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Reviews
Ariaferma (2021)
Amazingly accurate
While viewing this film I couldn't help but think of two things.
1) How outerworldly this must look to the public used to Hollywood depiction of jails
2) How well portrayed the reality of certain italian jails is.
Mind you, my mother worked for Amministrazione Penitenziaria (what in the US would be the Department of Corrections) so I spent a very big chunk of my early life in several prisons around Italy.
Prisons in Italy can be very different, but the rule of thumb is "if it's on an island it's bad". Not Alcatraz bad, but you don't expect to find easy inmate in an island prison. The jail in the film is located in Sardinia which is an island, but big, so it's bad but not as bad as smaller insular facilities like Asinara or Gorgona.
Obviously such jails had huge running costs so the italian government did start to shut them down in favour of different - and hopefully more modern - structures.
I've seen the situation depicted in the movie SO many times: prisoners and personnel start to get relocated, the director is sent to another facility and possibly gets back once or twice a year.
Those prisons become some sort of microcosm where everybody, be it inmate, guard, administration or their relatives take part in everyday challenges.
The boundary between good and evil blurs. The fact itself that someone has been really evil (islands used to be the default option for organized crime) vanishes and you end up fishing with a funny guy who has strangled his wife and kids or talking about the best honeys with a very calm guy who could be a friar and instead ordered killing entire families.
What might be unclear is that there's humanity even in a jail and this movie delivers this in such a poetic way all played on a kind of suspence that is so uncommon to see and experiment.
It really doesn't get much better than this.
Savage Salvation (2022)
Kept checking how much time was left
I think the title says it all but, since I have another 550 chars left... despite the cast having some big names it was that bad.
I wouldn't even say it was bad acting just the whole film felt soulless.
The plot seems something out of time, it could have been meaningful had it come before the Zoo station and all the drug-vengeance production we have had since the 80s but even so... boy is it clueless and just not working.
It seems like some old chap at a production firm opened a drawer that had been shut for 40 years and pulled out this story - which had been denied production ever since and not without reason.
I kinda feel sorry for Robert and John "having" to accept this script.
Avatar: The Way of Water (2022)
Na'vi SEALs - someone had to say it
Seen in 3D.
I was not very enthusiast of the first movie, but its visive language had some form of poetry that simply wasn't there in the sequel.
Yes, the graphics are there, but that intangible is simply not.
In terms of an actual movie - not just images - the plot is thin, predictable, and with plenty of things that just don't make sense and can hardly be ascribed to the characters making bad decisions under pressure.
The characters themselves are SO cliché it sometimes becomes embarrassing.
But I guess that wouldn't be so bad if way too many scenes hadn't been cut WAY too looooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooong. You get what I mean 🤷♂️
While sometimes you can accept that because there is some need to showcase what millions of dollars in CGI have produced, in the "acted" scenes it just doesn't make sense: the movie becomes utterly oversized, slow and howmuchareyougonnadragthisyetffs?
As if the similarities with Dune were not obvious enough in the first chapter the authors decided to make them adamant by introducing giant animals who move beneath the horizon, have three lipped mouths and produce a substance that makes your life long: plot twist, it's not the film script.
I gotta say... The visuals and effects are there and they are the only thing that make this utterly flat and predictable story worth seeing.