Word: sergio
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...hotel collaborates with Nero (real name Sergio Iacomoni), chief trainer and president of the Scuola Gladiatori Roma, so it can provide guests with something more original than a gym. The courses are proving just as popular as corporate team-building exercises as they are for young classicists and their parents...
...spaghetti western changed that. Sergio Leone filched the plot from Akira Kurosawa's Yojimbo (Hollywood had already remade Kurosawa's The Seven Samurai as The Magnificent Seven) for his 1964 Fistful of Dollars. Clint ambles into a rotten town commandeered by rival miscreants and takes both gangs down. In Fistful and the Leone-Eastwood followups For a Few Dollars More (surely the most honest title every slapped on a sequel) and The Good, the Bad & the Ugly, society was run by outlaws. The moral choice was among various shades of black. Anarchy ran riot, and the only recourse was martial...
...Among the prime directors of Italian Westerns (most of them shot in Spain, by the way) was Sergio Corbucci, who vaulted to prominence with the 1966 Django. It was The image of star Franco Nero coming into town not on horseback but on foot, dragging a coffin, was an instant sensation that cued more than 50 Django films, all unrelated to the original. Its theme song, by composer Luis Bacalov, remains one of those melodies that worms its way into a listener's brain and, as I can testify, can't be extracted for weeks. The Corbucci film also inspired...
...screen (where such stars as Brando, Gable, Monroe and Stanwyck did sagebrush epics) and on TV (where, in the 1958-59 season, six of the seven top-rated series were oaters). A decade later, the form was revitalized in the spaghetti westerns starring Clint Eastwood and directed by Sergio Leone. But by the late 1970s the genre had virtually bit the dust. Natural western stars might very occasionally be able to get on a horse and shoot it out--like Eastwood in Unforgiven, Kevin Costner in Dances with Wolves and Open Range--but only through an expenditure of their clout...
...Eastern westerns remade in Hollywood (The Seven Samurai as The Magnificent Seven) and Europe (Yojimbo as Leone's Fistful of Dollars). Leone followed up with For a Few Dollars More--surely the most honest title ever given a sequel--and the spaghetti western craze was born. Django, director Sergio Corbucci's bleak riff on Fistful, with its hero lugging a coffin that has a machine gun inside, spawned at least 50 movies named Django. The most recent, Takashi Miike's Sukiyaki Western Django, which played to rapt crowds at the recent Venice and Toronto film festivals but has no American...