Alexander review

มีนาคม 12th, 2010


directed
by Oliver Stone

US/UK/Germany/Netherlands 2004


I once heard a description of Oliver Stone's work as being
the American equivalent of classic Greek epics. Big themes. Ambitiously told.
Stone’s films are often flawed but full of passion and meaning. When I learned
he was making a film about the life of Alexander The Great I thought if anyone
could pull it off…

The consensus is that Oliver Stone blew it but I have to disagree. I found
Alexander to be an intelligent, beautifully shot and typically complex Oliver
Stone movie. The acting is excellent.

Not only by Colin Farrell, who confidently portrays one of history's biggest
enigmas but also by Val Kilmer, Angelina Jolie, indeed, the entire cast. While
long, the movie is seldom boring. Accepted historical accounts are enacted
faithfully and realistically. Stone puts us in the ancient world and we are
left to deal with the resulting culture shock. Brutality, sexuality and social
interaction are all being thrown at us on their own terms. On my initial
viewing of Alexander, I found that it took me a while to grasp this. Then I
remembered that the first time I see any of Oliver Stone’s films I am left
reeling.

What is made very clear is that Alexander The Great was very much a man of his
time. But, after him the world would never be the same. I have to applaud the
film makers for attempting to put this legacy on film, warts and all.



Posters

Theatrical Unchain: November 16, 2004 (US)


DVD
Review: Warner Residence Video (Widescreen Best Edition) - Dominion 1 - NTSC


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Warner Harshly Video
Bailiwick
1 - NTSC

Runtime

175'

Video

2.40:1
Original Aspect Ratio

16X9 enhanced

Average Bitrate: 6.31 mb/s

NTSC 720×480 29.97 f/s
NOTE: The Vertical axis represents the bits transferred per second. The
Flat is the time in minutes.

Bitrate


Audio

English/French (dubbed in Quebecois) (Dolby
Digital 5.1)

Subtitles

English/French/Spanish (removable)

Features


Release Information:

Studio: Warner Tellingly Video

Standpoint Correlation:

Widescreen anamorphic - 2.40:1


Edition Details:

• Commentary by Oliver Stone and Historian Robin Lane Fox

• Vangelis Scores Alexander

• Behind The Scenes of Alexander with Sean Stone (3 Documentaries):

• Resurrecting Alexander

• Realize Is The Enemy Of God

• The Death Of Alexander

• DVD-ROM PC - Weblink to the Online World of Alexander the Great

• Two Disc/Dual Layer
DVD
Release Year:
August 2, 2005
Two-Disc Keepcase
Chapters 40

Comments


The image
is consistently thoroughly and sharp. Colors are correct, if somewhat warm.
Oliver Stone states in his commentary that he inured to a different color
palette for each of the three worst sections of the big to cue the
viewer since there are some sequences shown into the open air of chronological classify.

The novel aspect relationship is said to be 2.40:1. My measurements indicate
that the DVD perception is roughly 2.37:1 indicating minimal cropping.

The Dolby 5.1 ambience on is clear with good directional effects. It
did not buckle my subwoofer much of a workout. Surprising, since the battle
scenes are tremendous.

The commentary by Stone and Oxford University historian Robin Lane Fox is
very engrossing and informative. The behind the scenes footage shot by
Sean Stone, Oliver's son, is also very entertaining and well worth a look.





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The film opens on a farmyard …

มีนาคม 9th, 2010

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The film opens on a farmyard scene in Arkansas, pig heaven, where
two bumpkins in a pickup come to cart away a hog, a sow and their
several squealing piglets to the stockyards, thence to the
slaughterhouse.

The little piglet named Gordy is out playing in a field, but returns
to see his fat old dad being driven away. Crying out, Gordy runs
after him, his tiny legs going like egg beaters, the itty-bitty
hooves plinking on pavement.

The pigs are being “taken up north, where pigs go” (and
never come back), so Gordy sets out to catch up with his kin. He
meets up with a cute girl
named Jinnie Sue (newcomer Kristy Young, the light of the film) and
her country singer dad, Luke, played by country music star Doug
Stone, a lanky, deep-voiced guy with pleasant hayseed good looks.

They give Gordy a ride into Missouri, where Gordy meets a
boy named Hanky (Michael Roescher), grandson of Henry Royce (Ted
Manson), who is CEO of one of America’s largest companies, Royce
Industries. The conglomerate makes cereal, soda and sausages, among
other things. The singer, Luke, meets Hanky’s pretty mom, Jessica,
and there’s a spark of flirtation between them.

One thing leads to another, including the ability of young
Hanky and Gordy to talk to each other, and Gordy winds up being the
CEO of the
St. Louis-based Royce empire. A lot of the film deals with the
marketing strategies of the company — Gordy is used as a corporate
logo and “spokespig” — and the tedious attempts by an ambitious PR
man to take over the company. It’s unlikely kids will feel there’s
much at stake.

“Gordy’s” strongest suit is the piglet’s determination to
reunite with his family, and that part of the convoluted plot
develops into a folksy comic effort as Jinnie Sue, her dad, Hanky and
Gordy race to save the family of pigs from becoming sausages. One
would think the pork industry would be livid about this film as it
portrays pig slaughter as an outrageous evil. The highlight
comes when Gordy jumps into a backyard swimming pool — piglets
really are cutest when they put their little trotters together and
dive — and saves Hanky from drowning.

Generally speaking, time would be better spent with
“Charlotte’s Web” than this forgettable hogwash.

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Layer Cake (2005)

มีนาคม 7th, 2010

Do you know what a Ramora fish is?’ Michael Gambon’s ageing crimelord loftily inquires of Daniel Craig’s nameless, younger and very successful cocaine relations in this smart crime thriller. ‘Yes,’ Craig replies calmly, immediately puncturing his potent elder’s posturing claptrap. The well-known black hat needed so that changeth in this modish directorial inauguration from the restrain with the dubious keep of producing Guy Ritchie’s films.
Vaughn survives the transition from producer to director well, but first and foremost this is Craig’s film. As a extreme-suited, exhaustively present-day unlawful, he dances around an endlessly-evolving cast of gangster types, trying but failing to relinquish the messy drugs corporation into which he slips more and more at every tick of the clock. JJ Connolly’s novel (and script) gives Vaughn a credible manageress of characters to looseness with, and the director refrains from spoof. Instead, he paints a distinct, muted view of the London underworld, indulging in the rising towers and grey skies of Canary Wharf to stress the onset of a new crime generation, fuelled by drugs and Eastern European muscle. Sure, Jamie Foreman and Dexter Fletcher are familiar Brit-gangster flick faces, but Craig, Gambon, Kenneth Cranham and Ben Whishaw add some greeting gravitas to an if not tired genre.
Peel away the suits, the caricaturist, the drugs, the chases and the twists, and you’re not left with much else . But what else do you poverty from a slick misdemeanour thriller with overtones of ‘The Prolonged Good Friday’? At least Vaughn has buried the cartoon ghosts of ‘Lock, Stock…’ and ‘Snatch’ (and the myriad pretenders to their throne), and in the process proved himself a more sensitive, perceptive director than Ritchie ever was.

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There’s more than a few spira…

มีนาคม 4th, 2010

There’s more than a infrequent spirals of DNA missing from the script of “Jurassic Park III,” an all-action, helter-skelter, don’t-forget-to-buy-the-computer-game ride that makes the two previous installments look like models of ideal filmmaking. Showing all the signs of having been stripped back at a in stage into a impoverished, 91-minute chase system — and to hell with pacing and character phenomenon — pic has that unmistakable feeling of a franchise being severed from its inventive roots with considerable confusion all over what to put in its place. Watch for a provocative opening, followed by a faster than stock falloff, for this latest seg of the dino Edda which, if the series ever makes it to “IV,” resolve be seen as a depression halt throughout refueling rather than a full lap around the track.

Except for the visual effects, the movie has a hand-me-down feel. The first two installments used largely the same key talent behind the lens and two key actors (Jeff Goldblum, Richard Attenborough) in front of it, giving them a homogeneous feel. With “JP III,” however, the script’s not based on a Michael Crichton novel, and — aside from Stan Winston and a few others on the dino side of things — there’s an all new crew on the tech side. Even with Steven Spielberg in the coach’s chair, there’s an unmistakable sense that the reserve team has gone in to bat.

Opening with an OK teaser sequence in which a young kid (Trevor Morgan) and an adult (Mark Harelik) are attacked by an unseen thing when parasailing over Isla Sorna, pic adopts a real-time stance. It’s eight years after the original debacle at John Hammond’s theme park on nearby Isla Nublar, and Hammond’s company, InGen, is a memory. One of his original invitees, Dr. Alan Grant (Sam Neill), is struggling to maintain funding for his paleontology research. Grant is keen to develop his theory of velociraptor intelligence, but auds at his fundraising lectures only want to hear more tales about Jurassic Park.

Grant is approached by Paul Kirby (William H. Macy), and his wife, Amanda (Tea Leoni), to guide an aerial tour of Isla Sorna, the so-called Site B (and setting for “The Lost World”), where InGen secretly bred the dinos and where they’ve been on the loose for almost a decade. Presenting themselves as wealthy thrill-seekers who want to buzz the quarantined island, the couple asks the cash-strapped Grant to name his price.

These establishing reels have a hasty feel that prefigures many of the film’s later problems. Laura Dern briefly reprises her role of Ellie from the first movie; other characters are clumsily introduced and thinly drawn. Result is that, when Kirby, against Grant’s wishes, tries to land the plane on the island, the viewer is plunged into immediate action with only the barest idea of who most of the characters are.

Pic’s first major action sequence is a highly kinetic screamfest, with the plane crashing into some tree-tops and its occupants being attacked by a spinosaurus, the movie’s much-touted new villain. As the fuselage rolls this way and that, the sequence plays like a B-movie version of the dangling Winnebago sequence in “Lost World” — heavy on screams and visceral shocks but lacking in deep-seated, skin-crawling fear.

The truth is that the lumbering spino, despite its larger size, longer jaw and fancy back fin, just doesn’t cut it as a substitute T-Rex. With none of the T-Rex’s extensive backgrounding, this new addition to Winston’s dino lineup looks more like an escapee from a Japanese monster movie.

Following an attempted escape in another plane, pic settles into one long chase movie. The two previous installments had varied situations and cross-plots in which the humans and animals interacted, plus a larger story arc in which the action sequences were implanted. Here, the majority of the movie takes place in jungle settings with the cast running between them as predators arrive on the scene.

Smidgen of a script cooked up by three credited (and two uncredited) writers soon reveals that Kirby and Amanda are in fact a divorced couple searching for their 14-year-old son, Eric, and Amanda’s boyfriend, Ben — the parasailing pair attacked in the opening teaser.

“JP III” thus becomes a very different movie from the previous two pics, in which human hubris received its just deserts when protective technology proved inadequate. Here, the protagonists are never in control: They’re dino-dinner from the get-go. In essence, pic becomes a prehistoric variation on another genre: Americans under threat in a hostile, foreign environment. Unsurprisingly, the final line of dialogue is “Let’s go home.”

Direction by Joe Johnston, who cut his teeth as a visual f/x designer before graduating to effects showpieces “Honey, I Shrunk the Kids” and “Jumanji,” keeps the action ticking but without the broader sweep he brought to adventure saga “The Rocketeer.” Blame that largely on the script; lame attempts at humor and characterization make even the few surviving moments of non-action dialogue painful to sit through.

As the only hardened specialist of the group, Neill’s paleontologist is largely reduced to looking worried and uttering apocalyptic warnings. Grant’s protege Billy (Alessandro Nivola) is thinly drawn, and even the usually reliable Macy looks like he signed for the wrong movie. Following her career rebound with “The Family Man,” Leoni is a major disappointment, stuck in an annoying role in which her character spends a lot of time screaming and running around. As the sensible young Eric, Morgan acquits himself best, bypassing most of the young-teen cliches and sharing one above-par, quiet moment with Neill.

Still, pic’s effects are extremely impressive, with the creatures rendered with a smoothness and believability that puts even the first two installments in the shade. Whether caught in the middle of a stampede, face to face with intelligent velociraptors or gazing from afar, the human cast members become of a piece with their prehistoric co-stars thanks to superb work by Winston and the ILM team that blurs the line between live action and CG.

But with so little going on among the humans, the sheer amount of creature work robs the critters of much of their menace and surprise. Most impressive among the newcomers — and eerily pre-figured in the final shot of “The Lost World” — are the flying pteranodons, whose encounter with the hapless humans in a giant aviary is worth the price of admission alone. For a brief spell, the movie manages to recapture the shock of the new that drove Spielberg’s original movies; thereafter, pic tails off in search of a finale that never arrives.

Other credits are functional rather than atmospheric, with Don Davis’ score faithfully recycling John Williams’ original themes and Shelly Johnson’s workaday lensing at its best in the impressively clammy, studio-created jungles rather than the Hawaiian exteriors.

Final reel, which most shows signs of last-minute cutting, leaves room for a sequel featuring the pteranodons.

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Bellamy: ‘You bastard!’ Marvin…

มีนาคม 2nd, 2010

Bellamy: ‘You bastard!’ Marvin: ‘In my pack an casualty of birth, but you, sir, are a self-made man’. Brooks could certainly write a stripe and direct action, but his smart and disillusioned yarn of American mercenaries intruding into the Mexican revolution to ‘rescue’ Cardinale had only a couple of years in vital favour more willingly than it was comprehensively eclipsed by Peckinpah’s externally similar The Wild Sort.

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Tea With Mussolini (1999)

กุมภาพันธ์ 27th, 2010

Much tea is consumed but hardly any sympathy evoked in Franco Zeffirelli’s semiautobiographical kind piece, which centers on a group of English and American eccentrics in northern Italy during the be nurtured of Fascism and WWII. Some first-class lone perfs by the tony formulation, plus amercement period exhaustively and costumes, make the adjust pass justly agreeably, but “Tea With Mussolini” suffers from a fateful lack of focus and emotional center, reducing potentially involving real to a succession of person scenes. Box work looks to be decent at best, at any rate an recuperation on Zeffirelli’s earning power this past decade or so.

As he showed in his last pic, the underrated “Jane Eyre” (1996), Zeffirelli can still come up with the dramatic goods when he has a strong cast and a script with a backbone. In “Mussolini,” he has the former in spades, but he and co-writer John Mortimer fail to transform the broad parameters of helmer’s childhood into a thoroughgoing slice of drama. Where Zeffirelli’s alter ego, here called Luca, should provide emotional continuity and a sense of perspective on the bizarre community, he becomes little more than a bystander as the various distaff leads walk in and out of the spotlight.

Spanning 10 years, story starts in Florence in 1935, when cultured Brits’ love affair with Italy was still on a roll and “Mussolini was just a man who made the trains run on time.” Luca (Charlie Lucas) is a young local kid whose mother has run away and whose stern father, a fabric importer, is more than happy when he’s taken in by Mary (Joan Plowright), an Englishwoman who lives at the aptly named Pensione Shelley.

Mary and her circle of Brits of a certain age — dubbed “the scorpions” for their tart wit and snobbish manners — rally ’round to take care of Luca. Chief among them are the snooty Lady Hester (Maggie Smith) and arty, dog-loving Arabella (Judi Dench), who prances around uttering phrases like “I’ve drunk deep the wine of Firenze.” Mostly centered on Plowright and Dench’s characters, pic’s first two reels are genuinely likable, with a rich array of personalities intro’d and the warm, string-and-piano score drawing the viewer into their world.

With the entrance of Cher, as rich American collector Elsa on a swing through Italy (”where all the bargains are now”), the film agreeably broadens beyond just a portrait of English eccentrics, with Lily Tomlin adding some twinkle-eyed humor as Georgie, an easygoing lesbian who lives nearby. At the same time, however, the script’s episodic structure starts to become apparent, with Plowright and Dench largely fading into the background and Smith’s aristocrat moving to centerstage, initially dispensing anti-American witticisms and then leading a personal delegation to meet with Mussolini. She wants Benito’s personal assurance that they are in no personal danger from rampaging Fascist gangs.

After that set piece, with Claudio Spadaro as a creepily polite Il Duce, the film really starts to jump the rails. Luca, in danger of becoming steeped in English manners, is sent to Austria for a “German education,” and the first in a series of tacky date captions flash across the screen like an old-style newsreel as we leap forward to 1940, the war, and the women’s disillusionment with Mussolini.

In short order, there follows the expats’ internment in the beautiful hilltop town of San Gimignano, Luca’s return as a handsome teen (Baird Wallace) and a manufactured climax as the Jewish Elsa is smuggled out of the country. Tacked-on ending, which goes at least a reel too far, tries to restore the opening comic tone. With Smith basically phoning in her patented performance, and Cher good but emotionally remote as the gold-digging Elsa, the real acting honors go to Plowright, nicely restrained as the essentially lonely Mary, and Tomlin, equally subtle as the relaxed but observant Georgie. Both bring a measure of continuity to the shapeless drama, though it’s not enough to make the whole confection work. Cast as a dotty old dame, Dench gets few opportunities, and often seems to be in a different movie. Wallace is vanilla as the grown Luca.

Though costume design is excellent, with a lived-in look, the $14 million production has a fiscally prudent feel overall, not helped by David Watkin’s untextured lensing, which is often flat and sometimes plain unattractive. This absence of visual elan is nothing new for Zeffirelli, hardly the most elegant of directors, but is far more noticeable here than in, say, “Jane Eyre” (also shot by Watkin), where at least the heart and mind were fully engaged. Italian-British co-production was largely backed by Medusa Film, part of the media empire of Silvio Berlusconi, whose political party Zeffirelli has represented for several years.

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The Secret Adventures of Tom Thumb review

กุมภาพันธ์ 26th, 2010

The hour-hanker, stop-action animated “The Secret Adventures of Tom Thumb” is imaginatively crafted, but too simplistically written. Writer-director Dave Borthwick employs both actors and clay models to tell the little protagonist’s story. Tom, the sequel of artificial insemination run amok, is born to the doting Thumbs (Nick Upton and Deborah Collard), residents of a post-industrial, cockroach-infested slum. The sweet-faced preemie is in a jiffy torn away from his home and confined to a laboratory full of other tearful freaks; Thumb pere becomes a depression-stricken barfly, who just sits and stares at Tom’s neonate personification. Ultimately, this film is an seal of accustomed family values.

“Franz Kafka: It’s a Wonderful Life” is a droll 24-minute film about the writing bug. Mr. K (a hilarious Richard E. Grant) attempts to complete the first line of his novel “Metamorphosis” but is constantly interrupted by the celebrations of his downstairs neighbors on this spooky Christmas Eve. Peter Capaldi directed this delightfully improbable spoof, which, like the Borthwick film, also manages to be oddly heartwarming.

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Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (2001)

กุมภาพันธ์ 24th, 2010

If the studios had needed a mysterious weapon during the recent contract negotiations with the Screen Actors Guild, they could have tolerant of “Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within.” The first crucial present to quirk an entire casting of computer-generated fallible characters, this bigscreen fitting of the long-popular interactive computer game is visually affecting if not dramatically premeditated, and is considerable by “acting” that is no worse than that found in the majority of sci-fi films. Teens, extraordinarily game players and boys already turned on to the beautiful practical heroine Dr. Aki Ross, will constitute a hefty commencement-weekend audience exchange for this sleek but distant entertainment, although how much repeat biz or inquisitiveness among non-aficionados it will form is questionable. But as computer game-derived features go, it sure beats “Lara Croft: Grave Raider.” Foreign approaching, markedly in Asia, look big, as does home viewing revenue down the line.

The “Final Fantasy” game first appeared in 1987 and reached a crescendo of popularity with the release of the eighth and ninth installments over the past two years. Creator Hironobu Sakaguchi has controlled the game every step of the way and maintained a total grip on the film as well in his capacities as story writer, producer and director (co-director Motonori Sakakibara has worked with him as an animator and director since 1995). Al Reinert, who co-wrote the script with Jeff Vintar, was born in Japan and more than earned his space-travel stripes as producer-director of the docu “For All Mankind” and co-writer of “Apollo 13.”

Although it treads such familiar movie and sci-fi territory as a decimated planet Earth (New York City takes it on the chin again), aliens that can get up inside you and intense battles in which a few stalwart humans try to keep the savage hordes at bay, pic is marked by an Eastern, one-world spiritual and philosophical approach quite different from the gung-ho action mentality found in most Western futuristic epics. In tone and attitude, “Final Fantasy” is much closer to the modern Japanese animated classic “Princess Mononoke,” which dealt with disruptions in the overarching harmoniousness of the natural world order, than to the kick-butt mindset one normally expects in the computer game arena.

On the other hand, all the highfalutin talk about wave theory, spirit signatures, dream visions and energy forces — much of it from the mouth of a resident bald sage — will more readily remind many viewers of “Star Trek,” which is both a good and a bad thing. The phantoms — opaque, dragon-like creatures that appear, float about and vanish like ghosts — that represent the ostensible evil here aren’t particularly effective villains, so there is a fundamental lack of visceral engagement in the central conflict. Film boasts enough action and incident to hold the attention over the relatively brisk running time, but it’s a calm, polite sort of attention, one without compelling involvement or resonance.

Curiously, then, for a film that’s both animated and a sci-fier, most of the interest stems from the appeal of its principal character. A cool, composed, dark-haired beauty who resembles a blend of Jennifer Love Hewitt and Bridget Fonda, Dr. Aki Ross is introduced on an exploratory mission to Old New York City in 2065. In terms of narrative, which involves Aki and some friendly soldiers shooting at elusive light forms in the ruined streets of the city and later being scanned for contagion, initial action is fairly confusing. But this doesn’t matter much, since one is absorbed during the opening stretch simply beholding the physical look of this new artistic universe.

Style is dubbed “hyperRealism” by its makers, a term that seems as good as any, since it very narrowly walks the line between photographic realism and ultra-vivid painterly detail; backgrounds are close to the sort of lifelike representations of otherworldly settings that have graced the covers of sci-fi novels over the years. Same can be said of the characters. In what will prove most threatening to flesh-and-blood actors, the virtual figures here are sufficiently real-looking to evoke virtually emotional (and virtually erotic) responses. It would seem that computer animators have cleared the major hurdles in the way of creating wholly credible human characters and now are in the home stretch toward achieving it. More than any feature film that has appeared to date, this one makes one ponder the uneasy question of how replaceable actors may be — and how soon — in dramatic material.

This is hardly to make any claims for the emoting done by the computer drawings herein, which are no more emotionally expressive than animated characters have been over the decades. But it must also be acknowledged that Aki has far more palpable impact than a normal cartoon character, both because of her demure, seemingly unconscious sexiness and her unusual degree of intelligence, spirituality and focus. As an object of appeal and admiration, and as a role model, she rates very high, even if she was created in a computer on Waikiki Beach.

Once the storyline emerges from the shadows, it has something to do with the crisis among humans as to how to fight the aliens. The military, repped by the determined General Hein (voiced by James Woods), naturally wants to blast them back to wherever they came from with his all-powerful Zeus Cannon. Although Hein is restrained by a reason-seeking Council, there isn’t much time, which puts heavy pressure on the already infected Aki (smartly voiced by Ming-Na, who previously did the vocal honors for Mulan) and her egg-headed mentor, Dr. Sid (Donald Sutherland) to find the eight spirits that, combined, will create an energy wave to offset the predatory force repped by the spectral aliens.

Since the ghostly monsters are too pale and ephemeral to be truly scary, some more vivid adversaries are introduced in nightmare visions Aki has courtesy of her alien infection. But the Eastern p.o.v. is pronounced, and even the presence of Yank-speaking-and-looking characters isn’t enough to prevent this from feeling more like a Japanese film than an American one.

A potential romance between Aki and her crew’s captain (Alec Baldwin) is nipped in the bud, but the captain will have his own impact on young femme viewers, as he’s been sculpted from the hardest brave-and-buff stone. Voicing is solid down the line, and pic evinces a craftsmanlike fastidiousness throughout all levels of production.

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Buddy (Will Ferrell) is a huma…

กุมภาพันธ์ 23rd, 2010

Buddy (Will Ferrell) is a human who was mistakenly taken as a baby by Santa Claus (Edward Asner). Although raised by Santa’s Papa Elf (Bob Newhart), Buddy finds it difficult to spasm in with the elf lifestyle. When some other elves induct trip that he’s really a humanitarian, Papa Elf explains to him that he was put up for adoption in the presence of his adventure with Santa, and his get Walter Hobbs (James Caan) is living in Chic York City. Buddy sets out to bring to light his dad; but when he arrives in New York, in elf clothing and talking more Santa, he’s treated like a nut and rejected by Walter. He finds sanctuary in a kickshaw store, where he’s faulty for a sales assistant. There he meets Jovie (Zooey Deschanel), and almost immediately falls after her. But he undisturbed needs to connect with Walter.

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Three Lives and Only One Death review

กุมภาพันธ์ 21st, 2010

Shock horror! Raul Ruiz makes an accessible, intelligible, interesting skin! An intriguing comedy in which Mastroianni plays four roles - a travelling salesman, an anthropologist-turned-tramp involved with a somewhat unusual hooker, a strangely laconic butler, and a well off industrialist - in (in)consequential stories which finally go into to overlie. What it all adds up to is a mystery (though the title may provide a hint), but the playfulness, the first-rate cast, the charm of Mastroianni’s performance, and the discreet grace of the mostly make for the purpose very civilised entertainment.

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