I Love Italian Movies but not all of them.
C’mon, I’m not stupid, and I don’t love things just because they are Italian (Just so happens that a lot of Italian things are lovable).
Let’s just say, I love a lot of Italian movies, I’m ambivalent about some of them, and a hate a few. Sometimes a bad movie is just trivial and not even worth writing about, but often when I hate an Italian movie there’s a reason that merits discussion:
Il Soliti Idioti is based on a popular TV show this movie featuring the comedy team of Francesco Mandelli and Fabrizio Biggio is vulgar, juvenile, insulting, predictable, disgusting, racist, sexist, and homophobic; what it’s not, it is not funny.
Obviously made for the lowest possible common denominator, that it was hugely successful in Italy is not an indictment on the country given all the equally shitty movies that are popular in the United States. What it says about humanity, however; no comment.
When the yucky old man Ruggero (played in heavy makeup to appear much older by Francesco Mandelli ) finds out that his educated and sensitive son (Fabrizio Biggio ) is about to marry for love (we never see the bride to be, but she’s evidently not very pretty) Ruggero sets forth to postpone the wedding and get his virgin son laid. And not just laid – LAID – he’s got a scheme, and a bet, and the goal is to get his son in bed with a beautiful lingerie model.
Please don’t see it. Don’t encourage them.
Il Rosso e Il Bu has a great director and all the right actors but a tired plot and a poorly written screenplay. It’s not funny enough to be much of a comedy, not really profound or complicated in a way to provoke thought, and doesn’t have anything very new to say. Giuseppe Piccioni’s Il Rosso E Il Blu (The Red and the Blue) stars Margherita Buy and Riccardo Scamarcio’s in a story about high school teachers that wouldn’t even have made a very good After School Special.
After seeing Quando La Notte I realized something: Cristina Comencini has to be stopped, making movies, that is. She gets way too much credit because she’s a woman and she’s Luigi Comencini’s daughter and she churns out one Lifetime Movie after another with various trendy social problems.
Quando La Notte (When The Night) is about Post Partum Depression and the difficulties and loneliness of motherhood. Good movies don’t manipulate audiences and lead them to single conclusions and good movies don’t need to spell everything out for the audience. This was not a good movie; it was booed at the Venice Film Festival premier.
Bella Addormentata was way overrated and before you start throwing things at me, hear me out. Marco Bellocchio’s ‘Dormant Beauty is a movie that wants to be liked and should be liked. It has a cast to-die-for, with Toni Servillo, Isabelle Huppert, Maya Sansa and Alba Rohrwacher, so what went wrong?
Bella Addormentata takes the true life story of the last six days of the life of Eluana Englaro, comatose for 17 years when her family fought for the right to pull the plug and let her die. So it has a THEME that right away makes it feel less like a story and more like a morality lesson.
It is beautiful and sad, but it needed an editor, because although Bellocchio is one of the greats in Italian filmmaking, he’s becoming one of its dinosaurs. It has stagey dialogue and heavy handed imagery I felt like I’d been smacked in the head by a nun after having watched it.
Gabriele Muccino’s L’Ultimo Bacio (The Last Kiss ) is an Italian movie that made it to the US and is relatively well known to people who enjoy the genre.When I tell people I love Italian movies they always get a big smile and say, “L’ultimo Bacio! Did you like that one?” And I say, “Yes”, because I don’t want to seem like a curmudgeon.
In reality, I blame L’ultimo Bacio for all the problems of the Italian film industry. If this is what is getting the good reviews – if this is what is being distributed outside of Italy – then it’s no wonder everyone thinks that Italy can’t make a good movie anymore.
L’ultimo Bacio tried to be everything at once – a romance, a buddy movie, a coming of age story,and a movie with social commentary. Instead of doing any of those things well, it’s just a mess, with confusing story lines and too many characters to keep track of. This movie is mostly about relationships and I have never seen a movie with so many bad ones.
One of the negative reviews I read had one of those “wish I’d said that” lines – Josh Larsen from the Chicago Sun Times said, “Girlfriends are bad, wives are worse and babies are the kiss of death in this bitter Italian comedy.” Yikes! The whole thing made me tired just watching it!
Me too, Josh.
Hating Venuto Al Mondo (Twice Born) makes me sad because I love director Sergio Castellito and Penelope Cruz, but the movie goes awry in ways I hadn’t anticipated. Cruz is great just like she always is, but she couldn’t tap dance fast enough to save this melodramatic mishmash. An American photographer meets Gemma (Cruz) an Italian doing research in Bosnia, and the friendships they make with the locals keep their ties to the country even when the bullets start flying in 1992.
It’s a tear-jerker and I found myself weeping, but in the way you cry when you know you’ve been manipulated into it. I don’t even know who I was crying for; maybe it was just Sarajevo.
I Love Italian Everything 