| Overall Grade: |
A- |
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| Story: |
A- |
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| Acting: |
B- |
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| Direction: |
B+ |
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| Visuals: |
A- |
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Why We Love Cinema!
by Nima (movies profile)
Jun 9, 2007
1
of
1 people found this review helpful
Cinema Paradiso (1990) is a romantic/comedy movie by Giuseppe Tornatore (Director of Malena, The Legend of 1900 and etc). The original Score of this movie is magical and is composed by the great Ennino Marricone. This movie won the Best Foreign Language Movie of Academy and Special Jury Grand Prix of Cannes Festival. Its story takes place at a small Sicilian village and is told in flashback about the love of a small boy, Toto, to Cinema and his relationship with the city’s Projectionist, Alfredo (Philip Noiret). Their relationship ended in Toto becomes a projectionist and a deepened love of cinema. As Toto’s became a Teenager he fell in love with a girl, Elena.
The main plot of the story settled on three main issues; The romantic relationship between Toto and Elena, The love of a small boy and people in a village to cinema and the story of Cinema Paradiso and above all, Alfredo and his role in Toto’s life.
The masterpiece of the movie is in the two latter issues. The first 1.5 hours of the movie is mainly took place in Cinema Paradiso, a local cinema which each and every day lots of people gathered to watch the movies they admire, love and live with. The scenes are magical, I couldn’t stop watching and loving them and they are so hilarious. The parts that the local priest is censoring the movies before releasing them, the reaction of the people in cinema toward the movies and Toto’s love to cinema and Alfredo’s job are definitely the best parts of the movie. Meanwhile we witness great conversations between Toto and Alfredo and these conversations shows the genius of the writer and you can see the influence of classic movies on them. Since Toto is a child till he becomes a teenager, his relationship and dialogues with Alfredo are magical.
On the other hand, personally I don’t consider Cinema Paradiso as a great romantic movie. Similar sentimental relationships to Elena and Toto’s have been seen lots of times in other movies and it’s not something new, even sometimes it becomes like cheap love movies. You know, it doesn’t make u feel different inside and brings tears to your eyes and even sometimes you feel disagreed with their relationship. Especially the last time they meet each other at the beach, is so weakly written and I didn’t enjoy it. This movie has 3 different versions; a 124 minute one which has been released in US, UK and France. Another 153 minute one released in Italy and a 174 minute director’s cut version which I have watched and was released on DVD. In the US version, the romantic scenes are less than the other two and the end of the movie is slightly different and the beach scene mentioned above never happens, I wish I watched this one.
But if I wanna talk about the best scene of this movie, definitely it will be the last 2 minute of it. When Salvatore DiVitti (the old Toto) opens up a gift from deceased Alfredo and it’s an old reel of movie made up out of film clips cut from the reels by the projectionist (to appease the censor by the local priest). The clips are romantic scenes from every film Alfredo has projected in the theater, causing tears to come to Salvatore's eyes. Actually I believe it is one of the best scenes I have evr seen in my whole life and the movie is particularly renowned for this famous 'kissing scenes' montage. |
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