1119 Miracle in Milan

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m_montana
Joined: Wed Jul 17, 2019 8:36 pm

1119 Miracle in Milan

#1 Post by m_montana » Wed Mar 10, 2021 10:34 pm

Miracle in Milan

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Renowned filmmaker Vittorio De Sica followed up his international triumph Bicycle Thieves with this enchantingly playful neorealist fairy tale, in which he combines his celebrated slice-of-life poetry with flights of graceful comedy and storybook fantasy. On the outskirts of Milan, a band of vagabonds work together to form a shantytown. When it is discovered that the land they occupy contains oil, however, it's up to the cherubic orphan Totò (Francesco Golisano)—with some divine help—to save their community from greedy developers. Tipping their hats to the imaginative whimsy of Charles Chaplin and René Clair, De Sica and screenwriter Cesare Zavattini, adapting his own novel, craft a bighearted ode to the nobility of everyday people.

SPECIAL FEATURES

• New 4K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
• New interview with neorealism expert and film scholar David Forgacs
• Audio interview from the late 1960s in which director Vittorio De Sica looks back on his career, conducted by film critic Gideon Bachmann
• Interviews with actor Brunella Bovo and Manuel De Sica, the director's son
• Feature-length documentary from 2019 on screenwriter Cesare Zavattini
• Trailers
• New English subtitle translation
• PLUS: An essay by film critic Christina Newland and, on the Blu-ray, "Totò il buono," a 1940 short story by Zavattini and stage actor Totò that is the earliest version of the narrative on which Miracle in Milan is based

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Ribs
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Re: Janus Films

#2 Post by Ribs » Fri Nov 12, 2021 1:59 pm

m_montana wrote:
Wed Mar 10, 2021 10:34 pm
A page for De Sica's Miracle In Milan has been up for days now.
Arrow Video's 2015 BD is a merely HD (1080p) release. The film had a 4K restoration by Cineteca di Bologna and was presented in Cannes Classics in 2019. And that's what Criterion is getting
Miracle in Milan will begin a tour run at Film Forum in December.

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yoloswegmaster
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Re: Janus Films

#3 Post by yoloswegmaster » Mon Nov 29, 2021 11:37 pm

Image

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Boosmahn
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Re: Janus Films

#4 Post by Boosmahn » Tue Nov 30, 2021 1:11 am

Fascinating color palette! Surely Criterion will use this for the physical release. (I wouldn't mind if they used one of the original posters I just saw, although they never use the original artwork.)

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FrauBlucher
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Re: Janus Films

#5 Post by FrauBlucher » Thu Dec 02, 2021 8:42 pm


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swo17
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Re: 1119 Miracle in Milan

#6 Post by swo17 » Tue Jan 18, 2022 1:19 pm


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Randall Maysin Again
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Re: 1119 Miracle in Milan

#7 Post by Randall Maysin Again » Tue Jan 18, 2022 2:32 pm

I didn't really enjoy this film. Though it's probably pretty likely the screenplay is at least a few steps closer to being of quality than the way i experienced it, what with universally terrible subtitles everywhere, the combination of a perhaps excessively whimsical and heartfelt tone with a very real-looking and feeling depiction of homelessness and poverty i found a bit gross. Perhaps the film innocently blunders into poverty porn. The best aspects of the film are the nice photography, the performances of the two leads Francesco Golisanto and Brunella Bovo and the potential they both display, and the brief appearances of Emma Gramatica, who has a magical presence and the film could have used much more of her, as well as perhaps more toughness or hardheadedness (and you can still be whimsical if you do that!), and more wit and invention, in its handling of its subject.

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swo17
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Re: 1119 Miracle in Milan

#8 Post by swo17 » Wed Jan 19, 2022 12:15 am

I'm confused about this guy's connection to the film, if any:

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Criterion's ad copy seems to suggest that he co-wrote the source story, but I'm not seeing that mentioned elsewhere

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domino harvey
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Re: 1119 Miracle in Milan

#9 Post by domino harvey » Wed Jan 19, 2022 12:43 am

My write up from the Cannes list project
domino harvey wrote:
Sun Jun 18, 2017 1:25 am
Miracolo a Milano (Vittorio de Sica 1951) De Sica moves from realistic portrayals of the lives of the destitute to an unexpectedly comic fantasy involving a cabbage-patch kid who exits the orphanage and enters a shantytown, quickly becoming a focal figure for all the cheery poor folk within even before a magic dove comes into play. The film is entertaining and embraces its fantastic elements in the final third with admirable gusto, but that only means this is a well-made bad film centered on a thinly-veiled superiority to these people that is all the more surprising coming from the so-called champion of the poor in Italian cinema.

I refute absolutely the notion that this film exhibits anything but contempt for the homeless characters which populate the narrative. Everyone here just looooooves being poor. It’s the greatest! You don’t have to do anything but beg, and you even get paid by a chocolatier for that too! Otherwise, work is a foreign concept and far from the minds of these empty-headed dolts who want nothing more than to celebrate squalor, sometimes in song. The displaced persons in this film are all cheerful simpletons, who, when presented with the opportunity to obtain anything via magical intervention, choose token symbols of the upper class (a fur coat, a top hat) rather than anything that would further their advancement out of this blissful state of ignorance (no one asks for a job or skills to obtain one). Are their newfound accoutrements comically contrasted with their surroundings and socioeconomic position? You know it, dude. Most of the gags in the film are at the expense of these flamboyant transients— they’re so wacky, the film keeps insisting! What a jolly sort these poors are!

The single worst moment in this film (and in any film I’ve seen in some time) comes when two peripheral characters, a widowed white woman and what I presume is an AWOL African-American soldier, who have been giving each other sad side-glances for most of the picture, have their fondest wishes granted in a fashion that gives O Henry retrospective charity. This sequence is offensive not for its racially-predicated make-up and punchline, but because it uses two non-jubilant characters solely to set up a mean-spirited and cruel joke at their expense, and both then disappear from the film once they’ve served this function. I guess if you’re not having the time of your life living in mud and filth, you deserve to get fucked over by a dove-clutching elf. After this, I wish I could say I was surprised that our protagonist’s solution to the central narrative problem of the film is to enact a suicide pact with all of the denizens of the camp, but that sounded about right. And the characters are of course gleefully cheerful as they Heaven’s Gate it up to the afterlife!

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knives
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Re: 1119 Miracle in Milan

#10 Post by knives » Wed Jan 19, 2022 7:29 am

I kind of like it, but The Roof which Arrow paired it with is better by a comical degree.

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Michael Kerpan
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Re: 1119 Miracle in Milan

#11 Post by Michael Kerpan » Wed Jan 19, 2022 10:54 am

domino -- Your review makes this film sound utterly horrifying! (Never seen it -- and I guess I never will).

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Finch
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Re: 1119 Miracle in Milan

#12 Post by Finch » Wed Jan 19, 2022 12:37 pm

Yeah, Randall and domino pretty much convinced me to give Miracle a miss, too. It sounds horrid (like a 1950's pre-cursor to the dreadful Slumdog Millionaire), and I am a fan of Umberto D. (Bicycle Thieves is fine, I guess).

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therewillbeblus
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Re: 1119 Miracle in Milan

#13 Post by therewillbeblus » Wed Jan 19, 2022 12:42 pm

I can’t stand it either but my impression is that people love this one by and large, so it’s certainly worth seeing at some point to make up your own mind. That being said, hard pass for me

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domino harvey
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Re: 1119 Miracle in Milan

#14 Post by domino harvey » Wed Jan 19, 2022 12:58 pm

Yes, this is oddly well-loved. It should not be, but it is. Decide for yourself, if you must, but don't say I didn't warn you!

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Re: 1119 Miracle in Milan

#15 Post by Rayon Vert » Wed Jan 19, 2022 1:53 pm

A rare classic that I started and wasn't able to finish. Definitely not in the blind buy category.

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Re: 1119 Miracle in Milan

#16 Post by FrauBlucher » Wed Jan 19, 2022 4:26 pm

I just saw this very recently touring at the FF. And I can’t agree more with Domino. Domino’s write up was exactly how I felt when I left the theater. The film marries the seriousness of Neo-Realism with humor that's clumsy and slapstickish, that gives no sympathy for the characters and gains no understanding of their situations. And then the characters that whimsically have their races switched was nothing for me but cringeworthy. What was the purpose? This clearly is no The Bicycle Thief or Umberto D.

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domino harvey
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Re: 1119 Miracle in Milan

#17 Post by domino harvey » Wed Jan 19, 2022 4:48 pm

FrauBlucher wrote:
Wed Jan 19, 2022 4:26 pm
And then the characters that whimsically have their races switched was nothing for me but cringeworthy. What was the purpose?
I’ve seen some people try to frame it as socially conscious criticism, but that reading doesn’t work for what is at best dubious cheap irony, and at worst just garden variety racism from a director who hasn’t shied away from that kind of thing. To support that last claim, I’ll remind everyone of my questions of a film De Sica made a decade later
domino harvey wrote:
Thu Aug 19, 2021 1:54 am
Do you think all the stars who signed on for Il giudizio universale realized they would be dubbed into Italian singing en masse a song to a black baby about how he's actually so beautiful that now he's white, or appearing in a movie in which one of the "jokes" is a sketchy adoption peddler trying to convince a young boy to go with him to be sent to American parents by lamenting that if the Italian boy won't go they'll have to send black children because "they're cheaper" and then promising the boy that he'll live in a house with a black servant, which he then illustrates by showing the child a photo of a monkey?

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Matt
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Re: 1119 Miracle in Milan

#18 Post by Matt » Wed Jan 19, 2022 5:08 pm

Lump me in the group with the people that disliked this. It has some amusing moments and a cute ending, but it's definitely no underrated classic of Neorealism.

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Black Hat
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Re: 1119 Miracle in Milan

#19 Post by Black Hat » Wed Jan 19, 2022 6:51 pm

I've been curious to see this one ever since I heard Wes Anderson rave about it. Surprised and disappointed to read how many dislike it.

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TMDaines
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Re: 1119 Miracle in Milan

#20 Post by TMDaines » Tue Feb 01, 2022 12:58 pm

m_montana wrote:
Wed Mar 10, 2021 10:34 pm
Miracle in Milan

Image

Renowned filmmaker Vittorio De Sica followed up his international triumph Bicycle Thieves with this enchantingly playful neorealist fairy tale, in which he combines his celebrated slice-of-life poetry with flights of graceful comedy and storybook fantasy. On the outskirts of Milan, a band of vagabonds work together to form a shantytown. When it is discovered that the land they occupy contains oil, however, it's up to the cherubic orphan Totò (Francesco Golisano)—with some divine help—to save their community from greedy developers. Tipping their hats to the imaginative whimsy of Charles Chaplin and René Clair, De Sica and screenwriter Cesare Zavattini, adapting his own novel, craft a bighearted ode to the nobility of everyday people.

SPECIAL FEATURES

• New 4K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
• New interview with neorealism expert and film scholar David Forgacs
• Audio interview from the late 1960s in which director Vittorio De Sica looks back on his career, conducted by film critic Gideon Bachmann
• Interviews with actor Brunella Bovo and Manuel De Sica, the director's son
• Feature-length documentary from 2019 on screenwriter Cesare Zavattini
• Trailers
• New English subtitle translation
• PLUS: An essay by film critic Christina Newland and, on the Blu-ray, "Totò il buono," a 1940 short story by Zavattini and stage actor Totò that is the earliest version of the narrative on which Miracle in Milan is based
Anyone know from the Zavattini documentary is? It doesn't appear to be the Lizzani one that has cropped up everywhere.

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CSM126
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Re: 1119 Miracle in Milan

#21 Post by CSM126 » Mon Mar 21, 2022 7:55 pm


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