Ballando Ballando (Le Bal) (1983)

I’ve been trying to find a good copy of Ballando Ballando for years and found one last week, so I am finally watching it. Ettore Scola’s film is charming and funny with some very silly, delightful performances. The conceit is a nightclub where we spend nearly fifty years from 1936 to 1983 and we see many different characters over this time, but all the actors are the same. The music changes, the dances change, but there’s no spoken dialogue and we watch the passage of time. It’s a set of cinematic restrictions ripe for farce, and it’s successful and always fun to watch.

This is not really interesting to anyone except me, but now that I've finally seen Portrait of Chieko, The Walls of Malapaga, and Ballando Ballando, the number of Foreign Language / International Feature Oscar nominees I've seen has jumped to 337 out of 347 nominees (that number includes this year's five movies). This leaves me only Io Capitano, Perfect Days, and The Teachers' Lounge from 2023, and then Daens (1992), Memories of a Marriage (1989), Nights and Days (1975), The Deluge (1974), The New Land (1972), Live for Life (1967), and Dear John (1964) from previous years.

Mondo Cane (1962)

Mondo Cane is "the original shockumentary" – as all of the synopses call it nowadays. This movie is so very 1960s, though. It's quite silly, really, while also showing us a great deal of savagery.

Mondo Cane's style is a sort of faux-anthropological view of various activities in human societies worldwide. To my mind, this kind of thing ends up being sort of racist, even when it doesn't want to be, and the violence in it, particularly as directed toward animals, is a repeated theme in the film and is, frankly, disgusting.

I didn't hate this, though. It's well made and amusing when it's not horrifying. It has that kind of Italian humor that we can see in movies like I Mostri and I Nuovi Mostri. Mondo Cane, too, would go on to have a series of sequels.

As for the song that was nominated for an Oscar in 1964... what song?