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Life Is Beautiful

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Life Is Beautiful (1998)

October. 22,1998
|
8.6
|
PG-13
| Drama Comedy
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A touching story of an Italian book seller of Jewish ancestry who lives in his own little fairy tale. His creative and happy life would come to an abrupt halt when his entire family is deported to a concentration camp during World War II. While locked up he tries to convince his son that the whole thing is just a game.

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Reviews

Unlimitedia
1998/10/22

Sick Product of a Sick System

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Console
1998/10/23

best movie i've ever seen.

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Bereamic
1998/10/24

Awesome Movie

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Deanna
1998/10/25

There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

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adonis98-743-186503
1998/10/26

When a Jewish librarian and his son become victims of the Holocaust, he uses a perfect mixture of will, humor, and imagination to protect his son from the dangers around their camp. Life is Beautiful has Benigni doing his usual things both in front and behind the camera and unfortunately his humor is quite dated. (4/10)

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TheNabOwnzz
1998/10/27

It shouldn't be surprising that this movie isn't a very great one, as it is very hard to take a matter like the holocaust and try to create a parody of it as Benigni tries to do here. Yet it has been done before succesfully, but unfortunately Life is Beautiful is not one of these instances.It seems to be a movie with the central message that you can find hope in anything or anyone, yet it comes off as a sitcom with jokes you just can't seem to laugh about. Benigni himself was overacting like a madman the entire film, yet comically, dramatically and emotionally he does not seem to make any dent whatsoever. The story is also rushed. He suddenly has a child and expects that this is his free ticket in order to feel sympathy for his character, yet it comes across as a cheap way to get the audiences undeserved sympathies. Benigni uses cliché'd jokes that we have all seen before, rendering it inaffective as a comedy film. The movie doesn't take itself seriously enough in its seemingly serious setting of the holocaust, making it also fail as a dramatic or emotional film. Ofcourse Dr Strangelove by Kubrick is an example of where it actually works to create a comic effect over a serious matter, but this is generally because the comic aspect is a lot funnier, the dramatic aspect is a lot more plausible, Peter Sellers is simply a better actor than Benigni, and the film knows at all times it does not take itself seriously, unlike this one.The cinematography is alright, but nothing special. There are a couple of nice landscape shots and the scene where the train arrives are quite nicely filmed, but it is nothing to cry home about. The music is decent, but not enough to make you emotionally involved in the picture like Ennio Morricone's score for fellow italian film Cinema Paradiso (1988) managed to do so well. There are also a lot of scenes in the latter part of the film where particular scenes could have easily been drawn out to create a more dramatic effect, yet Benigni cuts everything short and everything seems to end way too abruptly and quickly, negating any kind of emotional connection you might be starting to feel. I would say despite the fact that Benigni was even worse in the first half of the film, i would still prefer the first over the second, as atleast it seemed to know which direction it was going at that point, but in the second it turned into an unfocused mess of sillyness to the point where we cannot absorb any kind of dramatic or emotional impact we were supposed to get.If you ignore all these obvious issues, which i am certain a lot of people did, some might consider it a movie with a message, yet you are indifferent to any possible message since the characters seem indifferent to the situation.

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pardojoan
1998/10/28

The movie is split in two different movies. The love between a man and a woman. And how a father explain the crude reality to his son like a game.

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mirkobozic
1998/10/29

A friend of mine, who struggled with overweight issues for most of his life, once said that the only place where he actually managed to lose weight was the concentration camp where he was incarcerated during the 1990s conflict in former Yugoslavia. He fortunately survived, and Roberto Benigni's film isn't far away from that in terms of approach to the subject. it's arguably my favourite war film, due to the unique perspective of the little boy (Giorgio Cantarini) and the gruesome reality that's about to crush him, where his father (Benigni) does his best to prevent him from the horrors of the Holocaust and protect him by turning survival into a game where the boy gets to win a tank if he behaves properly. The viewer is unable to ignore the repercussions of the situation in which the story is unfolding, yet Benigni's direction make the hot potato of the topic at hand much easier to handle. Nicola Piovani's emotional soundtrack hit the right nerve without descending into pathetics. Benigni won two Oscars, which were very well deserved. When he got up to the stage, the great Sophia Loren handed him the award, hugged him and broke down in tears, which is a scene that resonates with me even today. He dedicated the Oscar to "those who gave their lives so that we can say la vita e bella". It' impossible to stay cold to that. Bravo, Benigni!

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