Checco Walks The Line

Ceccho Zalone walks a very fine line between stupid and asshole.

Maybe it’s just that I am trying to justify liking him more than the recent Hollywood generated idiots, like the ones in “The Hangover”or “Hot Tub Time Machine”. He belongs to that club – the one that celebrates idiots that somehow do good and save the day, but with Checco, I kind of see how that might have happened. Checco is neither a complete waste of humanity or an unlikely saint in disguise. He’s just a guy. A politically incorrect, not very educated, small town guy who wants the best for himself and others. I know guys like that.

I went to see his “La Bella Giornata ” today and it was funny. It was stupid. It was obvious. It was broad. But it was funny.

We Americans are too afraid to make a movie about a security guard who is getting played by an Arabic woman planning to plant a bomb on him and blow up a church. (Actually not just any church – the duomo in Milan.) Face it, we are. But that’s what happened to Checco. He falls in love with her in the way that all guys fall in love with pretty women without getting to know who they really are. And she never loves him, as a Hollywood movie would have you believe. She doesn’t see the error of her ways and fall head over heals for him. But she likes him, and so the end is happy. It’s a comedy and we know that the duomo in Milan isn’t going anywhere – I’m not giving anything away.

Checco is not gratuitously politically incorrect . He’s just a real person with room to grow. And there’s something about him – something really likeable. This guy’s got something here. His movie has surpassed Benigni’s “La Vita e’ Bella” and is threatening the success of “Titanic” in Italy. Yeah, that’s right. He’s on a pretty big stage for somebody that America’s never heard of.