Monica Bellucci

The new Philip Haas film, “The Situation,” is not the first movie to consider the United States’ presence in Iraq. We already have “Turtles Can Fly,” a sharp evocation of life in the Kurdish territories, set in 2004. Though grim, it was brightened by a child’s-eye view, and it closed with the good news—as it seemed to the Kurds—that the Americans were coming. Now, three years on, and three thousand American deaths later, good news sounds like a bad joke, or a half-remembered chimera. Such is the present-day backdrop against which “The Situation” is staged. What it investigates is the policy—pursued by governments and clung to by private souls—of hoping against hope. In Baghdad, an intelligence officer named Dan Murphy (Damian Lewis) continues to work on the principle that hearts and minds may yet be won, swayed, or, at the very least, bought. He arranges the contract for a water-treatment plant; he talks knowledgeably of hospitals that require incubators for babies, whereas his colleague, Wesley (Shaun Evans), scoffing at such idealism, prefers to speak of “democracy by force.” Mind you, Wesley wears a black bow tie with a blue shirt in hundred-degree heat, so he was clearly deranged to begin with. Meanwhile, outside the Green Zone (the phrase is starting to acquire the patina of a Thomas Pynchon setting), Anna Molyneux (Connie Nielsen), an American journalist and occasional bedfellow of Dan, picks her way gingerly through a story: Two Iraqi teen-agers fell afoul of an American checkpoint and got tossed into a river. Only one of them could swim. We see this incident at the start of the film, and duly expect Anna to expose it; but her efforts are fitful, and our attention, like hers, is pulled elsewhere. You could argue that Haas and his screenwriter, Wendell Steavenson, have planned this deliberately, so as to deepen the impression of a country snarled up in loose ends—how can you hope to impose democratic discipline, after all, when a single dumb crime goes unsolved? If so, they are running a double risk. First, we are left with the simple suspicion that Anna isn’t much of a reporter. There is a long, and by now threadbare, tradition of cinematic incursions into foreign lands being led by white Western journalists. Think of “Under Fire,” “Salvador,” or Volker Schlöndorff’s magnificent “Circle of Deceit.” In those instances, however, the hero seems as bedevilled as his destination, whereas Anna is so meek and fretful that, as a character, she is soon outgunned by her surroundings. I sometimes wonder if Connie Nielsen has quite recovered from “Gladiator.” Even now, as she makes love in a hotel room, there is something stunned in her demeanor, as if Joaquin Phoenix were still nuzzling her off camera. Second, if Haas feels no need to spin a tight yarn, that may be because he is too busy making a point. We hear it in the numbness of the dialogue, which could have been adapted from Ionesco. Listen to this exchange: “I’m sorry, it’s the situation.” “Everything is the situation.” Or this: “Let’s not talk about this for one night.” “There’s nothing else to talk about.” Really? There is always triviality whistling around, even in battle (think of “Three Kings,” David O. Russell’s manic take on the first Gulf War, with its meshing of grand purpose and cheap plunder), and Haas’s film tends to pick up speed only when minor characters, bearing furtive agendas, sidle into the frame. Take Zaid (Mido Hamada), an Iraqi photographer whose desire to work with Anna is less professional than shyly affectionate—they lie on a bed and hold hands. Then, there is Duraid (Mahmoud El Lozy), a bearish ex-Baathist with a wide, worldly smile. His sole wish is to quit Iraq (a diplomatic post in Australia, he explains, would do nicely), and he has information, useful to the Americans, that might hasten his departure. There is something about his calm conversation with Dan—they cradle glasses of whiskey, in the sunshine—that beautifully dramatizes the slow, corrupted steps by which civilization needs to be inched ahead. That deceptive tranquillity has long been Haas’s forte, as anybody who saw “The Music of Chance” or “Angels & Insects” will attest. He shot this new movie in Morocco, and the result is convincingly bleached and parched, with piebald cars spraying dust or lining up at gas stations. The combat scenes in “The Situation,” however, do not represent his finest hour, or even his most exciting minute; many years could—and perhaps should—elapse before Iraq finds the director with the energy to do justice to its fissile plight. The camerawork is handheld throughout, yet Haas is not a man of natural jitters, and long after the violence—a climactic American assault on an insurgent stronghold, with Anna trapped foolishly inside—has died down, this awkward and half-digested movie gives off a melancholy reek. One of the last sights is that of Dan, surveying the aftermath of the attack. Under sunlight the color of sand, he finds the incubators he ordered, unused and abandoned. So much for new life. As far as this year’s Academy Awards ceremony is concerned, only two things are certain. One is that the evening will not be Borat-free. The other is that Ennio Morricone will be given an honorary Oscar. He will thus join one of the choicest subsets in Hollywood, headed by Charlie Chaplin and Cary Grant: the Overlooked. These are figures who have been nominated several times (five, in Morricone’s case), who have never won, and to whom the Academy at last, tardily and guiltily, hands a fistful of gold. Borat can expect his forty years from now. Morricone is a composer. There may be moviegoers, as pale as deep-sea creatures, who have seen every film that he has scored; one list puts the tally at five hundred and twenty-eight. On the other hand, no moviegoer over the age of forty will fail to recognize the waa-wuaaah-waa that signalled Morricone’s presence in “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.” That was the third of his collaborations with Sergio Leone, a partnership that was to last from “A Fistful of Dollars” (1964) to “Once Upon a Time in America,” twenty years later, and which I recently heard Quentin Tarantino, in a TV interview, hail as the greatest entwining of composer and director in the history of cinema. The spaghetti Western was nothing without its meat sauce. By way of tribute, February is Morricone month in New York. On the third, there will be a concert of his work at Radio City, with the man himself on the podium—his first such engagement, astonishingly, in the United States. Meanwhile, MOMA will be screening six films, and Film Forum a deafening twenty-six, including some of Morricone’s ventures into Americana, such as “Days of Heaven” and “The Untouchables,” plus two of his projects with Bernardo Bertolucci: “Before the Revolution” and “La Luna.” As for rarities, I like the sound of “A Quiet Place in the Country” (1969), which, according to the program, includes “Nymphomania, Necrophilia, Fetishism, Sadomasochism.” All that and Vanessa Redgrave. Sounds like a job for the horn section. It’s good to be reminded that Morricone was asked to assist the bizarre and the brutal—he supplied the score for Pasolini’s “Salò,” an unforgiving exercise in disgust—because, like any artist who seems to summon loveliness at will, he will always risk being patronized for his facility. You sit down to watch Giuseppe Tornatore’s “Malèna” (2000), and your ears know what to expect: a glorious struggle, as Morricone strives to mold harmonic shapes that can go head to head, or quaver to quaver, with Monica Bellucci. He had already transformed Tornatore’s “Cinema Paradiso” into something more than itself— had stirred longing into its sweetness and thereby bound it together. The same recipe had worked, on a majestic scale, with “Once Upon a Time in America,” where the movie’s most plaintive theme was touched off not just by an old man gazing through the window of his boyhood hangout but also by one of his friends, filmed as a kid, scooping cream from a charlotte russe. What ignites Morricone, in other words, is less the nostalgic impulse than those pure, primal experiences which are destined to become the objects of nostalgia—the laying up of treasures upon earth. To listen to that film is to be surprised by how careful, even sparse, the use of music is. I was under the vague impression that Morricone had been at work throughout, whereas, in fact, he likes to lie in wait. It is that seizing of moments, the shudder of sudden attention, that lifts him to the top stave of movie composers, in all their stealth and pounce. You might not connect Morricone with a work as fiery as Gillo Pontecorvo’s “The Battle of Algiers” (showing at Film Forum on February 9th and 10th), which feels as if it needed no music at all; yet it bursts into a rattle of drums, as French troops, in 1957, head into the Casbah in search of their insurrectionist foes. When young Algerian boys, whipped up by a Muslim call for puritanism, set upon a drunkard and drag him down some steps, we hear three chords of crashing dissonance. Society is now primed to explode. This is Cinema Inferno, and Ennio Morricone, conjuror of the beautiful, is right there in its midst.

French cinema fans flock to look behind the cameras

PARIS (Reuters) - Thousands of French cinema fans flocked to a fair at the weekend to learn some of the secrets behind Italian actress Monica Bellucci's seductive gait or the pastel splendours of Marie Antoinette's Versailles boudoir. France's first Salon du Cinema, an event designed to give cinema goers a glimpse behind the cameras, had attracted close to 50,000 visitors by midday on Sunday, far surpassing the expectations of the organisers. "The idea was to break down the barriers between the public and the people that make the films," said Moise Kissous, one of the event's organisers. The event, which the organisers claim to be the first of its kind in the world, saw some of France's top cinema professionals reveal at least some of their secrets to the public with demonstrations of software, set design and sound effects. Kissous said he had to overcome some fears that allowing filmgoers too close a look would spoil the magic of cinema. But if anything, there seemed to be an extra interest in the sight of the bespectacled Jean-Pierre Lelong, one of the world's leading sound effects editors, using an old boot to create the voluptuous sound of Bellucci's high heels clicking along a Sicilian pavement.

'Rocky' rides tail of 'Museum' overseas

Fox's "Night at the Museum" continued a dominant run overseas, proving that international and U.S. auds are of the same mind these days. Pic topped the charts for the fourth straight frame internationally, taking in just under $15 million off 45 markets abroad. Look for the pic to continue drawing big numbers: It has yet to open in Spain, France, Japan and Italy. Sylvester Stallone's unlikely B.O. belter "Rocky Balboa" also punched up some solid numbers overseas after scoring a better than expected perf Stateside last month. Pic came in second to "Museum" with $11.8 million from just nine markets. Most notable perf, perhaps, came from the U.K., where the pic socked almost $7.2 million from 405 locations. Per-screen average for "Rocky's" Blighty debut was a whopping $17,742, and the pic should have some nice legs in the market. "Rocky" also saw a decent opening round in Mexico, where it topped the charts, barely beating out "Museum" in its third weekend. "Rocky" took in $1.55 million from auds south of the border, off 262, for a per-screen average of almost $6,000. "Museum" was playing in 126 more theaters in Mexico than underdog "Rocky." But the champ wasn't tops everywhere he traveled: Second-frame biz slid sharply by 57% in Italy, to $1.6 million at 370, and by 60% in Spain, to $1.46 million at 312. Away from the top of the charts, a number of Golden Globe winners -- and current Oscar nominees --got some international heat. Paramount Pictures Intl. sent its starry, globe-trotting ensembler "Babel" to the U.K. where the pic took in $1.7 million off 130 for a healthy per-screen average of almost $9,000. Brad Pitt has a winning track record in the U.K., which was a major factor in the pic's success there. Brazil gave pic nominee "Babel" $363,000 off 58. Pic has already cumed $44.1 million to date abroad. That's nearly double its domestic take, where it should get a nice bump from its Oscar noms. Par's other Oscar hopeful, the bigscreen musical "Dreamgirls," turned in a decent $975,165 Down Under, and $143,631 more in New Zealand, for its first taste of overseas booty. Pic next opens in Italy, Mexico and Spain. Another Oscar nominee, Fox's "The Last King of Scotland," held well in Blighty. Pic landed at No. 4, just behind "Museum" in the U.K. charts, with a 15% decline to $1.4 million. Fellow awards fave, Martin Scorsese and Warner Bros.' "The Departed" bowed in Japan with a first-place finish of $2.4 million at 370. Pic took in $1.6 million from 32 other markets to lift foreign cume to $131.4 million and worldwide to $253 million. But the main story overseas from foreign exhibs' standpoint has been "Museum's" boffo run. Pic has hit $173.9 million abroad. That brings the Ben Stiller starrer's worldwide take near $380 million,

and has managed kept the 2007 foreign biz on pace. Pic has now matched the perf of "The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe." Pic has begun to see solid Latin American returns as well: It launched in pole position in Argentina with $508,000 at 110, as well as in Chile with $317,000 at 76 and in Uruguay with $38,000 at 13 -- the fifth best opening ever in that market. As in the States, Will Smith starrer "The Pursuit of Happyness," from Sony, has been playing in "Museum's" shadow, but has still been seeing some impressive returns for a straight drama. Pic generated $8.9 million over the latest frame, from 11 markets, to land in third behind "Rocky." Smith pic was powered by solid soph seshes in Italy, with $3.8 million on about 1,600, and the U.K., with $3.6 million at 419. Pic also saw an impressive German launch of $3.2 million at 500. "Happyness," which opens next weekend in Japan, has topped $24 million overseas. "The story (of 'Happyness') has great appeal," said one German bizzer, "especially in Germany. Many people have been touched directly or indirectly by unemployment over the past decade and there's a lot of sympathy for Will Smith's character, especially since it's a true story." German unemployment remains high at nearly 10%. In other action, Buena Vista's "Deja Vu" has been playing to much better numbers abroad than it did Stateside. The Jerry Bruckheimer-produced sci-fi thriller, starring Denzel Washington, took in $7.3 million in 36 markets over the latest frame. Pic has hit $90.1 million overseas; it's taken in $63.3 million domestically. Top markets included an Australian opening of $2 million at 275 and a Brazilian launch of $650,000 at

90. Pic should easily cross the $100 million foreign mark with launches yet to come in China and Japan. Sony's latest James Bond pic is also still playing solidly abroad, and is another project with better numbers abroad. Pic has played to just under $400 million internationally, and to $164.5 million Stateside. Secret agent added $5.9 million to his cume in the latest frame, from 52 markets. But despite all of Hollywood's big guns, local productions are still making hay in early 2007 as they did last year. Local laffer "Manual of Love 2" scored big time in Italy, where the saucy cross-generational romancer pulled in a boffo $8 million on 590, making it the country's second-best opener ever. Latest hit from Aurelio De Laurentiis' Filmauro stable, "Love 2" interweaves four contempo skits packed with homegrown A-list talent, including Monica Bellucci in a wheelchair sex scene. "Love" bumped "Happyness" from first to second place. And in France, Gallic pics took the top five spots at the B.O. Nick Vivarelli in Italy, Ed Meza in Germany, David Hayhurst in France, Archie Thomas in the U.K. and Dave McNary in Hollywood contributed to this report.

"Cinema Explores Italy" film festival held in Beijing

If all that springs to mind are the faces of Roberto Benigni and Monica Bellucci, then you're missing a whole lot. But that's exactly the case with most people in China. So, "Cinema Explores Italy", a film festival in Beijing, has come to refresh and deepen this impression. If there is such a thing as an Italian seduction, it is epitomized by actress Maria Grazia Cucinotta.

Monica Bellucci | Monica Bellucci 2

Celebrity News Archive