Then and now

Upon learning about the death of the famous Italian director, Mario Monicelli, Cart insisted that we watch a movie by him. The way he died is quite tragic by the way, upon knowing that he was not ageing well, he jumped out of the window to commit suicide.

We watched I Soliti Ignoti which is a bitter-sweet comedy about a group of thieves who attempt to burgle a pawn shop and while I had a hard time trying to understand what they were saying, (there were no subtitles, not even Italian ones) it was interesting to see the different cultures and mannerisms during the 50’s.

Like, I didn’t know previously that Sicilian’s (from Southern Italy) were very proud people and before their women get married, they were supposed to be unseen and are always hidden at home. But then again, this was the 50’s and this tradition doesn’t really hold in modern times.

But one of the things that I was really wowed about was the location of the film. I like, and get a kick out of seeing old videos and pictures and see if it can still be found at the present time. Check out this scene from the movie :

And check this out from google maps :

And this one :

Compared to this one :

I’ve been here! Its not too far away from the gelateria that I was earlier this year! Absolute coolness! I’d like to see more of these, there should be more though, but I’m not that fluent enough to decipher and research more Italian! 

In any case, this makes me not help but to wonder. Do we have any films representing old Singaporean monuments and roads? For one, I think that Old P.Ramlee movies do, however the only ones that I can find are always in crappy VCD format so the images and sound are pretty crackled.

I do wish that Shaw Brother’s would digitally restore it and release it in at least DVD format, with subtitles for all to share. It will be such a shame that history is slowly disappearing like this!