Ginostra

"Ginostra" is a huge mess.

The Plot: FBI Agent Matt Benson (Keitel) travels to Italy to help a young boy from the mobsters that killed his family run by Del Piero (Stanton). There's also weird nuns (One of them played by Argento) involved with a volcano.....

From the opening scene the movie has already overstayed it's welcome. The movie is just abrupt and edited terribly. Scenes just start\end with no rhythm. Andie MacDowell has nothing to do, and Argento even less, even with the 2-hour plus running time. The best scene in the movie is the confrontation between Keitel and Stanton. The oddest part of the movie is: (Get ready...) One of the mobsters puts a bomb in a sheep and it blows up. I'm not kidding.

No wonder this movie has been on the shelf for over 5 years. It deserved it. Maybe it should've stayed there longer after some editing.

It's only worth sitting though if you're a Keitel completist. Anybody else stay away. Don't be fooled by the quality cast.

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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.

In Italy, in the Sicilian island of Ginostra, Matt Benson (Harvey Keitel) is a FBI agent assigned for the protection and investigation of Ettore Greco (Mattia de Martino), the son of Stefano Greco, a cooker of the Mafia executed with his family by one of the local boss. The boy witnessed the crime and Matt wants also to find out who has double-crossed him in the protection of the boy's father. This long story is very boring, having a confused screenplay without credibility. Who could imagine an experienced American agent, who does not speak Italian, bringing his family for a period of vacation in Mafia territory while performing an important investigation of a crime committed by one of the mobster boss? The great cast and the beautiful `sightseeing' of wonderful landscapes in the Italian islands and the gorgeous eyes and lips of Francesca Neri exhaustively showed by the director Manuel Pradal is not enough to make this movie attractive. My vote is five.

Title (Brazil): ` O Vulcão Ginostra' (` The Volcano Ginostra')