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Romanzo criminale (2005)
Skip it - watch the show instead (no spoilers, some historical facts)
I've seen the series, read the book, decided to give the film a shot. I wondered how they would be able to tell a story spanning 20 years in a 2 hour film. They couldn't.
A lot of movies are based on events - a bank robbery, a kidnapping, a terrorist attack averted, a hijacking, you get the point. With gang movies, a lot of the drug stuff is condensed to a montage, with the focus being on the gang politics instead. This movie tried to do everything - two kidnappings, one terror plot, a gang's rise, gang politics, the business of the gang, gang wars (with rival gangs) and a court trial. And if that's not enough, the film wanted to show the side of law enforcement too, showing the detective trying to bust the gang. 20 years in 2 hours 30 minutes.
There is a montage every 5 minutes, actually, most things are shown in quick cuts + music montages - the gang introduction, kidnapping, Terrible, drug business, Moro affair, Bologna... I stopped counting after that.
The choice of casting is terrible (no pun intended). Terrible, one of the scariest people in the TV show, is shown to be a wimp, crying in front of the gang. Accorsi is a good actor, but terrible as Scialoja. He's guilty of overacting here. Screaming and waving his arms around like a cartoon Italian. Freddo, the best character in the TV show, was ruined as well. In the TV show, he's a deep and troubled character, taking you along with him in an existential crisis. In this film, pretty-boy Kim Rossi Stuart plays Freddo and actually says "Why do you hate me, huh? Is it because I'm pretty?" Seriously. Libano is a criminal mastermind on the show, on the film he's an idiot who doesn't know how to handle a gun.
If you didn't know the actors, you would think that this is the low budget film remake of the TV show. The production values are low. The show looks cinematic, here, this looks like a TV film.
This film fails in comparison to the show. It's less of a film and more of a collection of spoilers for a great TV show. Even if you have no interest whatsoever in the show, skip this film. It's not worth your time, unless you want to see a film about a gangster drug lord called "The Terrible" crying and wimpering in front of a boy who says "Don't hate me because I'm pretty."
Mandariinid (2013)
Two Estonians living in a rural settlement in rural Georgia are caught in the middle of a separatist conflict
I don't normally give 10/10 to films, but this was easy. This isn't a slow artistic movie where nothing happens, critics laud and regular people don't get. This is something so good everyone can agree on. Everything counts for something, there is nothing there for nothing. And not for mere symbolism, but everything has a reason to be in the film - there are no stock characters, no stock conversations and no stock props.
Every word counts for so much that you couldn't cut out one second of the film without flinching. It is neither slow nor rushed, neither pro-Georgian nor pro-separatist, neither pro-settlement or pro-exodus... very few people could've made this same movie with this same script without ruining it with political biases like anti-Islam, anti-Russia, anti-Georgian, anti-Caucasian, anti-Communist, anti-separatist sentiment (or pro any of those). This movie is about the people in it and it does it well without the director getting caught up in tit-for-tat us-vs-them situation nor does it show some premonition of what is to happen 10-20 years from then.
It's a story about the early 1992, not 2001 or 1941. It's a story about an Estonian man living in Georgia. I personally know directors that would see this script and add so much history and awareness of the future that it would ruin it. This director goes without cheap attempts at referencing bigger historical events for the sake of contextualization.
Everything here is weighted and is kept in the movie after careful consideration, from the car to the cassette, from the photo to the guns, from the shrapnel to the shish kebabs.
No clichés, no stock characters, no distractions - just a great story.
If I had to say a bad thing about it - the music (the main theme), although great, gets repetitive after a while.
Easily film of the year and in my personal top 10.