italian – Page 2 – PopCult Reviews

Movie Review – The Gospel According to St. Matthew

The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964)
Written and directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini

It may seem like an incredibly odd match. A queer, atheist, communist Italian man making a film about the life of Christ. Even more bizarre, it was In an effort to find relevance in the landscape of the post-war world, Pope John XXIII had asked for an audience with contemporary non-Catholic artists. Pasolini had been raised in the Church and accepted the invitation, knowing so much of his identity clashed with the institution. The meeting occurred in Assisi, and the subsequent traffic jam caused by the Pope’s presence in town left the filmmaker stuck in his hotel longer than he had expected. Pasolini claims he paged through a Bible in the hotel room, reading through each of the Gospels and settling on Matthew as the perfect one for the film he had in mind. His opinion was that the three other Gospels embellished or lacked a clear perspective on Christ; Matthew’s gospel was the most human.

Movie Review – Mamma Roma

Mamma Roma (1962)
Written and directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini

Pasolini’s work stands out from his Italian peers of the era. He’s completely caught up in doing his own thing, making movies with a particular style nobody else brought to the table then. While his first few films, like this one and Accattone, are set contemporaneously, the filmmaker would quickly lose interest in that and dive deeper into the past through classic stories that shaped the world he was born into. Pasolini also held peasants in high regard, even though, as a gay man, he was often the subject of hate from them. That hate, of course, was stoked by the remnants of Italian fascism & generations of patriarchy that lie dormant until their more recent return to prominence (see Italy’s current fascist PM). Mamma Roma is a story of a peasant rising from her “lowly” beginnings to finally have a peaceful, more secure life, only to deal with challenge after challenge.

Movie Review – Accattone

Accattone (1961)
Written and directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini

Pier Paolo Pasolini was born in Bologna, Italy, in 1925. His mother was a primary school teacher, and his father was a lieutenant in the Royal Italian Army. A year later, Pasolini’s father was arrested for gambling debts, and his mother moved in with her family. In time, Pasolini’s father would embrace Italian fascism.

Movie Review – Salo, or The 120 Days of Sodom

Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975)
Written by Sergio Citti
Directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini

His body was nearly unrecognizable when it was found on a beach in Ostia, near the edges of Rome. Pier Paolo Pasolini had been savagely beaten and run over multiple times with his own car. Additionally, the director had his genitals crushed with a metal bar and had been doused in gasoline and set ablaze. He was 53 years old when his life was taken. He hadn’t started making movies until he was 35, having helped write dialogue for Federico Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria. Fellini brought him back for the La Dolce Vita script. Before films, Pasolini was known as a poet & a painter, both finding a potent presence in his cinematic work. His murder appeared to have been part of an extortion attempt by the mafia, stealing reels of Salo and demanding large sums of money in return. There was certainly hate behind it, too.

PopCult Podcast – Totem/La Chimera

These were two fantastic films made by two fantastic directing women. The first is an intimate study of a life changing day in a little girl’s life. The second is the mythic journey taken by a rogue British archaeologist in Italy.

Movie Review – The Conformist

The Conformist (1970)
Written and directed by Bernardo Bertolucci

Time and again, people in the States seem to conflate fascism with iconography. Yes, that is undoubtedly a piece of the ideology, but its believers are clever enough to know that continuing to wear swastikas and black leather while goosestepping isn’t going to sow seeds anymore. The danger of fascism is how much like the mundane & ordinary it can appear. This is where “I was just following orders” emerges from. You can be a mild-mannered civil servant, just signing the papers across your desk and filing them correctly. Nothing wrong with that, right? If those papers are in connection to greenlighting death camps or murdering political dissidents, then it doesn’t seem like you are “just doing your job.” You are carrying water for a type of thought that seeks to annihilate every last atom of humanity in us.

Movie Review – Intervista

Intervista (1987)
Written by Federico Fellini and Gianfranco Angelucci
Directed by Federico Fellini

When you think of Federico Fellini and movies about movies, you probably think of 8 ½, and rightly so. It’s one of the best movies ever made and the best movie about a movie ever made. However, I already reviewed it when I did a series on the iconic Italian director in 2022. When I discovered this late-career picture, I put it in this series instead. Intervista was Fellini’s second to last film, and like most artists in old age, as they grappled with their mortality, he returned to his memories. This wasn’t new for Fellini; nostalgia has always played a significant role in his work. 8 ½‘s beautiful dream/memory sequences of Guido’s and the reflections of childhood presented in Amarcord are some of the strongest examples of this in his films. Intervista is a movie about falling in love with making movies, and Fellini goes back into his memories of this time.

TV Review – My Brilliant Friend Season Three

My Brilliant Friend Season Three (HBO)
Written by Elena Ferrante, Francesco Piccolo, Laura Paolucci and Saverio Costanzo
Directed by Daniele Luchetti

I have been very impressed with how this show has made very young actresses appear to age into their late 20s/early 30s. It’s done through the talents of make-up artists, hair stylists, and wardrobe, along with the actresses’ physical and emotional performance. There are moments where the youth of Lenu might slip by all that, but for the most part, this season completely sold our two lead actors as maturing women, worn down by a society that looks all too similar to the one their mothers grew up in. That was the overarching theme of the season: Lenu’s realization that she was living a life as unexamined and pre-planned as her own mother, just with nicer furniture.

TV Review – My Brilliant Friend Season Two

My Brilliant Friend Season Two (HBO)
Written by Elena Ferrante, Francesco Piccolo, Laura Paolucci and Saverio Costanzo
Directed by Saverio Costanzo and Alice Rohrwacher

The subtitle of this season and its source material that the story is derived from is The Story of a New Name. This reflects the changes in Lila Cerullo’s (Gaia Girace) life and how one makes a name for oneself in transitioning from childhood into adulthood. Lila goes from being a Cerullo to a Carracci, and economically, she moves from poverty to comfortable working-middle class. For Lenu Greco (Margherita Mazzucco), she can leave their Neapolitan neighborhood but finds her roots as a child of poverty evident to her new acquaintances, causing others to view her as perpetually unrefined enough to ever achieve a higher status. Season Two is about the child’s transformation, whether having their dreams snatched away or transformed into something new.

TV Review – My Brilliant Friend Season One

My Brilliant Friend Season One (HBO)
Written by Elena Ferrante, Francesco Piccolo, Laura Paolucci and Saverio Costanzo
Directed by Saverio Costanzo

We open with a phone call in the middle of the night. An older woman answers. Her friend has gone missing. The friend’s son is worried. The woman chastises him and ends the call. And then she remembers. This is the opening to My Brilliant Friend Season One, an adaptation of the first book in Italian author Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan trilogy. The entire series is couched in the search for meaning from past experiences, piecing together how the friendship of Elena & Lila came to be, mainly how their dreams of where their lives would go went so astray due to being women and growing up in the times that they did. That period is the post-war period in Italy, the universe consisting of a single tenement and the surrounding neighborhood. The result is a powerfully moving exploration of women coming of age and learning how little agency they are given by the society around them.