Mymovies.it asks if Pietro Valsecchi has become the most powerful man in Italian cinema and I ask: Who is Pietro Valsecchi?
Italian movie producer Valsecchi listened to the advice of his teenage son, Pietro jr., made a movie and a bunch of money with Checco Zalone, and now his instincts are paying off again with his new movie, I Soliti Idioti (the usual idiots). From an apparently very irreverent Italian MTV series with a cult following and starring Francesco Mandelli e Fabrizi Biggio, it “embodies the worst of Italian culture” and in two days has made 2.451,142 euro and may reach 5 million by the end of the weekend.
It’s the story of boorish businessman Ruggero De Ceglie, played by Biggio, and his sensitive son Gianluca, played by Mandalli, who is, against his father’s wishes, about to marry for love. Ruggero gets the wedding postponed by faking a terminal illness and with the plan to get his son into bed with a top underwear model nicknamed “Smutandissima”, a take on the Italian lingerie company “Intimissimi” ( and help me out, Italians, with this translation. It means “getting someone’s pants off?).
Valsecchi is also producing Checco Zalone’s next movie, set to be released December 2012 and everybody’s waiting to see if they can keep up the enormous success of the last one, Che Bella Giornata, Italy’s top grossing movie, out-earning even La Vita è Bella.
PS : I find Checco hilarious and I’m determined to get to the bottom of this Checco phenomena, so my daughter, Lauren, a magazine editor and freelance writer in New York, has agreed to help. She’s soon to join my “staff”and her first assignment: Is Checco Zalone funny? Soon we’ll hear what an American twenty-something has to say about it.
Meanwhile, get a look at the usual idiots:
I Love Italian Everything 