Giuseppe Tornatore Remembers as Cinema Paradiso Turns 25
By Alex Simon
Giuseppe Tornatore’s Cinema Paradiso won the 1990 Best Foreign Film Oscar after setting box office records the previous year all over the world. Paradiso had a rough journey on its road to glory, however, with the then-32 year-old writer/director being forced to cut nearly 30 minutes from its original running time and facing critical excoriation and box office indifference upon its original release in Italy. It’s a fitting metaphor for a film that has become a classic tale about fate, perseverance, and destiny.
Set in Sicily beginning in the years just after Ww II to the late 1950s, and framed by modern-day flashbacks of a renowned film director (French actor/director Jacques Perrin) returning to his Sicilian town for the first time in 30 years, Tornatore’s hero (and alter-ego) is pint-sized Toto, who finds himself obsessed with the movies,...
By Alex Simon
Giuseppe Tornatore’s Cinema Paradiso won the 1990 Best Foreign Film Oscar after setting box office records the previous year all over the world. Paradiso had a rough journey on its road to glory, however, with the then-32 year-old writer/director being forced to cut nearly 30 minutes from its original running time and facing critical excoriation and box office indifference upon its original release in Italy. It’s a fitting metaphor for a film that has become a classic tale about fate, perseverance, and destiny.
Set in Sicily beginning in the years just after Ww II to the late 1950s, and framed by modern-day flashbacks of a renowned film director (French actor/director Jacques Perrin) returning to his Sicilian town for the first time in 30 years, Tornatore’s hero (and alter-ego) is pint-sized Toto, who finds himself obsessed with the movies,...
- 11/11/2014
- by The Hollywood Interview.com
- The Hollywood Interview
Ever since Leslie Howard appeared in Outward Bound, a 1930 film version of Sutton Vane's stage success about recently deceased folk on a boat bound for heaven or hell, there's been a steady stream of movies about the afterlife; very serious in the case of Roman Polanski inducting Gerard Depardieu into purgatory in A Pure Formality, larky in the case of Peter O'Toole and Colin Firth awaiting Charon's ferry together in Wings of Fame. Up There is a modest black comedy starring Burn Gorman as a road-accident victim attempting unsuccessfully to get out of his job as a minder of the newly dead and move onward and upward in a dull, bureaucratic afterlife. Instead he gets stuck in a rundown Scottish seaside resort. It runs out of steam very early on but should be compulsory viewing for would-be suicide bombers who think they're going to be living in a paradise populated by beautiful virgins.
- 11/19/2012
- by Philip French
- The Guardian - Film News
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