6/10
Questionable Italian romantic comedy somewhat redeemed by De Niro and Monica Belucci
4 August 2013
Warning: Spoilers
Are Italians really like this? :-)

I have just finished watching these 3 romantic comedy ... sort of ... stories in Italian with Norwegian subtitles.

A young lawyer is sent out to buy a family estate for a corporation and runs into a beautiful and wild girl who shakes his engagement and world. He tells the family not to take the money and reconciles with his fiancée.

An established Italian news anchorman is vexatiously seduced by a voluptuous woman who turns out to be a psychopathic stalker who apparently lets him impregnate her. His wife and daughter find out and walk out on him, while his seductress is institutionalized but lets him have the videotape she made of their sex sessions, apparently loving him. He is reassigned to Africa and leaves her there, and we later see him being Danteanly brutalized in his destination by thugs.

Giving us older guys hope, De Niro plays a heart transplant Italian American history prof whose lecherous landlord quickly becomes re-estranged from his voluptuously beautiful daughter (Monica Belucci no less), when he is scandalized to discover she has been a strip teaser and pole dancer in Paris ... and our prof gives her shelter. (Is there any male on Planet Earth who *wouldn't* give Monica Belucci shelter?) Mercifully, some of De Niro's soliloquies are in English.

The film does not reflect well on Italian men, who are portrayed as being neurotically weak - lots of extraneous gesturing - and run by their women ... except for De Niro, of course.

Some of the scenes are funny ... some are HOT with beautiful Italian women in various stages of undress ... and it amused me but not enough to watch it again anytime soon.

The film's climax is triumphant with Monica Belucci and De Niro having faith in themselves, each other, and life to have a baby boy regardless of obstacles - and I am very glad Monica has herself had two daughters: beautiful and intelligent women should indeed be reproduced. If she has a sister or niece who needs shelter, I am at her service.

But without Monica Belucci, I would not have rated the film as high as a 6. Even then, I wish she had proudly and shamelessly displayed more of her heart-stopping beauty, and the appreciation of such healthy feminine beauty is a national trait to the credit of all Italians ... and some of the rest of us.

Lou Coatney
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