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The Proposal

Review: Gomorrah, The Proposal and A Bunch of Amateurs

By Cinema, Reviews

Gomorrah posterMartin Scorsese isn’t just a legendary dir­ect­or, he is also one of the world’s great enthu­si­asts for cinema – the defin­it­ive cine­aste if you will. By head­ing the World Cinema Foundation, he has lent his sub­stan­tial imprim­at­ur to major works of film res­tor­a­tion and he also uses his influ­ence to endorse sig­ni­fic­ant new European work, help­ing to get films like 2007’s The Golden Door wider atten­tion and dis­tri­bu­tion. Thus, “Martin Scorsese presents” Gomorrah, which opened nation­wide this week after stints at last year’s film fest­iv­al and the World Cinema Showcase in March.

Acclaimed around the world as a mod­ern mas­ter­piece, I don’t have much to add to the read­ily avail­able exist­ing plaudits. Squarely in the Italian neo-realist tra­di­tion, Gomorrah is a hand-held look at the cur­rent state of mafia affairs in Naples where a bru­tal work­ing class gang known the Camorra holds sway over the hous­ing estates and the impov­er­ished peas­ant classes. From pro­tec­tion rack­ets and drugs to the dis­pos­al of tox­ic waste, there’s not much that they aren’t into, mak­ing sure that all the gains are laundered swiftly into legit­im­ate busi­nesses that con­tin­ue to oper­ate around the world.

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Apologia

By meta

Once again I stop by simply to apo­lo­gise for the lack of updates and for the reviews arriv­ing so late as to be all but use­less to a Wellington cinema-goer. What can I say? Life’s been a bitch. But things are look­ing up. Today I fin­ished read­ing “Sag Harbor” by Colson Whitehead at 2am, just in time to review it for Nine to Noon later this morn­ing. In between I man­aged 650 words for the Capital Times on Gomorrah, The Proposal and A Bunch of Amateurs.

Things should be get­ting easi­er over the next few weeks, but Film Festival is almost upon us and I have a stack of pre­view DVDs to get through. By the week­end I should have got all the out­stand­ing reviews up, and the “now show­ing” to your right will make some sense too. I’m even threat­en­ing to update WordPress to 2.8 and the blog theme too.

Tonight, though, I intend to have some din­ner out of the microwave, put the feet up on the couch and watch at least one stored epis­ode of Top Gear so it feels like a night off.