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Dirk Bogarde and Luchino Visconti roughed up in the Guardian
Death in Venice
Great gay movie Death in Venice "worst" says Tim Lott
Writer and Newsnight Review regular Tim Lott says in a Guardian article today that Death in Venice, the Palme d'Or and Oscar-winning gay tragedy directed by Luchino Visconti is in fact one of the worst best films ever made - in fact it heads his list of films that and leave him "cold, bored and searching desperately for the eject button".
This is how he describes the plot: "German novelist Gustav von Aschenbach (Dirk Bogarde) goes to Venice to recover his inspiration, checks into a hotel and spends the next two hours, as cholera threatens the city, rubbernecking a beautiful adolescent boy in repressed paedophiliac lust. After several months of this, Aschenbach drops dead in his deckchair.
It is beautiful, luscious. leisurely, elegiac and so forth. But it has the regrettable drawback of being staggeringly tedious...not so much a masterpiece as a colossal piece of soft-focus masturbation."
Other films on Lott's list, which he says is "a clearing of the air - a personal catharsis to shake off the years of tolerating, or even pretending to admire films that, in reality, I profoundly dislike" include La Dolce Vita, Schindler's List and The Shawshank Redemption.
