Edition 360:
Hey movie lovers!
This week: You’re going to think I was in a bad mood while talking about two new release movies that I very much did NOT enjoy—one in theaters and one on Netflix. But I promise I like movies! So I picked out two gems to recommend to you. Then in this week’s “Trailer Watch,” Olivia Wilde’s Sundance darling tries its luck at theaters.
You, Me & Tuscany
One thing I’ve been really consistent about in the almost-eight years I’ve been doing this newsletter is that I don’t see myself as a movie reviewer, I hope to be more of a movie sommelier or, to sound less pretentious, an investment advisor for where and how to spend your time. So I don’t see a ton of value in bashing a bad movie that very few people are going to see anyways. You were ignoring it before, you’ll ignore it after, who cares.
But I felt legitimately offended by You, Me & Tuscany—not in the like “my feelings are hurt” way so much as “how dare you.” I may have exactly 0% Italian blood in me, but as a lover of the country and its culture I have to use this platform to say, “Che cazzo!”
Firstly, for a movie that literally exists to be virtual tourism, it’s really difficult to differentiate between what scenes were actually shot in Italy and a few that I could tell were obviously shot with a green screen or Volume. I realize the movie is by design a fantasy, but the shiny dollhouse presentation of it actually kind of devalues its beauty by making it seem fake. This version of Italy doesn’t exist outside of a movie set, or Instagram—where a remote villa on a hill has modern appliances and enough cell service to not only make international calls but also video livestream, where every counter has a pile of fresh tomatoes on it and every car is either a Fiat or a Maserati.
Of course, there’s an entire cottage industry of movies about hot foreigners treating Italy like Disneyland (I would know, because I watch them all)—from the low budget Netflix trash like Love In The Villa and La Dolce Villa to the classics like Under The Tuscan Sun and Eat, Pray Love. All of them engage in some light stereotyping, and there’s little harm in that.
But our protagonist Anna, played by Halle Bailey, represents the very worst of American tourism. Her sense of entitlement over things like hotel availability, taxi prices and sciacca sandwiches was grating, not charming, and she showed no curiosity to learn about the country she had supposedly dreamed her whole life of visiting. In the tasting room of a gorgeous Tuscan winery, she responds to someone explaining the winemaking process by saying, “Nice Ted Talk Dr. Wine,” before drinking three more glasses.
She is what we’d call, in any context that wasn’t a brightly lit rom-com, a bad person. Yet her entitled selfishness is constantly rewarded by the movie.
When we meet her she’s squatting in a rich woman’s apartment under the guise of being a “professional housesitter,” wearing the host’s clothes, shoes, sunglasses, lingerie, and parading her dog around Central Park. After getting caught, she goes to her friend’s workplace, a hotel front desk, and asks to be given a free room (threatening her friend’s job…not cool!). While waiting at the hotel bar—where she orders a burger with jalapeños, an egg and pepper but no salt, plus fries with honey, and the movie tries to use this frankly DISGUSTING order to display she has good taste in food!!—she meets a rich Italian man who tells her about the villa he owns in Tuscany but never visits, and when he falls asleep just before their one night stand, she airdrops pictures of the villa onto her phone and makes a plane to jet off there…though not before ordering what looked to be a couple hundred dollars worth of room service to the man’s tab for breakfast.
Are you getting the picture…that this woman is a psychopath, before she even sets foot in Italy!
It gets worse when she does. She pretends to be the hot rich Italian villa man’s fiancé, then falls in love with another hot British-Italian man, played by Regé-Jean Page (of “Bridgerton” fame). Along the way she rediscovers her love of cooking, which she displays by making…bruschetta (a dish which requires zero cooking).
All of this is supposed to be excused by a viewer because eyyy, issa fantasia! But surely audiences won’t mistake Bailey and Page’s dueling Disney Channel acting styles for charming chemistry simply because they’re hot…will they? *opens Rotten Tomatoes … 67% tomatometer, okay … 93% popcorn meter?! Really?!?!
For this shallow, obvious collection of rom-com tropes they call a movie—which reduces Italians to singing opera and drinking Aperol Spritz and having an affair with a plumber named Luigi—I had to bring out the rare half-star rating on Letterboxd. Shame on this movie!!
Something New
Thrash (Netflix): Speaking of former “Bridgerton” breakouts, this new Netflix movie starring Phoebe Dynevor falls into the category of bad smaller movies I won’t waste space talking badly about.
I’ll just say that Netflix is not beating the allegations that it asks its filmmakers to restate the plot over and over again when 90% of the dialogue in the first 15 minutes is painful exposition dumps and amateurish character explanation. Since we all say things like, “Oh, Dakota, I know you’re sad that your mother died last summer,” to each other. I had to turn the movie off before the hurricane the movie is built around even made landfall. If any of you all stuck around for the full thing, let me know if the action in the back half is worth sitting through the painful beginning.
Something Old
Harlan County, USA (1976, HBO Max): I went to a 4K restoration screening celebrating the 50th anniversary of one of the all-time great documentaries, which helped launch the “cinema verite” style in the United States—where documentarians capture their characters real-time and piece scenes together without any narration.
The film follows a handful of contentious coal miner strikes in Eastern Kentucky that eventually escalate into gun violence. It’s a social justice statement about the unfairness of American capitalism as much as it is a beautiful movie, combining unlimited access with unforgettable characters, and giving a glimpse into a subsection of “real America” that few around the country would think about otherwise. I found it to be one of the most instructive artifacts of a particular time and place in this country I’ve ever seen.
Something To Stream
The Big Short (PlutoTV, MGM+): If you ever want to realize just how long ago 2015 was, go back and watch Adam McKay’s cutting satire of the 2008 financial crisis. From its editing style to its cutaways to Margot Robbie and Selena Gomez explaining complex financial concepts, it feels incredibly dated.
But two things remain incredibly true about this movie: 1) it absolutely RIPS, delivering humor and true dramatic tension for a movie that’s about mortgage-backed securities (I yawned typing that), and 2) its commentary about money-hungry rich people screwing over average Americans feels more resonant than ever. Watching this and Harlan County in the same week really makes you realize that we’ve always been this way. At least in this instance we got Ryan Gosling, Brad Pitt, Christian Bale and Steve Carrell to hold our hands through it. That does make it feel better.
Trailer Watch: Focker-In-Law
It’s probably worth a deeper investigation into how this franchise has somehow managed to continue finding new and interesting ways to squeeze more and more juice out of what was a pretty simple story, Meet The Parents, for now 26 years (!!). The insertion of Ariana Grande as the next generation of in-law, but flipping it and having Robert De Niro’s patriarch love her, is a fantastic twist that so obviously will produce comedy that is both fresh and also familiar (Ben Stiller gets crapped on…again). This is a candidate for major breakout success, in my estimation.
Thank you @jennifer ! I’m glad someone out there was as offended by this non-offensive movie as me, lol.
Haha love this! Thanks for reading, and good to know I'm not crazy seeing this movie for what it was!