01 June 2025

Weekly visions - week 21, 2025

A rather low-key horror week

The poster for Takashi Shimizu's 2005 film *Reincarnation*
After the back-to-back cinema screenings last week, I was left with nothing recent to watch in a theatre this week, and no relatively recent film I was interested in renting, so… I had to settle for what I found.

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29 May 2025

Splitting Bubbles

A short reflection about meeting ‘old’ friends

Back in my current hometown after a short holiday break back to Italy, I’m reflecting on how things and people (including myself) have changed.

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28 May 2025

Tomorrowland

My submission to this month’s IndieWeb Movie Club

The poster for Brad Bird's 2015 film *Tomorrowland*
Tomorrowland is ten years old, and we are all now living in the times foretold by President Nix, lost in tragedy and despair.

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26 May 2025

Weekly visions - week 20, 2025

Where we begin and end the week with Ethan Hunt

My appreciation for Brian De Palma has significantly reduced in the last few years, but I still believe his first Mission Impossible is the best film in the series. Sorry if that upset you.

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18 May 2025

Weekly visions - week 19, 2025

I’m starting to think I have no good found-footage films left to see

The poster for Josh Ruben's *Heart Eyes*
Please welcome a new addition to my blacklist of one-star films. If you asked me, I would have told you that this category included just three movies (Mamma Mia, My Big Fat Greek Wedding, The Sweetest Thing). But Letterboxd stats list 17 films, some of which I don’t even remember watching (There’s Someone Inside Your House, what was that?), some of which I’m surprised to have rated so harshly (does Old really deserve such a low score? ).
So I could and will revisit some of them, one day, to give them another chance (I mean, I love ABBA music… maybe the version I watched, on a trans-oceanic flight, was terribly butchered).
That won’t happen with the film I watched this week, though.

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14 May 2025

The other Pizzaballa

A childhood memory linked to a peculiar family name

Pier Luigi Pizzaballa (public domain picture, from Wikipedia)
During this last conclave, many English-speaking people online were fascinated by the name of one of the candidates to the papacy, Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem.
I can totally understand why his family name sounds peculiar. It was the same for many Italians in the second half of the last century, but most of us will think of a different person.

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