The Florentine

This is a fantastic character driven film, with a great, slightly quirky script, some funny one liners and an excellent cast. Standing out among the uniformly excellent performances are the the great Chris Penn (brilliant as always), Michael Madsen, Tom Sizemore and James Belushi (yes, you did read that right; James Belushi).The film follows a group of friends in the period leading up to a wedding and details how this event impacts on their lives. It's that simple but extremely effective. To say much more about individul story lines would give away too much plot, suffice to say that each character's story is interesting, different and watchable, there are no fillers here! The soundtrack, which features among others, Bruce Springsteen, is superb and really suits the film; one of the best matches of film and music I've heard. This is one of my favourite films and one that bears repeated viewings.

I have seen the rough cut of this picture and it is worth checking out. There is some fine writing by Damien Gray and Tom Benson ably handled by a good cast. Problem one, they all look too fat and too old for the parts. Problem two, the direction is merely competent. Problem three, no ending. it just kind of fizzles out. Hopefully this was fixed in the final edit. Look for good things in the future from the writers.

If you like rock solid acting and don't mind slow moving plots, then, this one's for you. The cast is TOP NOTCH, with fine acting and writing (interesting characters and storyline), and fine visuals. The problem is, THE OPENING. The last thing you wanna do is bore an audience for the first twenty minutes. THE FLORENTINE does this BRILLIANTLY. With a little editing, a little TLC, this movie could be first class.

This movie tries to be great. It does not succeed but I'll take an effort like this over much of the movies I see out of Hollywood. I was reminded a great deal of the Deer Hunter (scenes in the PA town) in the look and feel of the movie. Beautiful acting by the great cast is the real strong point of this movie. The performances by Mike Madsen, Virginia Madsen, Tom Sizemore, Mary Stuart Masterson, Jeremy Davies and Chris Penn are believable. The movie has some great shots and an incredible soundtrack lead by Bob Dylan, Tom Waits and Bruce Springsteen. My only complaint is that it seems to have too much going on. There are at least seven different subplots in the movie. I got the feeling that much was cut out to make it to the 100 minute run time. This movie should have been allowed to be three hours. This is not the fault of the filmmakers. This is well worth the price of a rental or a purchase.

I was very anxious to see this movie since it was filmed where I live, in the Lehigh Valley. It took a long time since it was filmed--about two years ago--to be released. And I must say I'm very happy with it. Great cast and it was a pretty involving story. The Florentine is mostly composed of short scenes between different pairs of actors, and it moves along at a pretty even pace, though it is perhaps a bit slow at times. Overall, I'd rate it a 7 out of 10.