Word: mimi
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Pasqualino (Giancarlo Giannini) is a survivor, and Lina Wertmuller's smashing new movie concerns both the ways he stays alive and the price he pays. Seven Beauties is a death-house comedy, brutal, audacious, liberating. As previous films like Love and Anarchy, The Seduction of Mimi and Swept Away demonstrate, Wertmuller takes a ringmaster's glee in barraging an audience with tawdry splendors and keeping it dazzled. She knows how to make us laugh, hard and long, even while we question ourselves for doing it. It is from the persistence of this questioning that Wertmuller gives...
...people-from life-size effigies to tiny, comic-strip figures painted on vinyl -were made by the Ruckus Works, a team of 20 painters, carpenters, sewers and stuffers, electricians, engineers and gadgeteers, brought together and working under the amiable direction of two artists, Red Grooms and his wife Mimi Gross...
...make, Ruckus Manhattan is closer to the street than the museum. It is cobbled together from the lumberyards of So-Ho and hardware bazaars of Canal Street, permeated with the hoarse side-of-the-mouth loquacity of a kvetching cabbie, swarming with grim and gaudy figures who, says Mimi Gross, are true New Yorkers, being "nosy, curious and short." There is a gritty and lugubrious side to the Ruckus imagination. Some of the figures are gross ham-faced brutes; and the bum who presides over the entrance to Wall Street is a scarecrow fit to terrify children, a wadded mass...
...Wertmuller's intention to rehearse this sexist drama uncritically. Not only do her published statements contradict this reading, but her second film, The Seduction of Mimi, is such a riotous and trenchant lampoon of Italian machismo as to make it inconceivable that Wertmuller deliberately endorses such a relationship here...
...ideas parallels her conception of the relation between politics and love. In each of her films, Wertmuller shows men whose political ideas are contradicted by their emotional and sexual behavior: in Love and Anarchy Giancarlo Giannini fails to shoot Mussolini because he falls in love; in the Seduction of Mimi his machismo belies his communism and ultimately forces him to collaborate with the Mafia; in Swept Away he forsakes his peasant wife and children for the socialite Raffaella. Though Wertmuller sees herself as a political filmmaker, the emotional message of her films is that political ideas and action are irrelevant...