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.

Tomorrowland is ten years old, and we are all now living in the times foretold by President Nix, lost in tragedy and despair.

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.

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.

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.

I had a random thought… I may have been a bit harsh with Speak No Evil 2024 a couple of weeks ago, as it dawned on me that so much of the current state of World affairs can be described by the simple exchange ‘Why are you doing this to us?’ ‘Because you let me’.