Last season’s best Italian movie? That’s a tough call, but Morandini, an Italian dictionary of films, didn’t have trouble making it. According to them, Nanni Moretti’s Habemus Papam was the winner.
The Morandini 2012 includes 24,500 films released in the Italian market beginning in 1902 and including more than a thousand products specifically for home video or television. 500 were added since the 2011 edition. Said the dictionary’s authors of Moretti, ” Maybe the most important thing is that it’s surely the most ambitious film by Moretti but not the most successful because it’s spoiled by his narcissism.”
Do they like it or don’t they? I’m confused. Congratulations anyway, Nanni for this back-handed compliment. I would have given more unqualified praise if I had my own film dictionary – I love Habemus Papam.
They spoke more highly, oddly enough, of Checco Zalone for his Che Bella Giornata. You know how much I love Checco, but I didn’t know that the critics specially did, even though it’s the highest grossing Italian movie of all time. Of Che Bella Giornata, Morandini gave it the same 3.5 stars that it gave Moretti and said it’s “a film that’s politically incorrect and capable of light satire for an Italy that values who you know over what you know.”
They liked Qualunquemente with Antonio Albanese about as much as I did, gave it 2 stars and called it “vulgar”. Yeah, it was vulgar, but everybody seemed into it at the time.
What merited 4 stars, according to Morandini? The Tree of Life from Terrence Malick, and of it, they said, “a film for the whole world, complete if not controlling, thunderous but also soft.”
I Love Italian Everything 