O Vulcão Ginostra

I saw it at the Toronto Film Festival. It sounded good on paper: Harvey Keitel plays a F.B.I. agent protecting the son of a murdered informant in Italy and Andie McDowell is his wife. I like Harvey Keitel but it felt like he was sleep walking through this film. There was no chemistry between him and Andie McDowell and she seemed more like window dressing than a solid female character. The film was slow and didn't lead to anywhere. You couldn't get into the characters and didn't care about them either way. Some of the Italian scenery was interesting but couldn't compensate for the weak script and poor editing.

I saw this movie at the Toronto Filmfest and had such high hopes... soon to be dashed. The plot is both confused and boring, leaving the audience incapable of identifying with the characters. The backdrop of an erupting volcano tries to give the film tension but merely confuses the storyline. Harvey Keitel manages to make some of the movie at least watchable but this movie rated high on the numb-bum-omiter... for a movie pegged at 135 mins it felt like 4 hours.

The whole audience was left in stunned silence at the end of the movie. When the Q and A started the director was asked "what were the evil nuns about? " he didn't seem to know what they were there for either... I'd like to think it was a nod to Monty Python ;-)

Keitel and McDowell clearly are not comfortable with each other in this film. The dialogues are mechanical and the film is boring. Never have I heard McDowell speak her lines with such a strange accent, and her performance is never convincing in this film. But she's not the only one. Keitel's performance is far below par and so is Harry Dean Stanton's.

Will this be the most talked about movie on the year? Perhaps - as everyone will be trying to figure out what went wrong with the film!

I saw this movie @ it's premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival (2002) and I've got to say, it was the most talked about movie between my friends and I. We just had so many questions about what various pieces of the movie meant as we were all sure we had to be missing something. We concluded that no, we didn't miss anything - there just wasn't enough there to tie it all together.

The movie has a lot of beautiful shots of the Italian coast, and the island of Ginostra. I think the editors could have done a much better job of pulling everything together. Also, I just didn't feel any chemistry between Harry Kietel and Andie MacDowell who were playing husband and wife.

Dramas over two hours in length generally fall into two camps - they either have an epic story to tell, full of deep characterisations, complex plots and stunning backdrops, or they stink. Ginostra falls with aplomb into the latter category.

Never has so little happened of such little note in such a long time. If this were not bad enough, never have actors of the calibre of Harvey Keitel and Andie MacDowell delivered such clunky dialogue with such haste and apparent lack of skillful direction or editing.

The likes of Osment and Radcliffe have little to worry about from Mattia De Martino, who plays the son of a chef to the mob who is his immediate family's sole survivor following a car bombing. Keitel is the FBI agent on the case and he and his wife MacDowell base themselves near the island of Ginostra, the site of the bombing, while he tries to pump the child for information.

There is some innuendo between Keitel and Francesca Neri, who plays the wife of the local officer chasing the mob, who in turn appears to fancy MacDowell. Nothing actually materialises, which is the film's major problem - it's quite miserable and very dull. Misery is not necessarily a bad thing in itself, but with nothing else to grab hold of, it's all a bit much.