I found a post about I Love Italian Movies in a very well done blog called The Smiling Eggplant, a source for all things Italian. I wanted to thank Cynthia for mentioning me, but since I can’t find a place to leave comments, I’ll do it here.
Cynthia is half American and half Italian (American father and Italian mother) and lived in Italy twenty years. She now lives in Boston, “which is much colder”, and she does not share my enthusiasm for Italian movies. Join the club, Cynthia; a lot of my Italian friends have said the same thing, preferring Hollywood to home grown….but that’s changing.
In a recent Variety Magazine article, Medusa Films’ Giampaolo Letta said, “There is a tendency for Italian audiences to snub American movies these days, unless they have some really special and fresh elements, and most of those titles go out via the majors,” Letta says.
Instead, he notes, “the market for Italian pics in Italy — which reached a 37.5% share in 2011, second in Europe only to France — is booming.”
I’ve been watching Italian movies since I started studying the language around the year 2000 and I’ve seen the movies getting better and the audiences growing larger every year but for a while I seemed to be the only one that noticed.
I remember one of the first movies I ever saw in an Italian theater, La Vita Che Vorrei with my crush, Luigi Lo Cascio. It was 2004 in a little theater in Florence, and 3 other old ladies and I were the only theater goers that afternoon. I figured it would suck, but I was looking for chances to practice my Italian and I like going to the movies, so I thought, at the very least, it would be fun to mock.
Instead, I loved it, and when the four of us watching the movie realized what has happened to Laura and we all gasped and then turned to each other giggling and delighted, I knew that what was going on here was one of those magical movie experiences; I’ve been hooked on Italian movies ever since.
I’m a movie lover, not a film snob. I chose my words carefully when I named the blog; please don’t mistake me for a high-brow film scholar. I just like the movies.
They don’t all have to be award winners. We have fun going to the movies here in the United States even if they aren’t all Citizen Kane; don’t we? (I know a whole lot of people who raved about The Hangover) So why does everyone expect all Italian movies to be La Dolce Vita? Sometimes we just want a fun movie and not an intellectual exhibition.
Don’t forget, many of the new ones are good enough for smarty pants film aficionados.
Directors like Marco Bellocchio, Emanuele Crialese, and Marco Tullio Giordana can not be marginalized.
And in the end, while I adore Crialese, I love Checco, too.
I love Italian movies.
I Love Italian Everything 