Word: lina
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
When in Rome..., but when in San Francisco, improvise. At least that was what Italian Director Lina Wertmuller did on the set of A Night Full of Rain. While shooting a scene with Actor Gianearlo Giannini atop a 52-story skyscraper, Lina decided that the Bank of America building simply wasn't high enough. "I had to stand on top of an 18-ft. tower she had built on top of it," complains Giancarlo, who starred in Seven Beauties, Swept Away and three other Wertmuller movies. "That's typical of Lina, to alter everything she finds, even...
...MOST PLASTERED JOKE TELLER AWARD: To Norman Mailer '41, who told an incomprehensible zinger with a punch line implicating "one philosopher and two perverts," but still managed to pronounce Cousin, Cousine and Lina Wertmuller with the proper accents...
SEVEN BEAUTIES. A born survivor's natural talents are put to the ultimate test by World War II in Lina Wertmuller's hard-charging, shrilly-pitched black comedy. Giancarlo Giannini is sulphurously splendid as the small-time crook who finds the great world as much a slum as the Naples back streets where he was born. His energy-and the director's-propel one compulsively through the movie's several stomach-churning moments...
...movie gets a charge from the high-voltage presence of Giancarlo Giannini, Director Lina Wertmuller's favorite actor (Seven Beauties; Swept Away). Here, with rambunctious energy, Giannini assumes roles in eight separate vignettes, playing everything from a lawyer hung up on dowagers to a simple, wistful yokel who unknowingly ar ranges an assignation with a transvestite. His partner in most of these episodes is a young Italian actress, Laura Antonelli, who, in a more innocent time, might have been called a lollapalooza. Antonelli has the face of a ravished angel, the shape of legend...
...boisterous provincial cities of Turin and Catania in The Seduction of Mimi, with their bossist politics and over-blown romantic intriques, provide the first, and the best, showcase for the talents of Lina Wertmuller. Her fluky--sometimes maudlin, sometimes racy--rhythm and pacing, the continual yak-yakking of her argumentative protagonists, even her crude flights of comical fancy all seem to fit in these cities. Here adults must act fast and foolishly in order to sustain the belief that their fierce chauvinism, mafioso loyalty and marital code of honor still mean anything in their industrialized, bureaucratized world...