Word: alighieri
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What are the similarities between Dante Alighieri and Steve Buscemi? First time writer and director Hue Rhodes may be the only one. Loosely based on Dante’s “Inferno,” “Saint John of Las Vegas” follows a reformed gambler’s trip to his own personal “hell” as he is led on his first investigation of insurance fraud. However, though the performances are uniformly strong, only viewers who are already deeply familiar with Dante’s poem will be able to understand...
Steve Buscemi plays John Alighieri, a quirky and uncomfortable man fighting a gambling addiction and moving up through the ranks of a mundane insurance agency. When he finally works up the courage to ask his boss (Peter Dinklage) for a raise, he instead offers him a shot at investigating the potential fraud of a stripper named Tasty Delight (Emmanuelle Chriqui...
...wants him, as in Ghost World, where he was chased by Thora Birch and Scarlett Johansson, it usually plays as a joke. So when Saint John of Las Vegas, in which he gets the lead, opens with Buscemi hitting on a convenience-store clerk, we assume his character, John Alighieri, doesn't stand a chance. He's disheveled and his face is heavily bruised. But she gives John a considering look. He's buying $1,000 worth of lottery tickets. He claims to be lucky. She shrugs an OK, or at least a maybe. (See the best movies, TV, books...
...Wait a minute. Alighieri. Virgil. Road trip. Where's hell? Las Vegas, of course. Using Dante's Inferno as your inspiration is an immodest act for someone making his feature film debut, but Rhodes does it so modestly that you'd hardly notice the connection. If the movie has a theme, it seems to be about making your own luck, which John doesn't believe in, initially. A bit involving an inexplicably flaming gate and a nudist colony led by Tim Blake Nelson should have been the tip off to an Inferno connection, but it feels trivial, just another slightly...
Kept in the basement of the Asiatic Society library, a colonnaded marble building in Mumbai's colonial heart, is perhaps the Indian financial capital's least heralded relic: one of the two oldest surviving manuscripts of Italian poet Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy. Its some 450 richly illustrated pages, dating from the 1350s, are bound and wrapped in red silk. Though the book rarely goes on display, Society staff insist the medieval text is in excellent condition. It came to Mumbai in the possession of a 19th century British antiquarian grandee, the imperially named Mountstuart Elphinstone, and has stayed...