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strayerpam
Reviews
Il primo incarico (2010)
Beautiful film, won top prize for new directors at New Italian Cinema Festival
A lovely film about a young woman sorting out her place in life when she's sent to teach in a small peasant village in Puglia. Complicated, engaging, heartfelt and wholly entertaining. Just when you think you know where it's going, it changes course. Highly recommended!
The film took the top prize at the New Italian Film Festival in San Francisco last night - and deservedly so.
I liked the film not only for the story and the acting, but also for a look at the life of people in Puglia - who almost never make it onto the big screen. For years, Marcel Pagnol's films about French peasants have been entertaining us. Now Puglia can take its place as well.
Marco Polo (1982)
Great series
It's the only decent telling of the tale of Marco Polo. Incredible cast! You can find it in DVD on Amazon for about $40. I just got one. It's about 8 hours long.
I returned from a trip to Venice and wanted to know more about this history of Venice. This DVD is great at painting a picture of the way Venice looked in the 1200s, centuries before the style of Venetian Gothic we now associate with Venice was born.
The series has an all star cast - Burt Lancaster, John Gielgud, John Houseman, Anne Bancroft - the true greats - sprinkled in with lesser known but very good actors, like Ken Marshall in the title role.
The opening scenes are riveting - you'll find yourself wondering if this could possibly be true and then going to wikipedia to check the historical facts and finding out everything, pretty much, comes from real historical sources.
Not available on Netflix, so you might visit Amazon and grab one of the rare copies that surfaces there.