demoleft's Journal - EuroDem from Italy - Quentin Tarantino is right on Italian movies. They're just depressing, I'd say!

It's not what he claims to have said, though.
In an interview in LA he told an Italian newspaper he was misunderstood in Cannes, where his cruel judgment on Italian contemporary cinema angered many in my Country. He had just answered a question about the Italian Cinema Industry, that he judged sad, or just depressing.

Excuses made, what's left is a terribly true statement: the italian movies engage in private tragedies, in soft reflections on human nature that, to me, are in tragic contrast with the explosive reality of this world - just think about the M.E., Africa, the immigration, the return of anti-semitic feelings and cultures, the new glimpse of cold-war and the struggle democracy has to bear every day even in democratic countries like USA or Italy.

I posted something on the Italian movies asking myself: who's going to tell these times we're living to the future generations? Who's going to tell the stories in movies?
http://journals.democraticunderground.com/...

Not Italians, Tarantino is right.
The last two movies he appreciated were Il Postino (The postman) with Massimo Troisi - poor Massimo's last movie: he died before the release (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massimo_Trois... - http://www.massimotroisi.net/pagina1.html ) - and Roberto Benigni's La vita è bella.

Both though had to do with past events and the power of poetry in the tragedy.

What we're missing, if I understand Tarantino, is
1.action movies (like oriental ones) to feed the industry,
2. women more protagonists and not merely victims or co-starring,
3. more truth-based narrations and scenes, like in his beloved revolutionary Spaghetti-Western (Sergio Leone & Clint Eastwood, Sergio Corbucci), the italian movies that in the 60's and 70's changed the genre of Western introducing real Elizabethan theatrical characters: the good ones were partly bad, the bad ones had some sparkle of glory. The end of melodrama.
Not to mention the flies and the sweat that were everywhere to be suffered as elements of everyday life, misery that was dominant and cowboys who were just dejected people who had to work hard to survive and had long stopped dreaming their golden dreams...

Looks like a world similar to our own. It reminds me of the Afghan scenes in BABEL, the last movie I really appreciated.
What about the exploding half of the world? The responsibilities of the Western countries?

We need a shout.
But who's going to make it in our feeble Italian movies?