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DVD L'Eclisse - Criterion Collection
Michelangelo Antonioni's L'Eclisse rolls over you and wraps you in its stylish embrace. The plot, such as it is, follows Vittoria (luscious Monica Vitti, The Red Desert) as her engagement falls apart and she slowly falls into a giddy but anxious affair with Piero (Alain Delon, Le Samourai, Purple Noon), a trader in Rome's stock exchange. Like Ingmar Bergman (Scenes from a Marriage, Persona), Antonioni examines the nuances of human relationships--but where Bergman is dense and dialogue-driven, Antonioni is spare and visual (there's maybe a page of dialogue in the first fifteen minutes of L'Eclisse). Every frame is like an exquisite black and white photograph, yet there's nothing static about this movie. It's fluid, sleek, and graceful, achieving its own kind of visual music. L'Eclisse contrasts opposing elements: Light and shadow, noise and silence, laughter and death, love and money, desire and dissatisfaction. Critics often describe the movie as a portrait of modern alienation, but they focus too much on Vittoria herself; while she finds her own life wanting, all around her Antonioni's camera captures a much larger world, full of as much vitality as despair, as much hope as loss. This is a movie essential to anyone's understanding of what movies can be. --Bret Fetzer
I could watch Vitti read the phone book (and I'm surprised she never gets around to that in this beautiful neo-realist classic)
This is the first movie I've Netflixed twice. I kept it for two months the first time, watched almost all of it, but then lost patience and sent it back because there was something else I wanted to get quickly. But I couldn't stop thinking back about it and wound up renting it again. I'm considering just going ahead and buying it. I still haven't figured out if I actually *like* it or not. But I can't stop watching it.
How can a movie this cold and distant and remote be so affecting? How can a film so full of detail and business be so cold and distant and remote?
Monica Vitti plays a stylishly unhappy woman who basically wanders around Rome, falling out of one relationship into another, with Alain Delon. She's so wan that I often wanted to step in and shove her, but at the same time, she has an absolutely captivating presence. Eventually, I actually stopped caring anything about the plot and just relished the endless scenes in which I could take in her long, slender nose and her slim, sleepy eyes. Is that a intelligent reason for liking this film? Probably not but fortunately I don't really care.
L'Eclisse (1962) - Michelangelo Antonioni
L'Eclisse is the thrid film in Antonioni's trilogy of isolation, and never has he made the audience feel so, well, isolated. There isn't really much plot, which is typical of an Antonioni film, and it's often why they're so appealing. However, in this film the silence becomes more self indulgent then meaningful, and the meandering style becomes tiresome. Antonioni balances both the quiet times and loud times of city life, while attempting to find love in between, but it just doesn't work well. The film is irregular, and the performances by Vitti and Delon (both great actors) feel stilted. The film has nice photography and has a very modern feel to it and Antonini's films are always interesting. L'Eclisse is not Antonioni's most ambitious film, but it is easily his most pretentious.
A clasic
When you see these movie you understand that there is another level far superior to all the adventure movies we are seeing today
This silky smooth film noir pits gruff police detective Dana Andrews, stiff and blunt in his street-bred manners, against a cultured columnist and acidic wit (Clifton Webb at his prissiest) in a battle of wits during a murder investigation. The cop is a romantic hiding under a hard-boiled exterior who falls in love with the beautiful victim through the portrait that hangs in her apartment. Gene Tierney, whose heart-shaped face mixes the exotic with the girl next door, brings the poise and calm of a model to her role as the object of every man's gaze and the target of a killer. Laura, handsomely shot in dreamy black and white, is the first and best of Otto Preminger's cool, controlled murder mysteries. In the gritty world of film noir it remains the most refined and elegant example... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Gene Tierney - Dana Andrews Director(s): Rouben Mamoulian - Otto Preminger DVD Release Date: Released the 15 March 2005 Usually ships in 24 hours
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Continuing the "alienation trilogy" that began with L'Avventura and ended with L'Eclisse, Michelangelo Antonioni's La Notte is a visually arresting, emotionally numbing exercise in chronic ennui. The film's anesthetizing effect is entirely intentional; Antonioni's central couple (Marcello Mastroianni as a self-absorbed novelist, Jeanne Moreau as his bored and wealthy wife) wallow in their own emotional desolation, constantly drifting--and in Moreau's case, literally drifting--from one disaffected scene to the next. Antonioni's pained study of modern detachment is richly supported by his visuals, often placing his isolated characters in a harsh landscape of empty glamor and even emptier emotions. Driving the point home is Monica Vitti as Marcello's would-be... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Marcello Mastroianni - Jeanne Moreau Director(s): Michelangelo Antonioni DVD Release Date: Released the 08 May 2001 Special Order
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A summit meeting of great Italian directors of the era, Boccaccio '70 is an antipasto platter of vintage sex symbols and naughty material. Cooked up and bankrolled by Carlo Ponti and American producer Joseph E. Levine, the four-part film was meant to tap the international smash of Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita, which gave audiences some refreshingly, you know, "mature" subject matter. Four directors were hired to create segments ostensibly based on the tales of Boccaccio: Fellini himself (in the lull between La Dolce Vita and 8-1/2), Luchino Visconti, Vittorio De Sica, and Mario Monicelli.
At three brief hours, La Dolce Vita, a piece of cynical, engrossing social commentary, stands as Federico Fellini's timeless masterpiece. A rich, detailed panorama of Rome's modern decadence and sophisticated immorality, the film is episodic in structure but held tightly in focus by the wandering protagonist through whom we witness the sordid action. Marcello Rubini (extraordinarily played by Marcello Mastroianni) is a tabloid reporter trapped in a shallow high-society existence. A man of paradoxical emotional juxtapositions (cool but tortured, sexy but impotent), he dreams about writing something important but remains seduced by the money and prestige that accompany his shallow position. He romanticizes finding true love but acts unfazed upon finding that his girlfriend has taken... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Marcello Mastroianni - Anita Ekberg Director(s): Federico Fellini DVD Release Date: Released the 21 September 2004 Usually ships in 24 hours
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Before becoming the poster child for the extreme arty, slow paced foreign films of the '60s, Michealanglo Antonioni actually developed his craft on very straightforward, neo-realistic films. Story of a Love Affair (1950) was Antonioni's first feature-length dramatic film, and much to his critics' chagrin, it is extremely linear, it has limited drawn out, "real time" shots, and his actors actually project more emotion than the typical "Antonioni apathy." Enrico (Ferdinando Sarmi) is an extremely wealthy and jealous husband who suspects his young, beautiful bride, Paola (Lucia Bosé), is unfaithful. Instead of confronting her directly, he hires a private detective (Gino Rossi) to investigate her past. While checking up on the mysterious death of Paola's friend, the private... More Info about this DVD Director(s): Michelangelo Antonioni DVD Release Date: Released the 28 June 2005 Usually ships in 24 hours
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