It’s no exaggeration, calling Garrone a genius. And Americans have access to his best work.
Il Racconto dei Racconti (Tale of Tales) competed at the Cannes Film Festival and is a fairy tale, but it’s not for children. There’s sex, blood, and adult situations, just like the original fairy-tales written in the 1600s by the stories’ author, Giambattista Basile, who predated and inspired more well-known story-tellers like the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Anderson. Apparently, Basile is responsible for the earliest version of Cinderella.
I’ll give Basile credit for the great material, but Garrone brought it to life in a way that could only have been exceeded in my own mind with my own imagination.
- is GORGEOUS. The cinematography is dreamy and creepy, with wild bursts of color and imagination.
- It is exciting and even scary, with monsters. ogres, and witches popping out around every corner.
- It has the most incredible cast, with Selma Hayek, Vincent Cassel, John C. Reilly, and Alba Rohrwacher.
- It is oddly relevant to today’s society, with plenty of morals to the stories, the ones our parents wanted to get when they read us to us as children.
WATCH TALE OF TALES on Amazon, YouTube, Vudu, and iTunes
Reality
When Luciano, the family’s favorite cut-up, gets talked into trying out for an Italian reality show, he’s on board at first just to please his children, but it doesn’t take long to catch the celebrity bug. The transformation from loving husband and father to obsessed, TV star wannabe is quick but authentic.
Matteo Garrone’s Reality is a host of contradictions and a miracle of insight. There is warmth of a family that contradicts the unsympathetic world of reality television. There’s the sense of fun that’s eventually squashed by heartbreak and ruin. There’s a reason to be your best self, but to serve God or a TV audience?
And hold on, I can’t forget about the star of the show, Aniello Arena, who plays Luciano; it wouldn’t have been the same movie without him. Arena, who is serving a life sentence in prison and was only able to appear in ‘Reality’ through a work release program, may be the single biggest cinema surprise in years. Was he acting or is he really Luciano? I don’t suppose we’ll ever know, but he is perfect.
Watch Reality on Amazon, 
Gomorrah
Gomorrah, directed by Matteo Garrone, is an extremely complicated crime story about the day to day operations of the lesser known and yet more prolific crime organization in Italy,the Camorra and the hard life of the normal people living in its grip. Every stereotype in my body tells me that this is not really organized crime but only impoverished, larcenous thugs who value life very little, so loosely banded together and without structure that no one is protected and everyone’s got a price on his head – literally. These stupid, brutal men might seem laughable if they hadn’t taken such a cold and complete hold on the area around Naples. But as we are reminded at the end of the film, the Camorra has killed more people than any other organized crime groups. They sell more drugs than any other, and have invested their gains in legitimate businesses all over the world, including the reconstruction of the twin towers. Roberto Saviano was forced into hiding for telling this story, and there’s really nothing funny about it. Gomorrah is grim movie that shows us a very grim reality. Do we want to see it or look away?
Gomorrah is not the kind of movie that is so violent that I found myself looking away – there is nothing gratuitous about the brutality and in some ways it’s made to seem mundane. It’s the reactions from the characters in the movie that are more interesting. The defiant mothers, the terrified children who want to seem tough, and the old timers who are trying to find their place and stay alive in this chaos.
While Gomorrah tells a very powerful story about the state of Italy, it’s also the story of all poor people everywhere today. When people are hungry and without education, this is what happens. It’s all about money: what some people are willing to do to become rich and what others are willing to do to merely survive.
Watch Gomorrah on AMAZON Hulu iTunes and Netflix .
I Love Italian Everything 