Ernesto Mahieux Movies

A handful of semi-professional musicians struggle to make a name for themselves in this nostalgic comedy-drama set in Italy in the mid-seventies. Faustino (Antimo Merolillo) is a would-be jazz guitarist who has just graduated from school and is looking for a gig, at least in part because he's trying to avoid the military draft. If he can get local promoter Raffaele (Ernesto Mahieux) to sign him to a contract, Faustino can tell the draft board that he's a professional supporting his widowed mother with his career in music, but getting Raffaele to make a deal is proving difficult. Faustino plays part time with a local band led by hard-drinking Mimmo Falasco (Toni Servillo), but when Augusto Riverberi (Fabrizio Bentivoglio), a once-famous bandleader looking to make a comeback, arrives in town, Raffaele pulls some strings and gets Faustino a job as Riverberi's assistant. In need of a singer, Faustino and Raffaele persuade Riverberi to hire a vocalist named Gerry Como (Peppe Servillo), and the first few dates of the tour go well as Riverberi entertains the crowds and juggles romances with Faustino's mother (Lina Sastri) and a lovely small-town hairdresser (Valeria Golino). But when Raffaele double-crosses Riverberi and runs off with the band's money, Faustino begins to wonder if he'll ever make good as a musician. Lascia Perdere, Johnny! (aka Don't Waste Your Time, Johnny!) was the first directorial credit for veteran actor Fabrizio Bentivoglio, who also co-stars as the bandleader Riverberi. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

A family living in poverty leaves behind the world they know in hope of finding new opportunities in this historical drama from director Emanuele Crialese. The Mancusos are a family struggling to make ends meet in a small farming community in Sicily in 1913. Life has long been hard for the Mancuso Family, who have lived in the same village for generations, and one day they are visited by a man who claims to be from the United States. The man tells them of the wonder and plenty of life in America, an offers to make it possible for them to travel to the New World and find work there. The Mancusos cautiously accept the offer, but after a dangerous voyage aboard an ocean liner, the family arrives in New York to face a number of new challenges -- the humiliating examination at Ellis Island, and abandoning their old lives and ways as they struggle to assimilate in a massive city that is now their home. Starring Charlotte Gainsbourg, Francesco Casisa and Vincenzo Amato, The Golden Door (aka Nuovomondo) received its world premier at the 2006 Venice Film Festival. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

Omnibus films attained renewed popularity during the 1990s and 2000s; this particular seven-episode film-a-sketch arrived during that period, and involved several top-tiered international filmmakers including John Woo, Spike Lee, Ridley Scott, Emir Kusturica and three others. Each helmer was asked to shoot a segment of between 16-18 minutes in length, for UNICEF, on the subject of exploited and/or underprivileged children around the world. The package opens with "Tanza," helmed by Algerian novelist-cum-filmmaker Mehdi Charef and shot in Burkina Faso. It concerns the 12-year-old female title character - an adolescent freedom fighter - who trollops through the countryside accompanied by young male guerilla fighters who spout off deliberately nonsensical English-language dialogue. Kusturica takes the reins for the second segment, "Blue Gypsy," an overtly comical episode in the vein of Time of the Gypsies about a precocious young boy who makes the split from his alcoholic father and thieving family and goes to live in a juvenile detention center, finding it preferable to home. The third episode, helmed by co-producer Stefano Veneruso and entitled "Ciro," recalls neorealismo with its Naples-set tale of a young boy unloved and systematically neglected by his mother, who resorts to spending time with other neglected children and stealing watches, and then gets caught in the direst of ways. The fourth segment, Spike Lee's delicately-handled "Jesus Children of America," stars Hannah Hodson as Blanca, a young Brooklynite ostracized by her peers because her parents are junkies; when she learns of her HIV-positive status, her world crumbles. For the 5th episode, "Bilu and Joao," Brazilian director Katia Lund casts child actors Francisco Anawake de Freitas and Vera Fernandes as two impoverished tykes whose days involve walking around the outskirts of Sao Paulo and pulling a wooden cart, into which they pile aluminum and paper - but do so joyously, with the courage and grace of two individuals delighting in subhuman work despite the direst of circumstances. For the sixth segment, "Jonathan," Ridley Scott teams up to co-direct with daughter Jordan Scott; the episode stars David Thewlis (Naked) as an emotionally-traumatized war photographer who encounters a band of Eastern European orphans. And the closer, John Woo's "Song Song and Little Cat," studies the contrast between the lives of two young Asian girls from polar opposite ends of the socioeconomic spectrum: Oi Ruyi is Little Cat, an abjectly impoverished child discovered in the garbage, during infancy, by a homeless man; she grows up helping her discoverer forage for victuals until he dies, leaving her aimless and bereft. Woo cuts between her story and that of Song Song, a wealthy and pampered little girl whose story is equally tragic in its own way, as her parents are undergoing a bitter divorce. Though this film, as indicated, enlisted the support of at least two major Hollywood directors (Scott and Lee) it did encounter extreme difficulty securing U.S. theatrical and ancillary distribution, which effectively kept it out of North America in the years that immediately followed its global release. ~ Nathan Southern, All Movie Guide

Ettore Scola directed this light comedy starring Jack Lemmon and Marcello Mastroianni that Scola calls "a story about two men who have reached the age where you look back and take stock." Lemmon plays business executive Robert Traven, who returns Naples for the first time since 1946, when he had an affair with an Italian girl named Maria. The girl's brother, Antonio Jasiello (Marcello Mastroianni) recognizes Robert and they sit around, catch up with old times. But when Antonio takes Robert to visit Maria (Giovanna Sanfilippo), Robert discovers Antonio has been writing letters to her in Robert's name for years, building up Robert to legendary status. Since the letters were not kept secret, everyone who knows Maria and Antonio greets Robert as if he were a living legend. ~ Paul Brenner, All Movie Guide