Hi friends. The critics are really terrible with "Il Mercante di
pietre" aka "The Stone Merchant". I´ve found a lot of websites with
reviews in Italian language, and any positive article. Phrases
like "brutal atack to the Islamic world", "unidimensional point of
view" or "caricaturesque characters" are frequent. I´ve read only an
article in english, an opinion about the journalist Oriana Fallacci
(who die a week ago) that critics too the Martinelli´s film. Here´s
an extract:

......"The film director Renzo Martinelli has now jumped on the
bandwagon of the scare peddlers. Introducing his new film, Il
Mercante di Pietre (The Stone Merchant), to the press in Rome
(Repubblica, September 14) he went right to the point: "The
terrorists are among us. I go everywhere armed." Then, detouring
back to the year 1453, he said Constantinople had been lost because
somebody left a gate open. "Just so has Europe left a door open
through which Muslims now infiltrate." To this call to battle,
Harvey Keitel, Martinelli's imported star, added a few confused and
irrelevant words: He'd been a "hard and determined" Marine but
turned against the war in Vietnam.

The only surprise in this action flick weighed down with propaganda
will be to see Italy presented as a place where nothing happens but
terrorism. In reality, unlike New York, Madrid, and London, Italian
cities have known no serious incidents. Moreover, though Italy
boasts fewer Muslim immigrants than other major European countries,
in Martinelli's film they seem to outnumber the native population
and are each and every one a terrorist.

The film starts with views of Rome: First of a mosque complete with
wailing in Arabic and then of St. Peter's Basilica with the same
music. Get that? Good. Then you are clever enough to take in this
story of comic-strip characters, scary cuts, cheap melodrama, and
big brutal camera sweeps. Just to keep folks awake, it starts with
an Islamist terror attack in an airport lounge. The beautiful woman
(Jane March) who was grabbed as hostage by a terrorist before he got
shot in the head is the wife of an Italian amputee. He lost much of
his body in the terrorist attack on the American Embassy in Nairobi
in 1998.

Mr. Nice Guy, cut off at the thighs, has become an expert in Jihad
studies, which he teaches at the University of Rome. But he takes
time off to escort his beautiful wife to picturesque Cappadocia in
Turkey. There, instead of merely recuperating from being taken
hostage, she falls for a mysterious gem salesman, Harvey Keitel done
up as an "homme fatal." The affair continues in Rome, offering noisy
orgasms to alternate with threatening Arab song.

Our cuckold has taken in the situation and suspects Keitel not so
much of sexual freebooting as of Islamist leanings. But no one will
believe the Jihad expert, not the newspaper editor, nor the Italian
Secret Service, and least of all his students and his wife. Do you
see the point? No one believed Oriana Fallaci either when she
insisted on closing the door so as not to lose Constantinople,
whoops, the Western World. As for the wife, she definitely has a
real case of the hots for Harvey and pursues him to Turin. There,
after listening to a bogeyman imam preach (F. Murray Abraham has
found his destiny), we learn that -- guess what -- a terrorist plot
is brewing, this one between Calais and Dover where, surely a
curiosity in those parts, more menacing Arab music can be heard.

Meanwhile, back at the abandoned husband's pad in Rome, he ponders
videos: one of Muslims cutting off each other's limbs, another of
that 1998 attack in Nairobi and, of course, some shots of the Twin
Towers falling. He's interrupted by two Somali killers come to call.
Evil for Martinelli is mainly Somali, maybe because their immigrant
pool in Rome is large enough to furnish a variety of actors. But
those Secret Service people weren't so stupid as they seemed and
turn up just in time to shoot the culprits dead. Martinelli takes no
prisoners.

The beautiful, sinning wife will have no such luck. She's been
tricked into proceeding to Dover on her own with a radio active
bomb, which duly sinks the ferry in the British port. Of the three
plotters, Harvey goes soft in the end and regrets his deed. As a
name actor still able to -- just barely -- convince in bed, the ex-
hard Marine didn't want to go back to the States earmarked for only
total-baddy roles or unemployment. There are no similar worries for
the two (more) Somalis who shoot him. Their careers will consist of
being real bad guys."