Encounters (and cinemas) at the end of the world

One of my Italian friends called me about one week ago: "We must go to see the last Herzog's movie! We can't miss it!"

"Ok," I answered and I went to seek it on the Internet, found an interesting trailer.
After one failed attempt (the cinema in Piccadilly published the wrong schedule!) on Thursday, eventually today we went in a cinema I could say "at the end of the world" or, at least, of London.
The Lexi Cinema is a social enterprise, based in 194b Chamberlayne Road, Kensal Rise, that claims they give the 100%of their profits to community action in South Africa.
If this could sounds quite original, the best has to come: me and my friend enjoyed an absolutely private screening and before it began one of the guys who works there come to "explain us the movie", giving us the possibility to skip it if we're not interested.
A little puzzled, we listened to him, who briefly (and nicely, I have to say, at least for his brave) introduce his 'social enterprise' and the movie, and let it starts.
It was the first time I went to watch a Herzog's movie and I think it's worth.
This time he went to Antarctica to shoot a docu-film about people who live and work there.
South Pole hosts nowadays a thousand od men and women - volcanologists, biologists, physicists, but even philosopers, linguists, travellers and refugees - that develop cutting-edge scientific researches.
Say that the images, especially those shot in the water under a thick layer of ice, are amazing it's almost banal, but what really make the viewer surprised it's discovering how much (beautiful) forms of life are under and above the pack ice.
But Antarctica is not just water in its different states, but also volcanos, penguins, seals... and professional dreamers. Yeah, exactly, professional dreamers, that's the definition of people who are there given by the philosoper Stefan Pashov, who is one of them and at present drives a digger.
Herzog gathers the most various collection of people and the best label you can give them it's just this: professional dreamers. Like anyone who hard-works and enjoys his passion until extremes, they get, deserve and fetch in this tag and it's easy to feel them close to you.
That's why, ultimately, it deserves to see what happens off the map, at the end of the world.

Il Divo – The spectacular life of Giulio Andreotti

Giulio Andreotti always looks calm, inscrutable and, above all, powerful.
He has been one of the most influential Italian politicians, whit a career that started in 1948 when he was elected for the first time at the age of 29.
Il Divo tells of a part of his 40-year career, between 1991 and 1993, when Andreotti was head of government for the seventh time and he was going to be investigated for suspicious links with the mafia.
Watching this outstanding movie, just one doubt comes up: will it be enough to make sense to the British audience?
There are two sorts of difficulties. Firstly, Andreotti is a man who seems incomprehensible even to his wife and his closest collaborators.
He is known by Italian people with several nicknames like ‘Divo Giulio’, which comes from Julius Caesar and means the importance of his authority, or ‘Beelzebub’ because of his alleged mafia links, but nobody has been able to pin him down totally.
Secondly, the movie aims at emphasizing his potential involvement in many important and dark happenings of Italian recent history, like mafia murders, terrorism and scandal bound up with Freemasonry, that are not clear either for many Italian people.
The director Paolo Sorrentino, who shot The Consequences of Love in 2004 and The Family Friend in 2006, portrays Andreotti like the personification of power, through the reconstruction of his meetings with mafia boss and high points like when he accepts to be nominated as President of Republic.
Thanks to the masterly performance of Toni Servillo, which won him the European Film Award, Andreotti - who is now senator for life since 1991 - is represented as a man who lives alone with his power and who lives for it, to the point of saying during a final monologue “you sometimes have to do evil in order to do good”.
So he appears as quiet as strong on taking his decision, as devout as calculating when he thinks about what he has to do, as fatherly with his voters as astute on achieving his purposes.
Like in a sort of revenge against a powerful man famous for his ironic sharp tongue, Sorrentino even enjoyed himself showing Andreotti, who served as Primer Minister seven times and 25 as minister, in a ridiculous way like when her secretary told him to stand erect despite being hunchbacked.
Il Divo is an intense movie, with a fast-paced editing that catches the most inattentive member of the audience, though the story demands at least a slight knowledge of Italian recent history to be comprehensible.
The jury of the Cannes Film Festival awarded Il Divo with its special price in 2008: maybe it is going to have seconds with the British audience.

Il Divo: 2008, Italy/France, Articial Eye, 110 mins, Biopic, in Italian with English subtitles. Director: Paolo Sorrentino.

It exists!

Do you remember the movie 'Notting Hill'? Well, I found the bookshop - the Travel Bookshop - that was runned by Hugh Grant. Nothing new, of course, the movie is quite old, but the place is worthwhile a visit, if you like this sort of thing.