Tosca's Kiss - Il Bacio di Tosca

Rating:
Summary: Beautiful film!
Review: A warm, bitter-sweet documentary. You have to watch it if you are a singer, you should watch it if you wish to understand what being a singer is about.
This Masterpiece doesn't ignore the difficulties and eccentricities of the inhabitants of this old musicians' home but it shows them with a lot of respect and love.
You will have to shed a tear at moments, laugh in amazement at others.
The extras are good as well: an interesting interview with the director and audio tracks from a 1948 recording of one of the main characters.
Highly recommended!

Rating:
Summary: A magnificent oportunity to dream
Review: The characters are real. The lives they once shared were first class. Their passion for, and love of, opera and musical art lives strong in their hearts, their voices and their everyday selves. It's an honor to listen to their stories, to hear their voices strong as ever, and to experience the love for musical expression they shared with the world so long ago, and still do in this film. This movie is worthy of inclusion in the best operatic collections!

Rating:
Summary: For opera fans a MUST, for those with memories a treat
Review: Who wants to see a film about old people? asks director Daniel Schmid in a special feature to the DVD "Tosca's Kiss" on EMI label (7243 5 99785 9). Well, if those old people are retired opera stars living at the Casa Verdi, founded especially for them and those like them, you have a lovely 87-minute film that shows their daily lives, still devoted entirely to opera and sharing their memories. Also sharing their voices, many of which have lasted surprisingly well down through the years.


Chief among the old-timers at the foundation is soprano Sara Scuderi, sort of a queen bee as it seems, whose presence ties the film together. Anyone interested in opera MUST see this, anyone who simply likes to watch senior citizens refusing to go gently into that good night should see this.


I read on the back that there are three CD tracks and some DVD-ROM features--most annoying to those without personal computers and those with them but without the required programs-but I could not bring up either of them after having some Adobe Acrobat software and some DVD-reading hardware installed at great expense. A bad direction for companies to take just to save some paper. But even without those elusive extras, this film is certainly worth the seeing.