Life Is Beautiful
Directed by: Roberto Benigni
Written by: Vincenzo Cerami and Roberto Benigni
Starring: Roberto Benigni

The film Life is Beautiful was a cinematic feature that I wanted to see for quite a while ever since it was released. Unfortunately, the film was considered to be a “speciality” film and wasn’t mainstream enough to be featured in Silver City mega-plexes or Famous Player movie coliseums in the Niagara area. That’s the disadvantage of living in a small area suburban town. You aren’t big enough to be considered to have much taste, so it’s not worth the expense to bring down culture here. The usual fluff would probably do just fine. If I wished to see the movie, then it was required that I travel. For Niagarians, the nearest centre of culture is Toronto. However, a two hour drive plus admission is quite a heavy price to pay to go see a movie. My best bet was to wait for it on video. So, I waited.

I waited to see Life is Beautiful earn seven Oscar nominations among the notable being Best Picture and Best Actor. In the end, the gifted, charismatic Italian nut Roberto Benigni claimed the Best Actor prize and touched my little mafia heart as he proudly accepted the award with a broken English speech and childlike wonder that is so characteristic of the Italian Star. My hunger to see the movie became insatiable.

My time would finally come as my friend Michael would appropriate the ultimate in home entertainment experiences, the DVD. I found DVD technology to be quite amazing. The DVD of Life is Beautiful for example was just chock full of little goodies and presents inside that I felt like it was Christmas time. I even wanted to decorate a tree! However, the night was getting late and as they say, “The show must go on!”.So we put in the DVD, we saw pictures, we saw words, we saw credits and then we went home. The End.

However, in between those dramatic key frames of our intense cinematic experience, a moving and beautiful story played out before my eyes. The story was centred around an Italian Jewish father whose family was captured during WWII in Italy by the Nazis. In order to hide the despicable reality of war from his young son, the father pretends that the entire war is a game that is meant to be won. The film is so touching in the explanations, attempts and sacrifices that the father makes in blinding his son from the horror of racism, war, pain and death. Fatherly acts that I wish were carried out more often in the world. The film was one of those rare movies that actually drew me in and affected me deeply. By the end, I could even feel a tear welling up in my eye. I couldn’t shoot anybody for a week.

I recommend Life is Beautiful to anyone and I believe that it would be a rare treat for any movie fan, especially the foreign film connoisseur. I also highly recommend that you watch the film in Italian with English subtitles in order to capture Roberto Benigni’s extraordinary talent to the fullest. No other voice does him justice. In conclusion…

La Vita E Bella e un film molto belissima. Viva Roberto Benigni!!

– Peter “The Gooch” Meneguzzi

End Of Days
Directed by: Peter Hyams
Written by: Andrew W. Marlowe
Starring: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Gabriel Byrne, Kevin Pollak

When the preview for End of Days first came out, I was getting pretty pumped up for opening day. Finally, here was a comedy that would wipe away the tears of shame that I had shed earlier in the year. Tears shed from such dismal attempts at humour found in such boring movies as “Austin Powers 2″ and… something else. The makers of End of Days were billing the movie as a religious action movie. I saw clear through this charade though and came to recognize the movie as an intellectual farce where Arnie had at last come of age as a comedic genius.

A remark made by my scriptwriting professor saying that the movie was worth seeing just to see Arnold cry only enforced my earlier suspicions. However, I was wrong.

When I went to see the film at a local two dollar theatre, I was given the privilege of seeing one of Arnold’s worst performances to date. How sad. In the movie, Arnold plays a washed up cop that has lost his wife and daughter. Due to this unfortunate “Act of God”, Arnold loses his faith and takes the whole situation personally against the Big Guy. As the end of the millennium approaches, the Devil himself is released unto the earth from his thousand year prison and understandably is quite horny. For some reason not totally explained, the situation has it that if the Devil lays this one chick, then he’ll finally defeat God and get to rule all of creation. Now I know sex is a profound and powerful experience, but this powerful?? I think not. However, I was willing to play along just to see Arnold go head to head with Satan himself in a climatic battle of the souls whose outcome was determined by the fate of this one woman. Basically, Satan had to screw her to win . That in itself should have been worth a couple of laughs.

Instead, the movie dragged on in uninspiring religious discussions and pointless action sequences that turned priests into hit men and Arnie into a big softie that the Devil could have squashed in the first thirty minutes if this were real life. However, this wasn’t real life. As usual, Arnie got to shine in the end but he projected a pale shadow of his former self. I barely recognized him.

Gone were the amusing traditional Arnie one-liners other then a quip here or there. Gone were the impossible feats of superhuman prowess that Arnold showered unto the audience until you could only laugh at their absolute ridicule. Even the accent seemed a little less Austrian sounding then usual.

I must say that my final conclusion for End of Days was a drooping thumbs down. The movie did not inspire any religious bone in my body. [Note from Sean: Do you mean you gave it a bone down?] I am also afraid to say that this may be the beginning of the end for Mr. Schwarzenegger’s motion picture career. Perhaps he should quietly leave the set now and move on to his much rumored political career.

If Arnold ever becomes president, then and only then will I have the faith again to say “God help us all”. — Peter Meneguzzi

Man On The Moon
Directed by: Milos Forman
Written by: Scott Alexander, Larry Karaszewski
Starring: Jim Carrey, Danny DeVito, Courtney Love, Jerry Lawler

It was a struggle to get me to see “Man on the Moon” from the very beginning, as my friends tried to coax me into seeing it at the last minute right outside the theatre. We had dwindled our choices down between this and “Galaxy Quest” and I was getting my heart set on “Galaxy Quest” for some unknown reason. Of course, there were other movies showing that were more appealing to me, but like usual, my friends had either seen them, “saved” them for other people, or just plain didn’t want to see them because their close-mindedness thought they sucked. To paraphrase the old adage, “With friends like these, who the hell sees anything?!”

However as it turned out, I absolutely enjoyed the movie and they hated it. So chock up another case of ironic vindication!

“Man on the Moon” is directed by Milos Forman, the respected director who has produced such good fair as “Amadeus”, “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” and the quite recent “The People Vs. Larry Flint”. When I stepped into the theatre, I was hoping that he would keep up the good work and to my delight, he did just that.

The cinematography and lighting was of course classic Forman who uses very bright colours and well lit sets. Foreman also makes extreme use of an interesting technique he used in “The People Vs. Larry Flint” by placing people from the real life scenario as actors in his movies. In the case of “The People Vs. Larry Flint”, the actual Larry Flint played the Supreme Court Judge at his own trial. In “Man on the Moon”, almost everyone in the movie were playing themselves from the entire cast of “Taxi”, to David Letterman, to Jerry Lawler, the very man who hit Kaufman on Letterman’s show. This technique gives the film an unprecedented feel of realism to it, which is quite gripping and helps to make you believe that Jim Carrey is actually Andy Kaufman.

Though I’m not a huge Jim Carrey fan, I must admit that he played the Kaufman character quite well and should be respected for trying to delve deeper into drama. He can be safely assured that I will not stand in his way if he were to receive an Academy Award.

The rest of the cast was also commendable, though honestly, I cannot really feel right in giving them much praise since most of them, well, were playing themselves. If they couldn’t do that at all, then they should definitely forgo being an actor and pick a more a useful career, like getting shot. However, I shouldn’t dampen the air and give oodles of praise to the entire ensemble.

Overall, the best thing I could say is that Forman presented the peculiar, yet intriguing story of Andy Kaufman in a fairly unbiased fashion. He neither tried to glorify or demean the man, and better yet, he didn’t try to make a comedy. Rather, all he did was try to encapsulate the Kaufman character, present it in all its ugly or beautiful glory and allow the audience to decide whether the movie was funny. Basically, the movie was just there. In hindsight, this approach was probably the greatest tribute to Andy Kaufman since it captured the very essence of his act, which simply was to make the audience ask the same question that Danny Devito’s character first muttered, “Who the hell is this guy?” — Peter Meneguzzi

COMMENTS ABOUT THE REVIEW:

“I loved it” — Peter Meneguzzi
“Highly thought out” — Roger Ebert (as an impression by Peter Meneguzzi)
“I’ve never been so complimented” — Andy Kaufman (channelled through a séance by Peter Meneguzzi)