Brightlyme i know i wasted 90 mins of my life.

Micransix Crappy film

Grimossfer Clever and entertaining enough to recommend even to members of the 1%

Bessie Smyth Great story, amazing characters, superb action, enthralling cinematography. Yes, this is something I am glad I spent money on.

gavin6942 An adaptation of nine stories from Bocaccio's "Decameron": A young man from Perugia is swindled twice in Naples, but ends up rich; a man poses as a deaf-mute in a convent of curious nuns; a woman must hide her lover when her husband comes home early; a scoundrel fools a priest on his deathbed; three brothers take revenge on their sister's lover; a young girl sleeps on the roof to meet her boyfriend at night; a group of painters wait for inspiration; a crafty priest attempts to seduce his friend's wife; and two friends make a pact to find out what happens after death.Not surprisingly for the guy who gave us "Salo", the film contains abundant nudity, sex, slapstick and scatological humor. It is never as offensive as "Salo" is, but if you are easily taken aback by male nudity, you might want to shy away... because this film gives no care at all about your sensibility.I am not sure what issue Pasolini had with the Catholic Church, but he pokes fun at it here, as he is known to do. You might think this would be a problem in a heavily-Catholic country like Italy, but yet he has gone on to be legend, not least of all because of his courage in courting controversy.

MisterWhiplash Pier Paolo Pasolini has with the Decameron what is supposedly one of his "happiest" movies. This is not to say the film is always cheery- matter of fact a couple of the stories deep down are pretty dark and sad and cursed thanks to the repression of religion and mortal sins- but Pasolini's comedy here is sharp and his wit comes out in the obscene or in the random. It's a little like Bunuel only with a more earthy sensibility with the locations and slightly less surreal situations; it doesn't mean that Pasolini is any less ambitious with treating the foibles and stringent ways of the Catholic Church.The Decameron's only big liability, in my estimation, is that it could be easy to get lost in the structure Pasolini sets up; it's nine stories, ranging from a Sicillian being swindled after finding out he's a brother to a sister of royalty until he's covered in feces, to a supposedly deaf-mute boy who becomes the sex toy for a bunch of sex-starved nuns, to a supposed 'Saint' who fools a priest into thinking he's such with his lackluster confessional, to a girl being met by her boyfriend on the roof and then being (joyfully) caught by her parents since his family is wealthy. They're all interesting stories, more often than not, with even a really short piece like the priest attempting to seduce his friend's wife providing something amusing or eye-catching visually.But, again, all of these stories go from one into the next without much warning, and one may wonder when the next story really begins or if it's a continuation of the last. As it turns out, like the Phantom of Liberty, it's very stream-of-consciousness and one skewering of morality and sex can bleed easily into the other. And yet some may find this to be a more daring strength than others; certainly it's a very funny movie (if not quite as funny as Pasolini's masterpiece The Hawks and the Sparrows), like with the bit of the guy caught in the tomb, to the frankness of the parents asking the boy to marry their daughter on the rooftop - even just the strange feeling one gets watching the painter (played by, I think, Pasolini himself) in the act of creating an unusual but unique work on a church wall.The greatest thing of all, for fans of the subversive, is that nothing is out of bounds for Pasolini, via his source material of the Boccaccio book, and he never is one to ever shy away from sex. That's also another asset this time around- unlike Arabian Nights we get some actually erotic bits thrown in the midst, if unintentionally, and on occasion (i.e. the shot following Lorenzo as he runs by the fence) the director conjures something powerful amidst the medieval/surreal/neo-realist pastiche. 8.5/10

fedor8 Pier Paolo Pasolini, or Pee-pee-pee as I prefer to call him (due to his love of showing male genitals), is perhaps THE most overrated European Marxist director - and they are thick on the ground. How anyone can see "art" in this messy, cheap sex-romp concoction is beyond me. Some of the "stories" here could have come straight out of a soft-core porn film, and I am not even so much referring to the nudity but the simplistic and banal, often pointless stories. Anyone who enjoyed this relatively watchable but dumb oddity should really sink his teeth into the "Der Schulmaedchenreport" soft-porn German 70s movie series, because that's what "Decameron" looks like to me.Besides, the movie is sloppy on nearly all levels, from start to finish: 1. Editing. An example: at 1 hour:15 minutes:45 seconds there is a chasing scene that is put quite clearly in the wrong place. It was supposed to be placed about a minute later, but I guess that Pasolini must have hired boozed-up editors who have little time for the "fine details" of movie-making. Pee-pee-pee's fans would probably counter this by saying that it was placed there intentionally - which I very much doubt. Besides, even if that were true, that would be even worse, because that story gains absolutely nothing by making it harder to follow. (This isn't exactly "Eraserhead" or one of Tarantino's broken-form films...) 2. Acting. Vey sloppy. Triple Pee's fans (all 8 of them) proudly declare how 3P-O uses "real people instead of actors". (Aren't actors people? Or are they Martians? Sure, many actors have sub-par IQs but does that mean we should treat them with contempt...?) Other directors have used amateurs and succeeded (such as Alan Parker or De Niro), so why are PPP's amateurs so utterly awful in his movies? The answer is once again appalling sloppiness. Pasolini is sloppy in everything, and that includes trying to get as much out of his toothless amateurs as he can. He is a lazy director, an IMperfectionist if you like. The anti-Kubrick, I suppose... Pee-pee-pee's principal goal when casting must have been to find as many toothless old people as possible (and young men that are to his liking). In Pasolini's world there is a simple formula: lack of teeth + strange face = realism. It's all well and fine to have them toothless, but at least try to eke out some at least semi-decent performances out of these inexperienced neo-thespians, otherwise you're an amateur yourself - an amateur director, in Pasolini's case. Whether 3P-0 wasn't capable of this feat or simply didn't care doesn't change anything. (Who knows... maybe he didn't even notice the awful acting?) 3. Audio. The synchronization. If 3P-0 felt that microphones are too much of a hassle when filming a movie, then he ought to have at least made a concerted effort in post-production, i.e. getting all these bum actors to say their lines on cue in the studio, so that we the viewers wouldn't have to watch mouths move while the elusive dialogue floats elsewhere in the movie.4. Lack of concept. We have close to a dozen stories which aren't connected in any meaningful way. Some are anti-Church (more on that later), while some are merely sex yarns i.e. cheap male (sometimes gay) fantasies designed to titillate and nothing else. The stories and characters are not amusing (if at all) on an intelligent level, but on the basest level. 10 year-old kids can laugh here... And there is nothing wrong with that, but then don't call it exalted, intellectual art! 5. As a result of point 4, there is also a lack of logic in the order of the stories. That goes without saying. Pee-pee-pee could have arranged the order in any other way, and we would have had the exact same movie. This also means that you can feel free to start from the middle then go back to the beginning, etc. "Decameron" is like a bowl of spaghetti that way: when you start eating it you can begin with any thread you want, it makes no difference at all.6. The pointlessness of the stories' resolutions. Most stories end with a cheap gag/joke, i.e. some damn dumb punchline straight out of a porn comic-book, whereas some stories don't even have a conclusion: they merely end. Finito. At best, the stories are watchable semi-anecdotes, barely any deeper meaning there - unless you find "deep" meanings in a porno. There is, of course, nothing easier than looking for and finding "meaning" where there is an absence of it. Hence even any hardcore porn film can be philosophized/mused over endlessly. It's easy and fun. Try it, oh ye 8 PPP fans! As for the Church-bashing... Some viewers get all excited about his attack on Catholicism and what-not. In principal, that's all well and fine - after all, I'm an atheist myself - but what those people ignore is the simple but essential fact that Pasolini was a Marxist. It's like the pot calling the kettle black. A Marxist criticizing the Church for hypocrisy and stupidity? Where does he get the nerve? Besides, Pasolini wasn't an atheist, hence his high-and-mighty and self-righteous stance isn't justified. After all, Marxists are believers: they merely substituted the accepted god with the idea of a Utopia, which is merely another supernatural wishful-thinking fantasy. Hence I cannot get excited about PPP's anti-religion antics.This sophomoric humpdorama anthology ends with Pasolini saying rather pretentiously: "I wonder... Why produce a work of art when it's nice just to dream about it?" He wasn't actually referring to this silly little movie as art, was he...? In case he was - the poor deluded man - then I have to wonder why he didn't just leave it at dreaming, and NOT make all those bad movies...Wanna read my altered subtitles of Bergman movies? E-mail me.

tedg Film lovers know "Andrei Rublov," that Russian film about an icon painter. The beauty of the film comes in part because the filmmaker is on the same quest as his character, and that quest has as its core the discovery of beauty. The interesting thing about movies is that they create and sustain a fantasy world that lives beyond any one movie and into which we assume each movie is born. That world has its own type of beauty, one born of color and glamor and poise.Paosolini does the same thing as Tarkovsky, but where Tarkovsky dealt with cosmic beauty and recognition, this artist has simpler goals: to engage with flesh, to flow with the simple streams of ignoble daily motion, and to discover beauty in that plain world.Oh, what a terrific cinematic place to visit! This is a far from that collection of movie metaphors and beauty as we can go. There is no movie acting here. There is no external beauty. There is no recourse to familiar characters or representation. As usual, he draws his source material from matter that is not only before cinema, but before any popular writing.And he works with that material outside any movie tricks. Well, he still has that Italian tendency to believe that the world is populated by characters and not situations or any sort of fateful flow. Just people who do things. Lots of little things, usually associated with pleasure.So if you are building a world of cinematic imagination you need to have this as one of your corners. That's silly, every one of us is building a cinematic imagination — we cannot avoid it. What I mean to say is that if you are building an imagination, some of which you understand and can use, some of which you actually want and can enjoy without being sucked into reflex...If you want to just relate to people as people and test how easy it is to find grace in the strangest of faces, then this is your movie voyage for the night.One rather shocking thing is how the nudity works. In "ordinary" film, we thing nothing of seeing two people humping and moaning, nude pelvises grinding is the most hungry of ways. But we gasp when some genital is shown. Here, the exact reverse is found: no shyness about the obvious existence of genitals, an erection even. A sleeping girl with her hand in her lover's crotch. DIsplayed as if it were in the same cinematic territory as the faces he finds.But when these characters lay on each other for sex, we have the most prurient of actor's postures. I think this was done simply to avoid an automatic sweep into ordinary film ways. It has that effect anyway.I don't know anyone that chooses more interesting faces. Distinctly Southern European, odd atypical faces.And finally, there is the bit of his own story inserted, the artist in the church. Creating scenarios of rich life. In the movie, the most amazing scenes are those that have little or nothing to do with the story. There's a "death" tableau that could be the richest single shot I have ever seen, anywhere.Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.