Seven Beauties - 1975 (Italian)

Pasqualino Settebellezze (English title Seven Beauties) is a 1975 Italian language film written and directed by Lina Wertmüller and starring Giancarlo Giannini in the main role. Fernando Rey and Shirley Stoler are also featured. The production design and costume design were by the director's late husband, Enrico Job. The picaresque story follows its protagonist, Pasqualino (Giannini) who, as a dandy and small-time hood in Naples, to save the family honour, is sent to prison for killing a pimp (and then dissecting the victim and placing the body in suitcases) who had turned Pasqualino's sister into a prostitute. Convicted and sent to prison, Pasqualino succeeds in being transferred to a psychiatric ward. Desperate to get out, he volunteers for the Italian Army, but then somewhere in Germany he deserts with a comrade. They are captured and sent to a concentration camp. There, in a bid to save his own life, Pasqualino decides to gain the sexual favors of the obese and ugly female commandant (Stoler). His plan succeeds, except for the fact that he is then put in charge of the barracks as a kapo, and is obliged to select six men to be killed under the threat that if he doesn't do so, they will all be killed. Pasqualino ends up executing the soldier with whom he was captured and being responsible for the death of another fellow prisoner, a Spanish anarchist. At the war's end, upon his return to Naples, Pasqualino discovers that his seven sisters, his fiancée and even his mother have all survived through prostitution. The film was nominated for Academy Awards for Best Actor in a Leading Role, Best Director, Best Foreign Language Film and Best Original Screenplay. Wertmuller was the first woman ever nominated for an Academy Award for Best Director.

Black Book - 2006

"We will kill that girl! However, wherever, whenever."

Based on true events, this epic drama from writer-director Paul Verhoeven stars Carice van Houten as Rachel Stein, a beautiful Jewish woman who averts Nazi capture, then assumes a new Aryan identity and joins the Dutch resistance movement. A local leader persuades her to seduce a Nazi commander and take down the enemy from within. But leading a double life takes its toll -- especially when both sides turn against her.

Director Paul Verhoeven and screenwriter Gerard Soeteman got the idea for the movie while doing research for Soldaat van Oranje (1977). Instead of simply working the controversies surrounding the Dutch Resistance into the already top-heavy screenplay of Soldaat van Oranje, they decided to make a separate movie out of it. Verhoeven and Soeteman wrote the screenplay over a period of almost 20 years, and they finally solved many script problems by making the main character a woman.

With a budget of approx. 16 million euros, this is the most expensive Dutch movie to date.

The Ninth Day - 2004

Would you give your life, your freedom to protect right from wrong? To keep your faith? To protect the lives of others?

In World War II, after a period living hell on earth in the concentration camp of Dachau with other catholic priests, Father Abbé Henri Kremer gets a nine days leave to return to his home town for his mother's funeral. Along this period, the SS Gestapo lieutenant Gebhardt tries to persuade Henri, who was born in silver-spoon and member of an influent Luxembourgian family, to convince the local bishop to give-up resisting to the Germans and write a letter to the Vatican in the name of the Catholic Church of Luxemburg convincing the Pope to support Hitler and the Nazi regime.

A drama loosely based on Jean Bernard's Nazi-era prison diary "Pfarrerblock 25487".

Dark City - 1998

My personal friend, Dov Hoenig, was the film editor to this film as well as the classics The Last of the Mohicans, The Crow and The Fugitive (to name a few). His editing touches make a difference in a film. This one--in particular--called DARK CITY is a neo noir sci-fi film that is quite different. I loved the focus, search and yearning for "Shell Beach".


The film depicts a city in which human inhabitants never see the sun, as their lives are manipulated by extraterrestrials referred to as the "Strangers", who masquerade as humans. The Strangers are committed to studying the race of humanity through experimentation. Rufus Sewell, William Hurt, Kiefer Sutherland, and Jennifer Connelly star in principal roles. Dark City explores the subject matter of murder, as well as abstract ideas such as hallucination, simulated reality, and the relationship between memory and personal identity.


Dark City is a retelling of the "Allegory of the Cave" used by Greek philosopher Plato, who conveyed the allegory as a fictional dialogue between his teacher Socrates and Plato's brother Glaucon. In the film, the city inhabitants are prisoners who do not realize they are in a prison. John Murdoch's escape from the prison parallels the escape from the cave in the allegory. He is assisted by Dr. Schreber, who explains the city's mechanism as Socrates explains to Glaucon how the shadows in the cave are cast. Murdoch however becomes more than Glaucon; Gerard Loughlin writes, "He is a Glaucon who comes to realize that Socrates' tale of an upper, more real world, is itself a shadow, a forgery."


Murdoch defeats the Strangers who control the inhabitants and remakes the world based on childhood memories, which were themselves illusions arranged by the Strangers. Loughlin writes of the lack of background, "The origin of the city is off–stage, unknown and unknowable." Murdoch now casts new shadows for the city inhabitants, who must trust his judgment. Unlike Plato, Murdoch "is disabused of any hope of an outside" and becomes the demiurge for the cave, the only environment he knows.


The city in Dark City is described by Higley as a "murky, nightmarish German expressionist film noir depiction of urban repression and mechanism". The city has a World War II dreariness reminiscent of Edward Hopper's works and has details from different eras and architectures that are changed by the Strangers; "buildings collapse as others emerge and battle with one another at the end". The round window in Dark City is concave like a fishbowl and is a frequently seen element throughout the city. The inhabitants do not live at the top of the city; the main characters' homes are dwarfed by the bricolage of buildings.


"The Matrix" was released one year after "Dark City" and was also filmed at Fox Studios in Sydney, Australia using some of the same sets. Comparisons have been made between scenes from the movies, making note of similarities in both cinematography and atmosphere, as well as the plot.