Infamousta brilliant actors, brilliant editing

Grimossfer Clever and entertaining enough to recommend even to members of the 1%

Senteur As somebody who had not heard any of this before, it became a curious phenomenon to sit and watch a film and slowly have the realities begin to click into place.

Janae Milner Easily the biggest piece of Right wing non sense propaganda I ever saw.

capone666 Valentino: The Last EmperorThe best way to design a dress for a woman is to never ask her want she wants.In fact, the only person that the dressmaker in this documentary listens to is his business partner.Filmed over the final years of his career in the fashion industry, enigmatic designer Valentino Garavani reluctantly opens up the doors of his illustrious fashion house to the public for the first time as he preps to hang up his shears for good.Archival footage documenting his early beginnings in Italy to his rise in popularity amongst Hollywood starlets, like Elizabeth Taylor, is interwoven with scenes of his last show in 2008, as well as in-depth interviews with some of those aforementioned celebrities, fellow designers, critics and Valentino's longtime business partner Giancarlo Giammetti to construct one compelling biography. Moreover, Valentino is proof that a man can design a dress for a woman that isn't see-through. Green Light vidiotreviews.blogspot.ca

emuir-1 The main film was a fascinating glimpse into the world of the ultra rich Europeans, who live in a manner that the rest of us cannot even imagine. Valentino is the last of the Haute Couture designers and he was determined to go out with a bang, even if his world had been taken over by the acquisition and merger corporations and hedge funds.Although I could never afford a Valentino dress, nor do I think I would ever want to spend that kind of money, but to have them there at all is the stuff dreams are made of. Dainty pleated bias cut and filmy swirls of color, hand sewn by expert seamstresses, which say to the rest of us that the wearer doesn't have to ask the price. As we learn, there is little money in the high fashion collections, they are to advertise the name. The suits want to market the small more affordable stuff, perfume, belts, scarves, purses, which carry the company name, which is what they have paid for. As we see, they will sell the company off within days or weeks if they can turn a profit - forget about promises made, they don't go along with the sale. The expensive exquisitely hand sewn Italian and French craftsmanship will be replaced by mass production, probably in China. They have the name, that is all that matters. Someone notes that when Valentino and the last great couturiers began in the 50's and 60's, they were were taught by the designers of the 20s, and that cannot happen today. The best part of the DVD for me was the special features, one of which showed Valentino's spectacular farewell party and his last collection. A party held within view of the Coliseum illuminated with Valentino red lighting, and a fireworks display over Rome! Throughout Valentino walked imperiously, left hand in his pocket, lips pursed ready for the cheek bumping mwah, mwah, greeting for both men and women and his palm downward wave. At one of his farewell parties, the entire workforce was invited and were given gifts. We never got to see what the gifts consisted of.Another special feature, which for me could have been the main film, was a view of the army of staff who maintain Valentino's residences, a French Château where the mile long(?) brick drive runs between dead straight rows of identical trees and brown patches of grass are sprayed green, a ski chalet in Gstadt, apartments in New York and Milan, all overseen by an Irish major domo, Michael Kelly, who seems to do everything from covering the furniture with dust cloths, cleaning thepugs' teeth, walking the pugs, winding the clocks, setting tables, supervising the kitchen, meeting the celebrity guests with umbrellas in a rainstorm and acting as a walking Rolodex and desk calendar for Valentino. As the guest arrive at the gate, the staff inform Mr. Kelly on the walkie talkie, so that Mr. V. can greet them at the door by name, in case he has forgotten a Duchess or confused Elton John with Joan Collins. The clockwork precision and organization which goes into maintaining these homes reminded me of the films about the Royal Family. We learned that they have identical table settings in each home, the maid preparing Mr. Valentino's room in Gstadt gets a birthday present and a cheek bump from Mr. V., Had he been prompted by Mr. Kelly and who had really chosen the white blouse she received?Mr. Kelly goes along on the luxurious private jet, with a chef and the perfectly matched pugs, who get their own seats. We see him shopping in New York for food and flowers, polishing spots from mirrors while giving a last minute inspection in the Château, and dealing with a flooded carpet in the tented outdoor dining room as the rain teemed down on the day of the party - all the time fluently switching from English to French. How does one get a job like that? Where did he get his start? If only the special feature had been as long as the main feature. I enjoyed seeing how the other fraction of one percent lived.

nycmec This portrait of Valentino shows a vain aging giant and his devoted business partner, who provides the center of the film, as Valentino does not seem to be very interested in participating in this feature-length glamour-shot. The clothes are lovely--Valentino is an extremely talented designer, wedded to a solid, if traditional, notion of female glamour.The main problem with this film is I didn't learn anything from it--the portrait of Valentino in the New Yorker a couple of years back was far more revealing and informative. While this film has its entertaining moments, anyone who has seen documentaries about, or witnessed first-hand the fashion world has seen it all before. The film should have gone into more detail about Valentino the man, rather than just giving us a superficial portrait. Assolutamente not essential viewing.

tedalexandre Director Matt Tyrnauer never could have known when making his new documentary "Valentino: The Last Emperor" that he'd first chronicle the demise of fashion's last true self-made couturier and then release it into a world where, as former Valentino Fashion Group president Matteo Marzotto (and the film's antagonist) recently declared flatly, "luxury is over." Resisting the reality-genre conventions a 21st Century first-timer might be tempted to devolve into in shaping events to fit a narrative arc, Tyrnauer simply lifts the curtain on Valentino's gorgeous, frantic, fragile universe and watches it collapse; a dying star, shining brightest as it implodes. What began as an outgrowth of a feature story written by Tyrnauer at Vanity Fair, where he is Special Correspondent, "Valentino: The Last Emperor" vaults over similar documentary efforts that fell back on partial scripting (Madonna's 1991 "Truth or Dare") or the discomfiting exploitation of a soon-to-fail relationship (the 1995 Isaac Mizrahi doc "Unzipped," directed by Mizrahi's unseen/all-seeing boyfriend Douglas Keeve). The reasons for this success stem directly from the trust placed in Tyrnauer, who as part of the 2004 Vanity Fair piece effectively managed what Valentino's own PRs certainly could not: the news -- subsequently splashed across European broadsheets -- that Valentino and Giancarlo Giammetti, Valentino's multi-role partner, were gay and had been lovers for 12 years as part of their decades-long relationship. Five years later, while Italian homosexuality remains a specifically complicated knot to unravel, a paradigm shift has occurred. The presupposition that the men are gay, as are the majority of their peers and male colleagues, is a mute presence in the film, while the expressive energy of the men's post-sexual relationship drives the film and their careers equally. Despite their bickering, their constant manipulations and mutual interferences, and the unceasing Italianness of their relationship (in one priceless moment, Giammetti stops Valentino cold in the middle of berating his partner's design choices by telling him he has a belly), what makes the center of the film is their love of one another, their love of fighting one another, and their love of being slightly put-upon by the demands of the baroque splendor of their lives together; lives made together, for each other. Unable as part of their generation, as part of La Dolce Vita in the closet, unable to be the men they (or their families) might have wanted them to be, their passions manifested in the exquisite beauty of Valentino's oeuvre and the extensive wealth that Giammetti was able to amass for them from it. Enough beauty, wealth and fame on an international (Jackie, Uma, all of them in between) scale to live, as Giammetti astutely observes, "above." Valentino is "above control, above partnership" and above, for most of his career, the closet. No wonder Valentino seems happy only when Tyrnauer shows him in the mountains in Gstaad, skiing -- above indeed -- informally dressed for once, alone and beckoning Giammetti to come to him from afar. Both men seem to know, semi-consciously, that separately neither man would have been able to achieve a tenth of what they've done as a couple. In what has rightly been termed their "love story," 1 + 1 = 1,000.The film has had the bittersweet luck to have been present for the ascendancy of a new math, as European equity fund Permira makes successive hostile takeover plays for Valentino's eponymous house, a late-capitalism tsunami of Euros sweeping away Valentino and Giammetti on the eve of elaborate celebrations and the designer's swansong show. Profit margins through duty-free handbags and trading on Valentino's name are the only products of these harsh calculations, whose cold logic is revealed later to show no mercy to the mercenaries brought in to do Permira's bidding. Tyrnauer, whose deft cameraman is seemingly everywhere at once thanks to top-shelf editing, wryly shows how these backstage machinations among unspeakable grandeur serve to further compress the schedule and increase the opulence of Valentino's farewell and farewell collection. Here, the film spends as much time in the château with Joan Collins and the Comtesse de Ribes as it does tender, thoughtful time with the house's incredible team of harried and largely unsung seamstresses. Hand-stitching be damned, the new regime looms, and Valentino's house, the last of its kind, will soon float away like the ironically apt motif of the hot air balloon chosen for the final season. It rises, lingers beautifully, and inevitably floats out of reach. As Giammetti says in closing the celebration and the film, "It was beautiful." He says more than he'll ever know. As multiple fashion luminaries comment throughout the film, the end of Valentino is the end of couture. (Lagerfeld and Armani seem to be out of competition, and aren't couturiers per se.) The current economic turmoil and the underlying social upheaval it implies have sealed present-day couture's fate for good. Conspicious consumption and the chicanery that funds it is done for a generation or more. Italy's crown jewel industry is in tatters, waiting for government handouts; multiple fashion houses are ruined. Permira's wager on raping the name that Valentino and Giammetti built over 50 years has been called in at the sum of hundreds of millions of Euros when it recently wrote down much of the value of Valentino Fashion Group. We'll go back -- hopefully -- to a time when fashion becomes a meritocracy again and conglomerate oligarchs have no place in whatever remains of haute couture. Valentino and Giammetti have left the party with one final, masterful flourish; Tyrnauer begins a new career having been there to capture its glory. It was beautiful.