Truly Dreadful Film

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

I am sorry but when I realized they were going to slaughter a pig on camera I stopped watching this film. I even broke the DVD as a remembrance for the poor animals that died making this film. Yes it is a beautiful recreation of life in 1900 rural Italy, yes the acting and camera work is flawless...but somehow I had this feeling of guilt that I had to like this movie because it was about poor people and filled to the brim with touchy feely details of their lives (a small child urinating before being put to bed ad nausea).Anyway such a human movie but ugghhh some things we do as humans are not something you want to watch close up. Although I did not watch this movie out I anticipated things like an obligatory filmed birth and every other touchy feely must in a left wing artsy class struggle film.Bad female writers usually love these things, I wonder who wrote this? An edited version of this film would have been OK.

I knew it was an Italian film, and that it featured in the book 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die, so that was the best reason for me to try it. There is no plot as such, it is basically a documentary style film seeing life on a peasant farm in Lombardy, Italy, at the beginning of the 19th century. So in the film we see all farm work and activities going through all the seasons, including hay loading, gutting and cutting up a pig while partially alive, a little mucking out, and caring for horses and cattle, oh, and going to church. The only tiny hints at a story are a clever child sent to school instead of getting help, and having to walk miles to get there, and when his shoes are ruined, they can't afford a new pair. Also, one of the farmer's finds a very valuable coin while doing his task with the horses, and to make sure no-one finds it, he hides it under one of the horse's hooves, but this doesn't work. Starring Luigi Ornaghi as Batistì, Francesca Moriggi as Batistina, Omar Brignoli as Minec and Antonio Ferrari as Tuni. I think, if it wasn't for the lack of plot (which isn't all bad, but still), and the length at just over three hours, this would have probably been given five stars, but it is still an essential period drama. It won the BAFTA Flaherty Documentary Award, and it won the Cannes Film Feastival Golden Palm (Palme D'or) and the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury. Very good!

What is it about artsy directors that makes them love to slaughter live animals on camera? Is it not a "real" film unless you slit a pig's throat (as we see here), shoot a horse in the neck (a la Tarkovsky) or decapitate a water buffalo (Francis Ford Coppola)? I wouldn't mind so much if these films weren't pretentiously laced with "moral" messages and "spirituality". I feel like I'm being preached to by a 17th century Catholic priest. It's utterly sickening. Give me CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST over this hypocrisy any day. At least in CH, you know what you're going to get: animal snuff. Whereas this pretentious tosh is animal snuff packaged like a Buddhist sermon. Yeah, a Buddhist barbecue is more like it. Eat up, folks. The pigmeat is fresh.

A mosaic of peasant life in Lombardy at the turn of the twentieth century that slowly moves along for three hours but never comes close to losing interest thanks to the wealth of details and (though amateur) moving performances. In the title lies the heartwrenching conclusion abruptly reached after the meandering and soulful journey that is taken into the lives of a group of peasant families, with the butchering of a goose and later a pig, a marriage, a boatride to Milan, and a dinner amongst the sisters of a convent while the stirrings of political change and repression stay mainly in the background but are there to see. While the focus is on the peasants, the world that the movie creates is more like being there than any other film around.