Comedy Italian Style

Oh, bummer. I really wanted to like this book. I wanted to learn from it. I mean, how many books are out there about this most wonderful (and relatively unknown) genres of Italian film, the commedia all'italiana of the 1960s-1970s? How many books try to weave together Italian political history with the works of filmmakers like Dino Risi, Ettore Scola and Lina Wertmuller? Okay, maybe there are indeed others. But this was the first one I, for one, have ever seen. And that was pretty exciting.

Unfortunately, I could only get through about 2/3 of it - I had to skim the remaining third. It was just too bogged down with bad writing (adjective noun adjective noun, etc). I kind of can't blame the author - English seems to be his second language, and much of his English felt like literal translations of Italian (including idioms!). e.g. “before everything” instead of “above all” (“prima di tutto”). This sounds petulant, but it really starts to wear on the reader. I had to constantly translate back and forth between English, this-book's-English, and Italian; having to exert that extra brain energy to figure out what, exactly, he was trying to say. Even more unfortunately, the thesis of the book is slim to nonexistent - much of it feels like an unenlightening taxonomy of a number of Italian films. I didn't really learn anything mind-blowing about the ones I had seen, and I didn't get very interested in the ones that were new to me. There didn't seem to be any grand thesis to hang it all together. Instead, it just felt like a lot of aimless hot air (a very Italian sin, admittedly).

Sigh! Who will honor the comedies all'italiana? Someone must!