Review of Viva Zapatero!

In the era of Michael Moore-like documentary-makers this film was long due! I've been living out of Italy for about 15 years now and my first reaction while watching this film was a certain guilt and shame to be part of a country where the term "freedom of speech" was so loose! Yet, the ending of the film could not have been more optimistic: Seeing all those (mainly young) people at the end of the film standing in line to watch Guzzanti's second part of her satirical show made me realise that the future for Italy is not as dark as you might think and after all. I really should be proud of being part of a Country where actually just a few people at the top are corrupted but most of the others have a real will to change things, and hopefully things will change soon! But, I'm digressing, back to the film! Stilistically the film is a bit all over the place (spilt screens happen completely arbitrarily, jump cuts, bad rostrum shots of newspapers and so on), the whole thing seems to be cut on Final Cut Pro or some cheap editing system by somebody who wants to try to new FX here and there for no apparent reason, but luckily all this doesn't matter, since the subject itself and the argument for the film are so strong that you hardly notice anything else but the real content. And that's the way it should be. The film sadly is very Italian and assumes everybody knows most of the people who are being interviewed. And it's a shame because it would not have needed a lot more to make it a little bit more appealing to the rest of the world. Surely it could have done with some more background information and some more archive clips from some of the other comedian who have been censured just to get an idea of what kind of stuff they stand for (I.e. Grillo, Paolo Rossi etc) . I'm sure a lot of foreigners will get lost in the hundreds of names that are mentioned. But sorry, I'm just picking needles: I guess I just want this film to be seen by as many people as possible, because I know that this is the only way to make a change! But as long as Italians watch it I'll be happy! Well done Guzzanti, but please don't stop now!!