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Il gattopardo (1963)

Rate: 4
Viewed: 7/20

Leopard
7/20: Luchino Visconti makes beautiful but dead pictures.

Il gattopardo, which is Italian for The Leopard, took me many days to complete. I couldn't watch more than fifteen minutes at once because it was so boring and had no plot to speak of.

Burt Lancaster was more exciting for a minute or two in From Here to Eternity, The Train, or Scorpio than all of the three hours put together for this glacial picture that was made for viewers with no taste in art.

Come on, the ballroom scene is so long that it beats the tedium of the wedding scene in The Deer Hunter. The battle scenes are laughable with nobody putting a genuine effort into the fighting. After going through similar films, I have to imagine how much the power would've been lost if a Michael Cinimo wannabe editor decided to add another five hours of desert footage for Lawrence of Arabia.

As usual of Luchino Visconti, the cinematography is the focal point of Il gattopardo. If a motion picture shall be judged this way, then the critics don't know movies well and therefore should be labelled as pseudo-intellectuals. Beautiful scenery alone do not make masterpieces; there must be more than that.

Who are these porcelain-looking characters, and more importantly, are they going to crack any time soon? Yes, there's Burt Lancaster, and there are Alain Delon and the beautiful Claudia Cardinale. But why do their characters matter? I'm still scratching my head in search of answers. Oh, okay...it's about the long lost aristocratic era of Italy. Uh...who cares?

Honestly, I picked up the film for Burt Lancaster; otherwise, I wouldn't have bothered with it. Initially, I thought, "Oh, wow...Burt goes Italian in this." After watching him for a few minutes, I got disappointed; it's hard to take him seriously, knowing he's speaking English, but it's really somebody else's voice. I would've appreciated it more if Burt Lancaster learned the language, at least phonetically, for art's sake.

All in all, if you don't know what the expression "moving painting" means, then I present you Il gattopardo.