Reviews!

Going through a bunch of Scorsese flicks... you haven't seen any of these, I'm presuming, but this is for my own personal enjoyment, so the hell with you. This is one of two that I might do tonight. The other is Bringing Out The Dead... I might talk about Casino as well.

My Voyage To Italy

The point of this documentary is that Scorsese likes Italian Neorealism, and so he decided to make a movie about these movies in the hope that he would then get you to see these movies. Which is cool and all, I suppose, and I guess it has piqued my interest in post-war Italian films. But it's not really interesting as a movie, you know?

At first, Scorsese spends some time talking about his family and how they used to watch these movies on a TV channel broadcasting out of New York (heavily populated with immigrated Italians, of course), and how the films would remind them of the home that they once left. This is the part that works the best, because it is Scorsese not only talking about the films themselves but how they related to his life and culture. But then it becomes more about the films and how they influenced Scorsese as a director, which I suppose is the natural progression that it is bound to take, but it becomes then more of a film history lesson rather than a documentary.

At some point, I stopped caring about what Scorsese said about the films I haven't seen and rather what he said about the ones I have seen (which means--pretty much I was interested in the Fellini segments). Is that a good thing? I don't know. I also don't know if it actually made me really all that more interested in seeing these films, since I pretty much got the condensed versions of them right here.

It's interesting at times, and I enjoyed seeing the insights into the films that I had seen (although I was disappointed he glanced over La Strada and Nights of Cabiria, but oh well), but it's four hours long.

RATING: