'Hit Me', Rocco!

Boxing BrothersOnly 3 episodes of Hit Me With Your Best Shot left and here's one of the three! Please join us with your own "best shot" choices for Aliens (July 13th) and Rebel Without a Cause (July 20th) as we close out the second season in the next two weeks.

Those films will be easier tasks than Luchino Visconti's ROCCO AND HIS BROTHERS (1960), mostly because they're more familiar properties. Visconti offers up so much to ponder in his novelistic film that one viewing might not suffice.

Rocco and His Brothers, which charts the sad aspirational lives of the Pardoni family -- they're country boys who move to the big city (Milan) -- is structured loosely by chapters named after and focusing on each brother from eldest to youngest: Vincenzo (Spiros Focás), Simone (Renato Salvatori), Rocco (Alain Deloin), Ciro (Max Cartier) and Luca (Rocco Vidolazzi). But this family is so codependent that that shifting narrative focus wouldn't be all that obvious without the title cards.

In fact, the brothers are rarely separated physically. They sleep in the same rooms, chase the same dreams (boxing), train and shower together, and even share women (albeit tragically). Visconti often films them in clumps, particularly in the first chapter, as the entire Pardoni family moves to Milan on the night of the engagement party of the eldest son.

They're never separated emotionally, as in this late shot in the film, when Rocco struggles to make a toast and the weight of his entire family hangs over him -- quite literally given the set decoration!

Rocco is a fascinating lead character because he's held up as an ideal in some respects being loyal, hard-working, and unencumbered by greed... but his tragic flaw is his own saintly martyrdom. The patriarch of the Pardoni clan is dead before the film begins (the matriarch is still wearing black) but he left five sons behind. You'd never know it from Rocco's savior complex. Does he fancy himself "the only begotten" what with the way he continually lays down his own blood, body, spirit and dreams for his wayward brother? 

But Rocco is no Christ. His love for his fellow man, or at least this one brother Simone, is so great that it's actually sinful. And it's not his own life he is willing to sacrifice but his woman's, Nadia's (a terrific Annie Girardot who you'll remember as Isabelle Huppert's crazy mother in The Piano Teacher).

Which is why the following two shots moved me the most.

Midway through the film Rocco dumps Nadia for love of his brother Simone (if Rocco and His Brothers weren't already considered a classic film, it'd have to be considered at least a classic soap opera) but his tears are impotent and this generosity of spirit hugely conditional since Nadia isn't exactly getting a good deal. In the end, it's Nadia who has to be crucified and she's not the one with the savior complex. 

"If I wanted a sermon, I'd go to mass."

Nathaniel and His Blog Brothers...  
Thanks to the following who also watched the movie for this Hit Me episode. Go read this great posts.

• My New Plaid Pants Hot Bros Before Hos
• Movies Kick Ass Iconic Roles
• Film Actually The Seductress
• Awww The Movies loved the movie, too

Clutch The Pearls! "The Iron Lady" Teases

What timing!

Oscar nominations are exactly 200 days away. Immediately after hearing that Glenn Close's Albert Nobbs now has a distributor, her ostensible "overdue" Best Actress competition -- that'd be Meryl Streep -- starts teasing us with this one minute teaser clip, the first from The Iron Lady.

We'll save the "Yes, No, Maybe So" for a full trailer. But you are immediately forgiven if every line reads as an Oscar tease as well.

You've got it in you to go the whole distance!"

Consider eyebrows raised, but why can't I shake the vocal / aural image of Streep as Julia Child on first glimpse of Streep as Margaret Thatcher? Is it just the Oscar proximity? (Can you?)

P.S. Oscar Prediction Pages updates have begun starting with Best Actress

Secret Messages: "Brain Says Strange Things Now"

secret messages from the movies.

CANT WAIT   CANT THINK EASY SINCE MORNING
BRAIN SAYS STRANGE THINGS NOW

FEEL MY WILL GOING     ALREADY

Can you guess the movie?  Check your guess after the jump.

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"Rocco and His Brothers"

Hit Me With Your Best Shot is a series in which we capture what we think of as the best shot -- and best is in the eye of the beholder whether that be for reasons thematic, aesthetic, intellectual or personal. Next Wednesday night for the multi-blog celebration of the 25th anniversary of James Cameron's Aliens (1986). This week's topic is... Luchino Visconti's Rocco and His Brothers.

Our Blog Brothers...  Go read them. Yay, blog brothers!

• My New Plaid Pants Hot Bros Before Hos
• Movies Kick Ass Iconic Roles
• Film Actually The Seductress
• Awww The Movies loved the movie, too

My piece will be up tomorrow. Why the delay? True story: I had a very unexpected visit just as I sat down to write today and they just left! Craziness.

True Blood 4.2 "You Smell Like Dinner"

Last week on True Blood I bemoaned the scattershot expository-heavy nature of the season 4 premiere but Holy Recovery. This show must have taken a hit of "V" last week because it came on supernaturally strong in the second episode of the season. If they keep this up we could be looking at a peak season. The show managed to pull at least a third of its characters (can we hope for two thirds?) back into a central plot (the emergence of a powerful new witch coven) in organic ways. It's the kind of braided multi-strand narrative that the best television series thrive on and which newly fanatical Game of Thrones watchers are going to eventually realize will never ever happen again on their new favorite show ever -- unless the production team ditches the source material for original stories -- but let's not get sidetracked!

What were those vamp whores up to this week?

'You want to call me that again?'

"You Smell Like Dinner" covers as much recap ground in its first half as "She's Not There" did in its entire hour while actually advancing the story. Jason is being held captive by his were-panther community and we learn why. The vampires at Fangtasia are still beset by Right Wing Christian groups -- Pam gets a particularly choice zinger in before hot-headed Hoyt gets a pumelling. Sam's shapeshifter friends become more interesting, particularly Luna. Eric continues his takeover of Sookie's house and life. He calls her "saucy" which is an impressively perfect word choice on behalf of the screenwriters given that it's 100% accurate, a bit old fashioned (he's hundreds of years old) and English isn't his native tongue.

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