Do you have any cinematic guilty pleasures?
I like rom-coms a lot so I will watch even really bad ones so I guess maybe that counts, but I don’t have that many guilty pleasures because I don’t feel guilty about it! I really enjoy popular culture. One of my favourite films is The Proposal which I know isn’t high art but I love it. I think you can acknowledge that something isn’t necessarily of great artistic merit but still enjoy it and find lots of interesting things about it.
Obviously, Riccardo Scamarcio, he’s the one I’ve written about the most so I like to see what he’s doing. I like Toni Servillo a lot. Unfortunately, there aren’t that many actresses, partly due to the lack of good roles for them. I think Valeria Golino is great and my favourite Italian actress of all time is Anna Magnani, who was absolutely incredible. I like a lot of the actors from 1940s-50s films who aren’t necessarily famous anymore, too.
Do you find you prefer older films to newer ones?
I enjoy both. I’m writing about modern cinema a great deal but I also have this project on the post-war films and am hopefully going to write about how popular film dealt with the traumas of the Second World War. I’ve been watching a lot of terrible melodramas from the 1940s recently; lots of them are about men coming back from the war to find that their wife has married somebody else and they have to kill someone! I find them a lot of fun, though, and some of them are really good. It’s striking how a lot of these films are not written about and some aren’t even available anymore. Italy is so proud of its cinematic heritage but there’s very little money to look after it and keep things in circulation. Sometimes things pop up on YouTube which is great; you see people have come across an old VHS of a film they taped off RAI years ago and they put it online.
Do you have any cinematic guilty pleasures?
I like rom-coms a lot so I will watch even really bad ones so I guess maybe that counts, but I don’t have that many guilty pleasures because I don’t feel guilty about it! I really enjoy popular culture. One of my favourite films is The Proposal which I know isn’t high art but I love it. I think you can acknowledge that something isn’t necessarily of great artistic merit but still enjoy it and find lots of interesting things about it.
il dipartimento
La Grande Belleza was really disappointing- it really played into this idea of what foreigners think Italian art cinema is
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