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Life is Beautiful

Cat Chant

09:48 / 08.04.02

I saw this on Film Four last night and thought it was brilliant (okay, there were some problems with it, but frankly far fewer than with Schindler's List). Is there an old thread I should look at before I start a new one about it?

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

10:02 / 08.04.02

I don't know, but it was the fact that this film almost made me cry BUT DIDN'T QUITE (and I felt like I should have been in floods of tears) that made me stop taking anti-depressants. One of the best films ever made, as far as I'm concerned. (And Benigni's Oscar speech was the most charming thing I've ever seen/heard.)

grant

15:12 / 08.04.02

www.filmthreat.com - the Film Threat editor *hated* this movie.

I didn't. Loved the bits in the nightclub before things got grim.

One of the nice things about Begnini's speech is that the seaters didn't expect him to win, so they seated him way back in the center of the crowd, not near an aisle. He actually climbed over people's backs, Crocodile Dundee-style, to get to the stage.

Yes, it's a good movie. But did you know Jerry Lewis tried to do it first, with a movie called "The Day the Clown Cried." Well, it's similar.

Film Threat didn't like the script to this one, either.

Baz Auckland

15:27 / 08.04.02

It's one of those movies that you love or really, really, hate. I thought it was great and damn funny.. (well, not all of it of course, but the first 1/2); while a friend of mine (as well as Spielberg) thinks that it was awful to say the least.

wembley can change in 28 days

20:00 / 08.04.02

I'm in the it-was-awful camp. Well, I really dug the hat tricks and some of the comedic moments, but something about it left a bad aftertaste. I kind of (but not entirely) agree with those who bring up the criticism that it tended to trivialise the events of the war.

Cat Chant

08:19 / 09.04.02

I had some problems with how clean it was, as well as the fact that the wife was such a plot device; I think it could perhaps have done with being filmed in a less realistic style.

But I fell in love with it for the bit where Guido's explaining the "No Jews or dogs" sign to his son as if it was completely contingent ("We'll have a sign saying 'No Spiders or Visigoths!'"); and I appreciated the way it was trying to talk about the Holocaust in a different way from the now-institutionalized pomposity of a film like Schindler's List; and I'd rather have the events of the war trivialized than fetishized, as in, again, Schindler's List.

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