Change Your Image
satnitcboy
Reviews
Vitus (2006)
Childhood fantasy
Saw a screening tonight at Tribeca Film Festival - good news for American Audiences: Sony Classics will be distributing Vitus here beginning June 07.
Director Muller says Vitus grew out of his own childhood fantasy: to be a genius. Other fantasies also play out in this completely guileless, charming story.
(Teo Gheorghiu is, in fact, a brilliant pianist. Now 14, he played in person before the screening and proved that, in fact, all the musicianship on display is real. The 5-yr old Vitus also plays.) Happier, and funnier, than Little Man Tate. IMO, what is thoroughly unpredictable about this film is the absence of nasty, bitter adults and children you'd have likely found in an American version ... except for the "boss's son" character, who is a cliché, but not one you have to look at for long.
Vitus demonstrates that fantasy can be a personal, human pastime, not just a cartoon or computer-generated effect. Terrific little film.
Summertime (1955)
Let's clear this up:
As someone who has viewed Summertime 5 or 6 times a year for its beauty alone, I can clear up a few questions: Jane Hudson has come to Venice for a relatively short vacation for which "she has waited such a long time" and "saved for so very long." She's a "fancy secretary" she says. It's easy to surmise from the action of the film that she is spending somewhere between one and two weeks in Venice. (They meet, she resists, she gives in, the go off for a weekend on the isle of Burano.)She's not rich and neither is he.
As for Renato's attraction to the prim Jane: first it's her ankle and calf, when he spots her at the cafe in Piazza San Marco. Next, it's her awkward shyness when she catches him looking at her. He is absolutely ga-ga over her "innocence" and sets his sights on the conquest. (The two of them play this nearly wordless scene brilliantly. I'd think anybody with a soul and two eyes would get it.)Then, naturally, when his heat is turned onto her and she blooms, he can't get enough.
She was 48 and he 39 when the film was released.
Summertime (1955)
Let's clear this up:
As someone who has viewed Summertime 5 or 6 times a year for its beauty alone, I can clear up a few questions: Jane Hudson has come to Venice for a relatively short vacation for which "she has waited such a long time" and "saved for so very long." She's a "fancy secretary" she says. It's easy to surmise from the action of the film that she is spending somewhere between one and two weeks in Venice. (They meet, she resists, she gives in, the go off for a weekend on the isle of Burano.)She's not rich and neither is he.
As for Renato's attraction to the prim Jane: first it's her ankle and calf, when he spots her at the cafe in Piazza San Marco. Next, it's her awkward shyness when she catches him looking at her. He is absolutely ga-ga over her "innocence" and sets his sights on the conquest. (The two of them play this nearly wordless scene brilliantly. I'd think anybody with a soul and two eyes would get it.)Then, naturally, when his heat is turned onto her and she blooms, he can't get enough.
She was 48 and he 39 when the film was released.