kikoz

Monitor is a small and straightforward story, yet inventive and intense. The direction and the script are clear cut, managing to keep the audience always on the edge. Both as a love story and a dystopian fable, Monitor manages to enthrall you with a few well-played means, turning the budget limits into virtue.

Director Alessio Lauria has a sharp, expressive eye, always knowing where to put the camera in order to get the best out of the slick script (co- written by Manuela Pinetti). Also, he knows how to direct actors: he gets a well-controlled but intense and meaningful performance out of the leading actors (Valeria Bilello and Michele Alhaique).

Incredibly cheap story about a man (Giorgio Porcaro, the one who created the Terrunciello character along with Diego Abatantuono) who claims falsely to be Mogol (one of the most famous Italian writer of popular song lyrics) in order to reach the rampaging millionaire Max Bernasconi (a great Massimo Boldi) - a clear, surprisingly early parody of Silvio Berlusconi. Delirious plot, demented characters, mass quantities of Terrunciello's slang: everything fits into one of the last focused effort of dying Italian genre cinema to create laughs just with bodies and language, out of a super shoe-string budget. Between cinema and television stand-up comedian situation, ultra-popular and ultra-poor, "Si ringrazia la regione Puglia per averci fornito i milanesi" (literally:"We thank Puglia County for providing the Milanese people") is an 80s stra-cult of Italian derailed comic cinema. A must see for every fan.

If you read too much you'll go crazy... so just kick off your fiction and watch this one! Shoestring budget (but shot on film!), quirky concept, good actors, fitting direction: a strange giallo-comedy short film from independent Italian producer/writer Antonello Sammito and director Nicola Barnaba. Pretty fun.