The Highlights
1) Four interesting Italian films are in competition for the Golden Lion and the biggest…
2) Marco Bellocchio’s Sangue Del Mio Sangue (Blood Of My Blood) is inspired by a true story of a 17th century noble woman who becomes a nun, and then is accused of being a witch after seducing a young army officer and his twin brother, a priest. The story continues centuries later in the same location, a building that is housing a mysterious count that only comes out at night.
Though the word “vampire” has been used in descriptions of the film, when I asked cinematographer Daniele Ciprì if it was a vampire movie he said, “NO!”. So I guess it’s not!
3) Luca Guadagnino and Tilda Swinton reunite on the Lido for ‘A Bigger Splash’. They were a big success working together in Io Sono L’Amore (I Am Love) and now they’ve got an English language remake of a French film (La Piscine) about the a famous rock star and a filmmaker on vacation.
4) Venice has become known for its great opening films (premiers of Gravity and Birdman) and this year they’ve got another, Baltasar Kormákur’s Everest, starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Robin Wright, the true story of climbers trapped on the peak by a snowstorm.
5) This could be the year that Johnny Depp stops sucking. Scott Cooper’s Black Mass stars Depp as the real-life mafia informant Whitey Bulger. Festival goers at Venice will be hoping Depp will show us something to compare with his performance in Mike Newell’s Donnie Brasco in 1997. Black Mass and already the word “Oscar” is being thrown around.
6) Eddie Redmayne will be in Venice with Tom Hooper for his film The Danish Girl, in which Redmayne plays one of the first men to become a transsexual.
7) Valeria Golino as a mob boss’s wife. They say it’s not a movie about the Camorra per se, but she’ll be playing a Camorrista on the verge of a nervous breakdown in Giuseppe M. Gaudino’s Per Amor Vostro (For Your Love).
8) There will be lots of cute girls, like Kristen Stewart (Equals) (Is she cute? People seem to think so), French actress Lou de Laâge in L’Attesa with Juliette Binoche, and Alicia Vikander and Amber Heard Depp from The Danish Girl.
9) And cute boys: I’ll be stalking Filippo Timi (Sangue Del Mio Sangue) and Luca Marinelli (Non Essere Cattivo).
10) And it wouldn’t be the Venice Film Festival without Il Buco – the hole. The excavation for a new cinema palace that’s gone nowhere for years and apparently will never be realized. But will they ever take the construction barriers down? It takes a little away from the glamour of the red carpet…
I Love Italian Everything 