- A Little White Lie
The great actor Michael Shannon manages with his performance to make interesting a rather typical comedy about the writing world. The organizers of a college literary festival invite Shriver, a famous – but decades out of the public eye – author to the events. However, the invitation is accidentally delivered to a man with the same name, who spends most of his day getting drunk and mourning his wife who left him. Nevertheless, he decides to go to the festival, where (almost) everyone welcomes him, first of all a beautiful professor (Kate Hudson), who will be fascinated by his strange character.
Michael Maren’s film begins with the simple premise of the con man, who pretends to be someone else in order to gain, if only for a moment, meaning in his stuffy life. Then, however, comes the twist, as the fake Shriver gets more and more into the role, somehow “communicating” with the absent writer. At the festival itself, one encounters various stereotypical characters of the spirit: an alcoholic poet who naturally becomes the protagonist’s sidekick, a vain playwright, an African-American, militant feminist lyricist, and so on. And Kate Hudson’s character represents women trying to make their creative voice heard in a (still) male-dominated environment.
“Within this void unfolds the human comedy, the difference between what we allow ourselves to think and what we know in our innermost souls. The film takes place at a literary festival that is in decline and struggling to survive, where a group of writers gathers. Each participant tries to appear as he hopes the rest of the world sees him.
In the middle of it all is Shriver, a writer so successful and so trapped in his own insecurity that he’s cut off from himself, but forced to pretend he’s really himself. As Kurt Vonnegut (an American writer) says: “We are what we pretend to be, so we have to be careful what we pretend to be”, observes director Michael Maren. This concept of pretense, so common in today’s social media world, is probably the most interesting element of his film.
- Bosch, the Garden of Dreams
From the Cinobo platform we select a documentary by José L. Linares, who explores in a unique way the famous “Garden of Earthly Delights” by Hieronymus Bosch. The Spanish director gets exclusive access to the painting, attempting to take us a little deeper into the fascinating world of the creator.
With the help of great figures such as the writers Salman Rushdie and Orhan Pamuk, the musician Ludovico Einaudi, the hedonist philosopher Michel Honfret and others, as well as experts in the history of art, the “Garden” is broken into pieces and details, which are presented separately and at the same time as a whole, in the form conceived by the artist’s imagination.
With the help of technology, the work is scanned electronically in order to reveal the drafts and the phases of its creation. And if in another canvas this division would have only academic interest, here it adds real depth, as the viewer discovers little by little, like a treasure hunt, the small “paintings within the painting”.
- The Good Mothers
Produser: Steven Bouchard Interpetations: Simona Distefano, Barbara Chichiarelli, Alessandra Roca
The Disney+ platform brings us a new mini-series, based on a true story, which premiered at the last Berlin Film Festival. We are in the Italian South, where even today the mafia commands and shapes balances in people’s lives. Three women, daughters and husbands raised in the bosom of the criminal organizations themselves, will decide to work with a fearless prosecutor in order to put an end to the cycle of blood and the permanent fear that defines their existence.
Succeeding in putting us in the atmosphere from the start, the Italian series is aesthetically reminiscent – and not only – of successful films of the genre such as “Gomorrah” and “Dogman” by Matteo Garrone, but also due to the medium, giving more weight to the characters. They, the protagonists at least, are mostly naturally female, emerging from a male-dominated environment to destroy it.
Here there is still plenty of suspense but also pure action, which however does not monopolize the duration of the episodes. And although we would like a little more depth in the narrative, the well-written script and (mostly) the performances of the female leads help the whole to reach a very high level.
