, you talk about the folly, real or presumed, of Peppino Impastato: well, someone who fights without weapons, only with his words and satire against Gaetano Badalamenti, can be considered quite safely an irresponsible person... Moreover, if you consider his ideas and then his family background, you realize that, although he wasn’t exactly a nobody, Peppino was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Did he realize what he was doing? I don’t know, he certainly knew what he was getting into... And in the film, all of this is visible... Was he a "hero without blemish and without fear," or was he just consistently faithful to his beliefs? But look, Peppino lived off the pizzeria set up by his mafioso father with Badalamenti's money... And even when he moved out, you can guess that it was his mother who handed him the "piccioli"... Maybe he should have found a job. :-) By the way, the scene where Peppino (the hero) and his brother (the one who pulls the cart) have a heated discussion about this very issue is great... Manichaeism? I don't think so... Lastly, Vortex, even the little story you tell can be applied to "I cento passi": assuming Peppino wanted to become a "people's leader" (and frankly, I don't think so...) the citizens of Cinisi, excluding his friends, were not really on his side, at most they listened to him on the radio... Yes, okay, by the end of the film everyone follows his coffin in a procession, but with a dead person it’s easy... And perhaps he, Peppino, would have gladly exchanged his coffin for a cage... In short, Vortex, either I haven’t understood well what you mean, or your criticism is a bit uncharitable.

Well done! Cute "parachute"...