Amazon.com: This fascinating Italian film (with English subtitles) by Maurizio Nichetti works on several levels at once--and is extremely funny on all of them. At heart, it's a satire of the kind of neorealism of such films as The Bicycle Thief, which it spoofs. But it also makes fun of the TV-centered society in Italy, as families gather around their TVs to watch Nichetti's takeoff on The Bicycle Thief, complete with hilarious commercial breaks. The film within a film is a spot-on black-and-white takeoff that begins to go distinctly wrong when a woman from one of the TV commercials is accidentally plopped in the middle of the film (which is about a man who is disgraced when he steals a chandelier from the chandelier factory in order to feed his family). The film is clever and visually arresting; its central effect--the Technicolor woman in the middle of the monochromatic movie--is commonplace in TV commercials now but was considered startling when this film came out. --Marshall Fine
An incredibly inventive and inspired movie, it takes the idea of a movie-within-a-movie beyond anything I've ever seen before. A movie is being shown on Italian television that resembles very much DeSica's film THE BICYCLE THIEF. At its most poignant and emotional moments, however, it's interrupted by commercial breaks. Pretty soon the characters from the movie "leave" the film for the commercials, and vice-versa. The director (Maurizio Nichetti) enters the movie to try to get his script back to the way he intended it. The results of all this are wildly funny. Not only is the premise of the story extremely clever, but Nichetti pulls it off with technical felicity (going from b&w in the movie to color in the commercials) and some great acting from his principals. It's a wonderful treat of a film that will keep you smiling for a long time after it's over. It also has some sharp things to say about art and commercialism. Definitely worth a watch.
Perception is illusion This movie deals with one of the principle themes found in the novels of Wm Gaddis. No computer could work the way most people's heads do. Imagine a computer that had one huge file named "the present." This file would contain everything you did on the computer for say 24 hours and then mix and blend all of this together in a goulash and then seperate out things so that your bank statement would contain parts of a love letter you sent as an e-mail, etc.
When the critic is attemting to summerize the movie the wife in the living room dives for the remote to hit the mute. "Who wants to watch a movie when you already know how it comes out," she asks. Her husband replies, "You watch the same movies over and over." And her response is: "That's different, I can never remember how they come out."-The point being they always come out differantly depending on the phone calls received, the conversation in the room, or any other intrusion. Commericals become part of the movie, as does anything else that occurs in the same time frame. As a result most people narrate a story that contains all sorts of extranous material that happened to occur at the same time.
None of this displeases the financial interests that promote the entertainment we consume. As the wife says, "Who wants truth and suffering? I want shopping."
Original and misinterpreted This offbeat Italian comedy uses the familiar black and white/color dichotomy to indicate different worlds, a technique always in danger of being overdone. Last time I saw it was in Hollywood's Pleasantville (1998) where it was so cloying it annoyed; the first time magically in The Wizard of Oz (1939). It was even done (to good effect) in Spielberg's Schindler's List (1993). Here the "film" is in black and white (as it's being shown on TV) and the commercials are in color. The characters bizarrely go from one "world" to the other while somewhere in between is the "real" world of TV viewers. Because the world of TV commercials is the more fantastic, I think the technique works well here.
Maurizio Nichetti, who might (and might not) remind you of Roberto Benigni, stars as Anotonio Piermattei, the icicle thief, the protagonist of the movie within a movie, which is a Bicycle Thief-like tragic film that the TV people manage to mangle into a TV-like romantic comedy. (If you're wondering how one can be an icicle thief, keep wondering. I'll never tell.) Nichetti also plays the auteur of the film being shown on TV who is invited to be interviewed but never gets to speak partly because the film critic who is to do the interview thinks they are viewing a different film.
The title notwithstanding, this is not a satire or a "spoof" of Vittorio De Sica's internationally acclaimed The Bicycle Thief (1948), although De Sica himself might be seen as being lightly satirized. Nichetti's The Icicle Thief is more like an identification as it attempts to stand with the art film solidly against commercialism. However any similarity between the film within a film here and De Sica's masterpiece is sycophantic. This is not to say that The Icicle Thief does not have its moments and its charm. It does.
Caterina Sylos Labini who plays Maria, Antonio Piermattei's singing wife, is charming as the archetypical Italian femme fatale, a dark, lusty, earthy woman who can cry and laugh at the drop of a hat. She is contrasted with Heidi Komarck, a colorized blonde model in a butch haircut who does TV commercials. Komarck looks like a member of the Swedish ski team draped in a lingerie outfit that leaves little to the imagination while speaking only American English. My favorite part of the film was the cute shtick with Maria's happy one-year-old daughter who crawls continually into mischief (grabbing a knife by the blade, putting an electric wire in her mouth, etc.) but somehow never has to shed a tear.
That this is a satire and spoof of TV (and not De Sica's Bicycle Thief or old-time neo-realism itself) is immediately apparent when the TV film critic has to ask the name of the film he is critiquing. On TV the only things that really matter are the commercials. So, to the extent that a "Big Big" candy bar jingle and a laundry detergent superhero triumph over a black and white neo-realistic film, we can see that triumph as a satire of television and its middle-brow audience.
Cleverest film I've seen While on the face of it a commedy, and in fact tremendously funny, the film is much more about how our memories merge events just because they were coincident. As a result, the independent lives of the viewers, the director who is being interviewed, the commercials, and the old film, all become intwined, with each character's drivers continuing to motivate them even in the new environment. This changes the direction of each of the narratives to great comic effect. No threads are left untied, each element of the film works on its own, and the mix is fantastically funny. If we could give this film 10 stars I happily would!
Truly hilarious, and lots of fun This movie is terribly charming (especially after seeing "The Bicycle Thieves") and very funny. The official review sadly gives away too much of this movie. I saw this film in a college class with no summations beforehand, and was really blown away. I would recommend it to anyone who enjoys quirky little stories within stories, paying close attention to the story line and typical Italian humor.
Anything Goes Trivia
Megaton Man
Tailipoe
Trevor
