Noticias

From left: Kate Micucci, Alison Brie and Aubrey Plaza play nuns with pent-up lust and schemes that are played for bawdy comedy and slapstick absurdity in a movie based on a 14th-century story. Photo: Gunpowder & Sky (c)

Writer/director Jeff Baena draws on Giovanni Boccaccio’s 14th The Decameron for The Little Hours, a bawdy, absurd comedy where the F-bombs fly through air thick with schemes and suppressed lust. Some audiences may object to foul-mouthed women religious but for those who don’t, Baena’s comedy is very amusing, as well as a clever updated twist on a medieval classic.

Nuns in the 14th century were different from today, as a convent was a place where prosperous families could send unmarried daughters or in which women without wealth could shelter, as much as a place for the religiously devout. Like Chaucer’s later The Canterbury Tales, these women in habits could speak in plain,...

Admirers of Giovanni Boccaccio's 14th-century work The Decameron (that's all of us, right?) will not be surprised to learn that Jeff Baena's adaptation The Little Hours ignores most of the tome's 100 tales, honing in only on a couple that revolve around a convent whose nuns are ready to do a bit of vow-breaking. What may be a surprise is that this zippy pic works so well — incorporating enough 21st-century attitude to emulate Boccaccio, who wrote in the vernacular of his day, without descending into silly, anything-goes anachronism. Top-shelf comic talent should attract more attention than usual for a...

Title: Maraviglioso Boccaccio Director: Paolo and Vittorio Taviani Starring: Lello Arena, Paola Cortellesi, Carolina Crescentini, Flavio Parenti, Vittoria Puccini, Michele Riondino, Kim Rossi Stuart, Riccardo Scamarcio, Kasia Smutniak, Jasmine Trinca and Josafat Vagni. The Taviani Brothers, have decided to tribute one of Italy’s greatest Renaissance humanist, Giovanni Boccaccio. The “Decameron” which has had many screen adaptations – the most memorable was by Pier Paolo Pasolini - lives again through the subtle direction of the Tuscan sibling filmmakers, who chose Giotto and Masaccio to inspire their cinematography, scenography and costume design. The book by Boccaccio is structured as a frame story containing 100 tales, told by a group of seven young [ Read More ]

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Italian film director and screenwriter who established a new school of social-realist comedy

The Italian film director Mario Monicelli has died aged 95, after jumping out of a hospital window in Rome. Monicelli directed more than 60 films, most of which he co-wrote. He was best known for I Soliti Ignoti (Big Deal On Madonna Street, 1958), which was nominated for an Oscar for best foreign-language film. It was remade by Louis Malle as Crackers (1984) and turned into a Broadway musical, Big Deal, by Bob Fosse in 1986. Monicelli's original is one of the most internationally admired Italian comedies of the past 60 years.

Born in Viareggio, Tuscany, Monicelli was the son of a journalist, Tomaso Monicelli, who founded one of the earliest Italian film magazines. Tomaso killed himself in 1946. Mario studied at the universities of Milan and Pisa and took an early interest in films. With the future publisher Alberto Mondadori, he collaborated...