Dreamland – La Terra dei Sogni

Released on the 8th July 2011: Dreamland – La Terra dei Sogni, directed by Sabastiano Sandro Ravagnani.  Not sure quite what to make of this one.  The poster features a couple of beefcake actors, which makes it look incredibly homo-erotic, but it sounds more like an dramatic action movie:

The story is set in the ‘Little Italy’ of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, a neighbourhood which covers about one square kilometer and which could just as well be in New York, Boston or Chicago or any other American town with a large population of Italian immigrants.

The neighbourhood is dominated by a struggle between rival gangs and one person, a former boxer and widower who is esteemed by everyone, suffers from their harassment more than most. However an unlikely friendship is born between him and one of the gang leaders, and they start working together to bring peace to the neighbourhood.

I’m getting the impression this isn’t really one of those urban crime films, more an attempt to make a kind of drama in which people find themselves through friendship, trust and bodybuilding (natch).  It was shot largely on location in America, and the reviews have been, well, not all that kind.  According to CineClandestino, who refused to even assign a rating to it, “the actions sequences are as ridiculous as anything seen since the silent era, and to make matters worse it’s packed with editorial errors… the dialogue, in a ridiculous Anglicised Italian, makes you’re skin crawl and the acting is naive at best.”  MyMovies were hardly any more positive: “Probably the best way to approach Dreamland is to take it as a kind of family video, something amateur and improvised and with a special dedication to the history of bodybuilding as embodied by the presence of Columbu. Any other view would make one cease believing in the potential of  cinema.”

I don’t know anything about the director, but Columbu has had a surprisingly active film career: he appeared in several Arnold Shwarzenegger classics (Conan the Barbarian, The Terminator, The Running Man), and also had a prominent role in Andreas Marfori’s 93 crime film Mafia Docks (also featuring Traci Lords).  He was also a body building coach to Sylvester Stallone and directed a 1997 film called Doublecross on Costa’s Island (featuring Frank Stallone, William Smith and Marino Mase).

The film is planned as the first in a series of three, which have a total budget of €4.6 million, which isn’t bad, some of which was invested by the Apulia Film Commission.  It’s been released into 13 cinemas, which isn’t huge, but still more than some.

Here’s the trailer:

About Matt Blake 890 Articles
The WildEye is a blog dedicated to the wild world of Italian cinema (and, ok, sometimes I digress into discussing films from other countries as well). Peplums, comedies, dramas, spaghetti westerns... they're all covered here.

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