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Film
Sept 25, 2008 10:25:16 GMT -5
Post by owen on Sept 25, 2008 10:25:16 GMT -5
Hollywood paid to endorse smokingThu 25 Sep 9:50 AM Hollywood stars of yesteryear were paid a huge fortune to endorse smoking, according to new research. Hollywood icons such as John Wayne, Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy, Joan Crawford and Bette Davis were paid to help promote smoking. The University of California at San Francisco researchers obtained endorsement contracts which showed how much stars were paid to promote cigarettes. Many of the biggest names from Golden Hollywood were paid up to $10,000 to endorse the brand Lucky Stripe (as well as earning a few free packets no doubt) This is equivalent to £150,000 today. Researchers from the University claim the findings show that the millions poured into Hollywood can still be felt today. They wrote, "As in the 1930s, nothing today prevents the global tobacco industry from influencing the film industry in any number of ways." Their warnings come despite a self-imposed ban on cigarette promotion in films. However, anti-smoking group ASH claim smoking imagery on the big screen would never be "outlawed completely", and are calling out for clearer warnings before films.
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manho
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Oct 3, 2008 6:14:06 GMT -5
Post by manho on Oct 3, 2008 6:14:06 GMT -5
Bosses from hell Hollywood loves the glamour of the mob. But a new film shows the mafia's true colours - as slave drivers, toxic-waste dealers and terrorists. Clare Longrigg reports
Clare Longrigg The Guardian, Friday October 3 2008
There's a remarkable scene in Matteo Garrone's film Gomorrah, in which a man known to us as Uncle Franco, immaculate in his linen suit, is overseeing the dumping of several hundred barrels of toxic waste. During the manoeuvre, one of the truck drivers, an illegal immigrant, gets splashed with corrosive fluid from a container, and the others down tools. Uncle Franco drives off and returns not with an ambulance, but with a small army of children, who clamber up into the cabs and, perched on cushions, steer their massive loads expertly to the dumping ground.
1. Gomorrah 2. Release: 2008 3. Cert (UK): 15 4. Directors: Matteo Garrone 5. Cast: Toni Servillo 6. More on this film
This scene reveals the profound cynicism of the Naples mafiosi, the camorra, who pocket vast sums to dispose of northern Italy's toxic industrial waste in built-up areas in the south. But it also shows the limitless resource of cheap labour available to the Camorra, supplied by an underclass of illegal immigrants, drug addicts and uneducated but resourceful youths, for whom organised crime represents the only way out of poverty.
Roberto Saviano, the young journalist and author of the bestselling book on which this film is based, did his research among gangs of illegal workers - on the docks, in the clandestine clothing factories, dealing drugs in the piazza - and their fight for survival is the real story in this shocking portrait of life under the Naples criminal sistema (system). In casting his film, Garrone made a point of using local people as extras, adding an unpolished intensity to his documentary-style camerawork. We are always uncomfortably close to the action, like another member of the crowd; in the dimly lit corridors and cramped kitchens, we are not granted the privilege of seeing what's about to happen. Garrone said he wanted to film Gomorrah like a war report, because that is, essentially, what it is.
This decision backfired somewhat when inmates watching the film in a Naples prison recognised a fellow camorrista on screen. Giovanni Venosa was wanted by the police for his organised crime activities. After his ill-advised moment of fame, he is back in custody.
Naples is a natural film set: the bay, with Vesuvius puffing away in the background; the theatrical districts where rich and poor live literally on top of each other. In the early 1960s, Francesco Rosi's Le Mani Sulla Città (Hands Over the City) showed the dramatic contrast between grimy tenements collapsing under the developers' machinery, and the magnificent views from the corrupt councillors' offices. Gomorrah focuses on the grimy underbelly of a suburb. Much of the action takes place in the imposing housing projects: on the inside, they are like prisons, where the drug dealers' teenage lookouts watch every movement. With a nod to Fellini, a stolen statue is raised slowly on ropes for delivery to someone's apartment. But there is no joyful call of raucous women's voices in this version of Naples: no Sophia Loren hanging out laundry and swearing amusingly at the neighbours. The women here are frightened, cowering indoors, trying to save their boys from danger.
Gomorra's one dissenting presence is a young graduate who is taken on as Uncle Franco's assistant, but eventually revolts against the careless poisoning of the land. This character, the film's quiet conscience, is called Roberto; but despite the presence of so many non-actors, he is not played by the author, for the simple reason that the author now lives in hiding, under police protection. Like the Sicilian journalist Lirio Abbate, who found a bomb under his car after writing a book about the boss of cosa nostra, Saviano's life has been threatened for revealing the clans' secrets.
This is a very different world from the cosy rapport between the American cosa nostra and Hollywood film-makers. In the old days, mobsters loved to hang out with George Raft in Beverly Hills, while the New York families all want James Caan to come to their weddings.
In fact, Naples has its own celebrity criminals. As the bosses of an industry worth a reported €150bn (£119bn) a year, the heads of the most powerful clans are treated like local heroes. The Giuliano family controls the Forcella district of Naples; Erminia Giuliano had her photograph taken drinking champagne with Diego Maradona, while her brother, the blue-eyed boss, Luigi, released records of himself singing nostalgic ballads. Naples' poor and disenfranchised youth need someone to look up to, and the charismatic bosses fulfil that role. Giuseppe Tornatore's 1984 film Il Camorrista (The Professor), based on the life of Raffaele Cutolo - a messianic figure who formed a splinter group and caused the death of 300 people - depicts a fascinating criminal mind still exercising power from behind maximum security prison walls.
Since then, other Italian film-makers have moved on to examine more wide-ranging issues. In 1994, La Scorta (The Escort), directed by Ricky Tognazzi, depicted the courage and dedication of a judge's bodyguard under continual threat of assassination. In I Cento Passi (The Hundred Steps), Marco Tullio Giordano told the story of anti-mafia campaigner Peppino Impastato, and his brutal murder at the hands of his father's mafia friends. Another Neapolitan, Paolo Sorrentino, has more recently taken on the mafia; in The Consequences of Love, he depicted it as a ruthlessly efficient machine, its money laundered by suited bankers in Zurich, its gunmen in shell suits eating fast food. And Sorrentino's new film, Il Divo, is a biography of Italy's long-time premier Giulio Andreotti, and shows mafia turncoats dramatically incriminating corrupt politicians, their former allies.
However, Gomorrah's subject is not the flashy lifestyle of the bosses - it is the misery they inflict on an entire population. The title comes from the words of a campaigning priest's call for people to open their eyes to what was happing to Naples: "We must turn and look at what is happening, what is raining down on Gomorrah ..." Saviano's story is a powerful cri de coeur. He records 3,600 camorra-related murders in his lifetime, and he's only 28.
The camorra's activities also spill over into public policy. Over the past year, news footage from Naples has shown uncollected rubbish strewn across the streets, with evil-smelling fires smouldering in the markets. These heaps of rotting garbage have become emblematic of the city's endemic corruption. The camorra makes much of its money from garbage, and for years has stuffed all kinds of rubbish, including highly dangerous toxic waste, into landfill sites. In defiance of police and even the military, residents have blocked the construction of new waste disposal sites and incinerators on land adjoining their homes and their children's schools - a protest that now seems unstoppable after arsenic was discovered in the hardcore beneath a newly built school.
But the traditional mafia activities go on. In the Naples suburb of Secondigliano, a war for domination of the drug trade, between the Di Lauros and the Spaniards, or Secessionists, is being fought. Last week, a gang of youths was arrested after a series of violent muggings. One was wearing a bracelet identifying him with one of the factions. "It's a clear sign that he aspires to a life of crime," said a police spokesman. In Gomorrah, this aspiration is the death of hope. One of the film's most terrible sequences follows Totò, a lad of 13, bright-eyed and elfin-featured, who wants desperately to be part of the clan. He understands what's required of a mafia soldier - he is quick, discreet, resourceful. And for his loyalty, they exact a terrible price, when he is forced to betray his best friend's mother. While her husband is in prison, her son has changed sides, but she refuses to move away. Totò must help his friends kill her, by luring her out of her flat. Tragically, this is a true story.
The mafia depends on its illegal workforce - anyone attempting to offer unemployed addicts and desperadoes a glimpse of an alternative way of life puts himself in immediate danger. In the mid-1980s, Father Peppino Diana set up a welcome centre for African immigrants in the Naples hinterland to stop them being recruited by the mafia. This was a direct challenge to the camorra's business practices. When the warring clans made the streets unsafe and the population virtual prisoners, Don Peppino wrote an open letter of protest. His famous letter, entitled "For the love of my people I will not stay silent", was distributed over Christmas 1991. He called on the church to stand up against the camorra's rule, which he called "a form of terrorism", and denounced the clans' business practices: "Extortion that has left our region with no potential for development; kickbacks of 20 per cent on construction projects; illegal drug trafficking, which has created gangs of marginalised youth and unskilled workers at the beck and call of criminal organisations." In March 1994, Don Peppino was shot dead in church, as he prepared for Sunday mass.
"The dead are the least revealing element of the camorra's real power," Saviano writes, "but they are the most visible trace." Mafia films have always sated their audiences' desire for big hits, splattering gunshots and gleeful explosions. In The Godfather, Francis Ford Coppola created an elegant counterpoint between a christening and a massacre; Scorsese's Casino opens with an operatic car bomb. But these violent moments pass quickly. As Gomorrah so powerfully demonstrates, the survivors' fear lingers on.
Clare Longrigg is the author of Boss of Bosses (John Murray)
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david
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Oct 3, 2008 8:59:12 GMT -5
Post by david on Oct 3, 2008 8:59:12 GMT -5
Is that a good movie? It's being shown here in a film festival in a couple of weeks.
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manho
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Oct 3, 2008 16:03:12 GMT -5
Post by manho on Oct 3, 2008 16:03:12 GMT -5
i haven't seen the film but i've read the book. it's something new. something different.
the general concensus here is that the film is brilliant, tho i'm always disappointed when i get round to watching brilliant new italian films. it could well be one of the candidates for best foreign film at the oscars.
i'd say see it for its historical importance and let us all know what you think.
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manho
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Oct 5, 2008 7:46:16 GMT -5
Post by manho on Oct 5, 2008 7:46:16 GMT -5
In the grip of Italy's bloodiest mafia clan
Gomorrah has been hailed as a classic mafia movie, which lays bare the savagery of the Neapolitan Camorra and how it developed into a political and cultural force. It is based on a bestselling book, whose author, Roberto Saviano, now lives in fear of his life under armed guard. Former Italy correspondent Ed Vulliamy returns to Naples to meet Saviano and witness, first hand, the brutal gang's reign of terror
Ed Vulliamy The Observer Sunday October 5 2008
The black Fiat Punto, loaded with cocaine, broke through a road block near Casal di Principe in the hinterland of Naples. Policemen Francesco Alighieri and Gabriele Rossi gave chase. In the pursuit their car keeled off an overpass, wrapping itself around a tree, killing both of them. They had only been in the area a week, drafted from northern Italy following the murder of six Africans by the local Casalesi criminal syndicate. For hours afterwards the lanes around Casal di Principe were scattered with characters in sunglasses sitting in cars and talking on mobiles. Menacing, but hardly mysterious, for these are the sentinels of the Camorra, the Neapolitan mafia which is about to achieve worldwide notoriety as the subject of a major new movie. Gomorrah, released this week, will bring worldwide attention to the Camorra: the most potent criminal organisation on the planet.
1. Gomorrah 2. Release: 2008 3. Cert (UK): 15 4. Directors: Matteo Garrone 5. Cast: Toni Servillo
The scenes described above are not from the film. The police chase took place nine days ago when I returned to the area 14 years after last reporting on the Camorra as Italy correspondent for the Guardian. This week the army was being mobilised into the area as three of the top Casalesi were arrested.
Gomorrah won the Grand Prix at Cannes in May and was last week chosen as Italy's entry for the Foreign Language Oscar. It is based on a book by Roberto Saviano, who grew up in Casal di Principe and lived alongside the Casalesi clan of the Camorra, one of its most powerful and ruthless. His father, a doctor, was beaten and obliged to hide for months after treating a man the Camorra had wounded. Saviano saw his first corpse in the street when he was 13 but 'never got used to seeing murder victims'. After studying philosophy at Naples University, Saviano observed then wrote about the Camorra with brazen fearlessness.
His book had a raw vividness, an attention to human detail and a dimension of outrage that caught public attention in a way that other diligent and brave reporters over decades have not. Now copies of Gomorrah are piled up for sale at every bookshop and motorway service station. It has sold 1.8 million copies and been translated into 32 languages. With the film, Saviano is even more famous, and more of a target. He was threatened by the bosses of his hometown clan and lives under 24-hour armed police watch 'somewhere,' he says, 'in the north of Italy'.
We meet at his publishers, Mondadori, in Rome. 'I like these interviews,' he says. 'They give me some sense of space and communication. I live this enclosed life, physically and psychologically. First it was one guard, then two, three, four and five. Two bulletproof cars now. And I can never go home. I love the beauty of Naples, but what happens there I despise; that is what I wanted to write about and do something about.'
Saviano made that decision after 14-year-old Annalisa Durante was killed in crossfire between Camorra factions. In the book he describes her friends at the funeral: 'Many of these girls will soon marry Camorristi... Many will bear children who will be killed ... But for now they are just little girls in black. They weep for a friend ... Annalisa is guilty of having been born in Naples. Nothing more, nothing less. As her body is being carried away in its white coffin, a classmate calls her on her cellphone. The ringing in the coffin is the new requiem... No one answers.'
In conversation, he adds: 'That they could kill children like that reached a point beyond my understanding, and that moment I decided something had to be done.'
The film of Gomorrah is savage, squalid, claustrophobic and relentless. The action is authentic, in gratifying contrast to the grotesque romance of films like The Godfather. 'All Camorristi love Scarface,' says Saviano. He cites newer role models - The Matrix and Pulp Fiction - as 'how the Camorristi want to see themselves'. Among the newly powerful women, Saviano points to a gangster called Immolata Capone who dresses in the same yellow as Uma Thurman in Kill Bill. Saviano calls his book a 'non-fiction novel'. 'There is no need to make anything up. Everything is from real life. Some things have been changed to protect people but I knew the people in this book.'
For all their wealth, the Camorristi can be parsimonious. Last week I tracked down the flat in Via Canonico Stornaiuolo that was home to the boss who terrorised the Secondigliano district of Naples during the savage Camorra war which is backdrop to the film. I found a modest place of peeling plaster. When, in 2005, the police came for Paolo Di Lauro, whose empire was worth billions, the only personal assets they discovered were playing cards, cheap furniture, a TV, cigarettes and peppers drying on a newspaper. And this was the man who established what Saviano calls 'the biggest narcotraffic holding company, nationally or internationally' in the world.
The English edition of Saviano's book is subtitled Italy's Other Mafia in recognition of the incorrect supposition among British and American readers that the Sicilian Mafia is the premier organisation. The Neapolitan Camorra was Italy's original Mafia by a century; it commands a higher turnover - and a higher body count than any criminal syndicate in the world: 4,000 over the past four decades.
I was unaware of this when I started to report from Italy in 1990. The Camorra first attracted international attention in 1991 when it was found to have ensnared the footballing Messiah of Naples, Diego Maradona. He bought his cocaine from the Camorra, and became a trophy for the bosses, photographed in their shell-shaped baths and at weddings of their children. 'It is a very strong identity, to be Neapolitan,' says Saviano. 'You love the place, and you hate it. I am estranged from it now, which is extremely difficult.'
Naples is a proud but battered city where life is agrodolce, bittersweet: a city of breathtaking beauty but perched on a fault line and nestled under a volcano. Much of life is lived in shadow yet there can be no secrets in the warrens of alleyways, steps and courtyards from which great domes and façades of tatty baroque churches rise like cliffs from the old stone propped up by scaffolding. Naples is the last great pagan city - of dolls, puppets, cards, magic and the significance of numbers, with which Neapolitans interpret dreams. Naples has a bright face but the Vesuvian city is ridden with the apocalyptic cult of death. After Maradona's Napoli won its first ever championship in 1987, graffiti appeared on the cemetery wall: 'You don't know what you missed.' Next day came the reply: 'Don't be so sure we missed it.'
The Camorra was forged at the time of backlash against the revolutionary French republic of Naples. Into the vacuum between a liberal intelligentsia and reactionary elite, the Camorra moved as 'protection' for the masses in Europe's third city and, crucially, its biggest port, a portal for smugglers and extortionists. The Italian Mafia was first crushed by, then absorbed into, Mussolini's fascist regime. As Tom Behan writes in See Naples and Die, the rebirth of the modern Camorra was ironically due to the return of its Sicilian rival after the war. But the Camorra and Mafia were different - the former urban, the latter rural; the Neapolitans bound only by criminal commercial interest, the latter by family ties also. The Sicilians subscribed to a veneer of 'honour' to which the Camorra paid little heed. The Camorra has been more cynically flexible than Cosa Nostra, more fickle in its recruitment, loyalties and hostilities.
Only one Camorra boss seriously allied himself to the Sicilians: Michele Zaza (aka Michel O'Pazz or Mad Mike), a shrewd smuggler-turned-gangster. Others saw no need to be bound to Cosa Nostra, markedly Raffaele Cutolo, who in the 1970s founded the New Organised Camorra, re-establishing Neapolitan control. The earthquake of 1980 relaunched the Camorra in terms of capital with some £16bn earmarked for reconstruction siphoned off by gangsters and by politicians building themselves villas while some made homeless by the earthquake were still billeted in a lunatic asylum in Naples in 1993. The looted funds stoked the first Camorra civil war between Cutolo and the 'New Family' of clans led by Zaza and his heir, Carmine Alfieri. By 1991 a courageous Naples examining judge called Paolo Mancuso was able to tell me that the Camorra had overtaken Cosa Nostra as a criminal business operation but that 'what marks them out is that their legal income is now greater than their illegal one. The Camorra has become a social, financial and political institution.'
The Camorra's coup was to realise that cocaine rather than heroin would become the drug of super-liquidity. They built international connections accordingly, in Colombia, Venezuela, Spain and along the French Riviera. They became the first capitalist operation to penetrate post-communist Eastern Europe, to deal in drugs, clothing and arms, in particular Kalashnikovs made under Soviet licence, with which the Camorra can now equip any army or militia suffering an embargo or supply problem. The profits were so great that the Camorra was obliged to invest imaginatively and semi-legally: in construction (it built much of the Costa del Sol), football pools and gambling, agriculture, car franchises, tourism, banks, social services, prostitution, waste disposal and textiles - even haute-couture, whether 'Made in Italy' or 'Made in China'.
The Camorra had meanwhile entwined itself with senior Christian Democrats and other politicians to form a terrifying power machine in Naples. Thousands in Naples owed their livelihoods to either Byzantine political patronage or to the Camorra, or both. There were no rights, only privileges for those who paid the Camorra or a politician in cash or votes.
Through the collapse of Christian Democracy and the advent of a leftist local authority and a right-wing Silvio Berlusconi to national government, the system remained intact. Saviano explains that few in Naples use the term 'Camorra' any more. The clans call themselves 'Sistema'- the System. It is impregnable, like cement, he says.
'Cement' is the title of Saviano's chapter about his home town, the stuff of construction, legal or illegal, completed buildings or those left paid for but abandoned as concrete skeletons. 'Successful Italian businessmen come from cement,' says Saviano. 'Before transforming themselves into fashion models, managers, financial sharks and owners of newspapers and yachts, before all this and under all this lies cement.' The English translation, for some baffling reason, castrates the climax to this passage, which in Italian reads: cemento armato - armed cement.
The last article I filed from Italy, in March 1994, concerned the Camorra's execution of Father Giuseppe Diana, or Don Peppino, as he prepared the host in his church in Casal di Principe. Saviano, then 16, knew him, and remembers the Christmas Day on which he distributed a tract defying the Camorra. It was the worst form of denunciation for murderers who think of themselves as Catholics.
Saviano recalls how rival Casalesi clans, in order to show that the murder was not their doing, pledged to find the killer. Saviano, meanwhile, was thinking about the power of the word. 'While Don Peppino's assassins were talking about cutting up flesh to seal their position,' he wrote, in the book's pivotal passage, 'I was still thinking about the priest's battle and the primacy of the word... words against cement mixers and guns... to testify, take a stand. The only way to eliminate a word like that is to kill it.' Which is what the Camorra wants to do to Saviano, now it has disposed of Don Peppino.
'If that book had sold 10,000 copies, they would not have had the slightest fear, and I would still have my freedom,' he says. 'But so many people have now read about who they are, and this they cannot forgive. They have been denied their romance.'
Part of the book and all of the film is set in Secondigliano, heartland of the Camorra. That is where I found myself last week on Corso Secondigliano. Turn right at the heavily fortified 'Penitentiary Centre', and there they are: the Vele (the Sails, because of their shape), hideous blocks built in the 1960s, turned into the biggest drug marketplace in the world, and then its most ferocious criminal battlefield. This neighbourhood is called Scampia, one-time fiefdom of a man few outsiders had heard of until 1998, when a teacher ticked off his son's girlfriend for being lazy in school, and was beaten senseless. In 2002 police traced 160kg of heroin and cocaine to his door. A man called Paolo Di Lauro, aka Ciruzzo the Millionaire.
Di Lauro's trafficking system was so pervasive that Saviano details a lucrative scheme for local pensioners, who could get a good return by putting their savings into cocaine. 'No substance gets introduced into the European market without first passing through Secondigliano,' writes Saviano, describing the squalid inferno of product tests carried out on pathetic addicts to gauge the effects of 'cutting' drugs, and then the war which followed a revolt against Di Lauro by lieutenants wanting a bigger share, and Di Lauro's terrible revenge.
One ventures into the Vele with trepidation. Many of the apartments are empty, some burned out. But people are surprisingly ready to talk, not about the Camorra per se ('What Camorra?' says one man) but about the film. 'I was in it!' boasts a girl. 'In the bit when they kill the lady at the end! You can see me!'
A woman whispers hoarsely on a stinking walkway between front doors: 'There is nothing that hasn't happened here. I read his book too. It's true, every word, God bless him.'
'When the cameras arrived,' says Saviano, 'most people wanted to be part of it, to advise on how to make the film and get it right. Once the people had decided they wanted the film to be made there, there was nothing the Camorra could do. They didn't want this film but they had to allow it. That alone was something.'
Casal di Principe is the fiefdom of the Casalesi clan and now-jailed boss Francesco Schiavone, called Sandokan after the pirate. He strangled the heir to the leadership with his bare hands at a cartel meeting, then became the mogul of Camorra construction, arms dealing and garbage disposal. I pull up at the Caffe Penelope, attacked by Sandokan's men during the Casalesi wars, and make some stupid remark in nostalgic praise of Maradona to a man at the bar reading a football paper. I ask if he has read Saviano's book. He stirs sugar into his coffee and replies with a nod, then a stare and silent grimace which says, today of all days, with those cops dead: 'Don't try to talk. Leave.' My appointment here with one of the bravest reporters in Italy, Rosaria Capacchione, has been postponed because of the car chase and three important arrests of Camorristi, which she must cover for her paper, Il Mattino. One of a roll of honour of brave writers on the Mafia, of whom Saviano is the most prominent, Rosaria works the area under police guard, and no wonder. Only the other day she was again singled out, along with Saviano, by lawyers for Camorristi in the dock at neighbouring Santa Maria Capua Vetere for her reporting on a trial. The Casalesi have wanted Rosaria dead since 1995 when she was tailed by gunmen after revealing the contents of two supergrass confessions against Sandokan while he was still at liberty.
As Saviano says: 'The Mafia makes for the best and the worst. It's hard to find the best sometimes but it is there - the tenacity of the good people in this battle, which seems so hopeless. No Italian political party can fight an election campaign by going against the Mafia. Politics is an alibi - there is this idea that if you have politics that is corrupt you have the Mafia, and if you had clean politics, the Mafia would disappear. It's not like that. Political parties cannot rid us of the Camorra because the Camorra has no politics beyond the money it makes; no ideology apart from its business interests. This can only be done by getting at their economy and their roots in society. And the way to do this is by mobilising civil society, challenging the way they operate, refusing to take part.'
In last week's L'espresso magazine Saviano lambasted the passive complicity of the city's middle class - Napoli Bene, as they are called - confronted in this particular case by a story linking the undersecretary of state for economy in Silvio Berlusconi's cabinet, Nicola Cosentino, and senior local politicians from his party, with the garbage disposal rackets run by the Camorra. Saviano says: 'The reaction of this strata [the middle class] has been "So what?" or "Why should that amaze you - isn't that how things work?" The professional ranks, the intellectuals, the employers - in short, the bourgeoisie of Campania which is always seen as a noble stratum - seems incapable of protesting.'
'I have no illusions about the fascination with the Camorra, with the bosses,' concludes Saviano. 'To say they have no fascination is a lie. I'm not going to say that you don't earn more money or that you will not get more pretty women if you become a Camorrista. But what do you do then? You can't leave where you live, you can't talk to anyone apart from your own kind, and the only women you will meet are the ex-girlfriends of your own men. And possibly you'll end up dead.'
And what about his readers? Are they too caught up in morbid fascination? 'What is so fascinating about torturing a girl to death or shooting an innocent teenager? What I want to do is recognise the fantasy, take hold of it and take it apart.'
Gomorrah the film is out on Friday. To order a copy of the book for £8.99 with free UK p&p go to observer.co.uk/bookshop or call 0870 836 0885
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2008
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Oct 5, 2008 9:38:29 GMT -5
Post by dino on Oct 5, 2008 9:38:29 GMT -5
Politics is an alibi - there is this idea that if you have politics that is corrupt you have the Mafia, and if you had clean politics, the Mafia would disappear. It's not like that. Political parties cannot rid us of the Camorra because the Camorra has no politics beyond the money it makes; no ideology apart from its business interests. This can only be done by getting at their economy and their roots in society. And the way to do this is by mobilising civil society, challenging the way they operate, refusing to take part.'
amen to that. see if ihave to read a brit newspapers to find out the only right words about mafia i ever see
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manho
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Oct 11, 2008 8:32:12 GMT -5
Post by manho on Oct 11, 2008 8:32:12 GMT -5
little article from la repubblica earlier this week. there was a private screening of gomorrah for a select band of american movie guys (scorsese, turturro, buscemi, half the cast of the sopranos...) and the film got a heavy thumbs up from everybody.
Scorsese: Gomorra chiude i conti col neorealismo
Repubblica — 06 ottobre 2008
E partita dal teatro Ziegfield di New York la corsa di Gomorra di Matteo Garrone verso la nomination all' Oscar. Nei giorni scorsi è stato presentato al New York Film Festival, e poi in una proiezione privatissima in cui Martin Scorsese ha introdotto il film a un piccolo gruppo di big del cinema non solo italo americano. Fra i presenti mezzo cast dei Soprano, John Turturro, Steve Buscemi, Stanley Tucci. «Ho visto il film due settimane fa e l' ho apprezzato moltissimo», ha detto Martin Scorsese. «Non solo per il soggetto, ma per il modo in cui il film è costruito e per il ruolo che occupa nella storia del cinema italiano. L' estetica, il rigore, la struttura narrativa originalissima, la recitazione di tutti i personaggi, e la sua intensa e precisa visualizzazione, a volte da incubo: una delle grandi forze di questo film è che non lascia scampo», continua il regista di Goodfellas. «Non sai in che paese sei, in che città, in che strada: sei scaraventato in un altro pianeta, sei solo e senza via di uscita. Capisci subito che i personaggi sullo schermo potranno solo fare una brutta fine, e tuttavia il mondo che stai osservando continuerà. è un film molto forte, e molto vero. Fa pensare a Francesco Rosi, all' Affare Mattei, certamente a Le mani sulla città, o al mio preferito, Salvatore Giuliano, ma c' è una ferocia nell' impegno degli autori, un' accusa non solo all' Italia ma al mondo. Circa sette anni fa ho fatto un documentario sul cinema italiano, e ricordo che Bertolucci consigliò i giovani registi italiani di tagliare il cordone ombelicale del neorealismo. E quando parliamo di neorealismo non intendo lo stile, la fotografia in bianco e nero, l' assenza di attori, le riprese nelle strade, ma quel neorealismo del ' 45 e ' 46 che era la voce di una nazione forse nel peggior periodo della sua storia. Sono convinto che questo film faccia un passo importante in quella direzione, perché aiuta a ridefinire quella voce, quella nazione, in un mondo che è entrato nel XXI secolo». E Steve Buscemi ha aggiunto: «Ho trovato il film devastante, bello e doloroso. Un film realizzato in modo magistrale, brutale, onesto, e molto commovente. Mi sorprende che Martin non lo consideri un film neorealista». Per John Turturro: «Gomorra è un film di prima qualità che viene da un libro di prima qualità. Ho sempre saputo che sarebbe stato impossibile portarlo tutto sullo schermo, ma il risultato è ottimo. Farò tutto quello che posso per spargere la voce affinché più gente possibile lo veda in questo paese. Perché ricorda i grandi vecchi film pur essendo molto moderno. Ovviamente è amplificato nella finzione e si concentra su una piccola zona, ma quando hai a che fare con l' assenza di educazione, quando i soldi sono tutto e non ti importa del tuo ambiente, sei di fronte a problemi vivi in tutto il mondo. L' ho pensato quando ho letto il libro e quando ho visto il film: com' è duro essere coraggiosi! Come molti sanno ho forti sentimenti per l' Italia, ho avuto una bellissima esperienza lavorando in teatro a Napoli e voglio tornarci, quindi sono doppiamente amareggiato da quello che ho visto. Sapevo che c' erano problemi ma non pensavo arrivassero a quel punto, nemmeno gli italiani lo sapevano. Ci sono molti tipi di intrattenimento, ma non succede spesso di vedere un lavoro così maturo». - SILVIA BIZIO NEW YORK
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Oct 13, 2008 14:01:15 GMT -5
Post by Cat Stevens on Oct 13, 2008 14:01:15 GMT -5
gonna watch this one tonight for the first time (I know! it is only recently that I've found it), they tell me it's the best british horror, a cult classic, etc; review later:
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Oct 13, 2008 15:10:03 GMT -5
Post by owen on Oct 13, 2008 15:10:03 GMT -5
i picked that up for a fiver a couple of months ago and then lost it. thx for reminding me to go search for it...supposed to be brilliant alright.
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manho
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Oct 13, 2008 15:17:32 GMT -5
Post by manho on Oct 13, 2008 15:17:32 GMT -5
yeah, it's pretty cool. anthony shaffer is a top notch theatre writer and edward woodward is one of the best actors of his generation check him out in "callan" (tv series) if you can get hold of any episodes. there were two private eye/special agent type series made for tv in the 60s which were better than anything ever made for the cinema. one was "callan" and the other was "public eye".
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david
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Oct 13, 2008 16:15:26 GMT -5
Post by david on Oct 13, 2008 16:15:26 GMT -5
The Wicker Man is a cool film.
I saw Gomorrah yesterday. It was good, not great. It's certainly a convincingly bleak picture of Naples, but I really didn't care too much about most of the characters. If I ever get back to Naples, I'll think twice about drinking the water though . . .
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manho
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Oct 13, 2008 17:26:30 GMT -5
Post by manho on Oct 13, 2008 17:26:30 GMT -5
"It was good, not great"
that's what i suspected. italian culture has been all downhill since mina dropped out.
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manho
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Oct 13, 2008 17:29:46 GMT -5
Post by manho on Oct 13, 2008 17:29:46 GMT -5
what i feared rather than suspected. the publicity had half convinced me this time.
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Oct 13, 2008 20:30:18 GMT -5
Post by Cat Stevens on Oct 13, 2008 20:30:18 GMT -5
review: BRITT EKLAND'S TITS WOOHOO!!!
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Oct 14, 2008 1:32:50 GMT -5
Post by dino on Oct 14, 2008 1:32:50 GMT -5
and one of the gomorra actor was arrested just the other day for being a real camorrista
the irony
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manho
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Oct 14, 2008 4:17:16 GMT -5
Post by manho on Oct 14, 2008 4:17:16 GMT -5
that's par for the course if you go for realism. i think you'll find the same applies for the sopranos. if you want honest actors in your mafia film it's gonna look like "vendetta for the saint".
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Oct 27, 2008 20:55:26 GMT -5
Post by Cat Stevens on Oct 27, 2008 20:55:26 GMT -5
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Nov 16, 2008 19:48:42 GMT -5
Post by Cat Stevens on Nov 16, 2008 19:48:42 GMT -5
My fav tune in the Wicker Man (no spoilers there, Owen): www.youtube.com/watch?v=-04rx3I4fccDid you find your copy then? If not, I could burn you and send mine, it's the director's cut, 100 minutes (instead of the 88 min. one that was available for years with lot of scenes missing)
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Nov 17, 2008 7:40:42 GMT -5
Post by owen on Nov 17, 2008 7:40:42 GMT -5
nope. will send you a pm later. (at work now)
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manho
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Dec 9, 2008 5:53:36 GMT -5
Post by manho on Dec 9, 2008 5:53:36 GMT -5
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