Patience Watson One of those movie experiences that is so good it makes you realize you've been grading everything else on a curve.

Ariella Broughton It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.

Marva-nova Amazing worth wacthing. So good. Biased but well made with many good points.

Marva It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

pinolaricio I think many foreign viewers have missed the point of the film because they are trying to relate it to their own personal experiences without taking into account the overall Italian context. Young people in Italy are eternally cosseted and dominated by controlling and indulgent mothers, particularly males. They also live in a society where the young must follow the advice and occupational footsteps of their parents because any other career choice is much more unlikely than in any other 'developed' country. In Italy jobs are secured on connections not on merit. Nor can one just leave a job with impunity. Mobility in the Italian job-market is practically nonexistent. Throughout the film the women appear controlling/dominating and/or resentful, whilst the men are all too weak to break away from their influence and strike out for themselves. The focal point of the story revolves around an adulterous affair where a thirty something man, who has meekly allowed his companion control his life and his future, seeks escape through an adventure with a girl almost half his age. (There are echoes of the latter-day Berlusconi here). The relationship ends almost as swiftly as it begins because the young enchantress ends up being just as manipulative as the partner he was trying to leave. Caught between two controlling women, our weak kneed Romeo goes running back to his 'safe' Mummy/Wife whose approval he thinks is guaranteed because she is pregnant with his child. The subplot of his three friends 'escaping' to an African adventure is just that, an impossible and unrealistic dream, which would never really be contemplated by young Italian males, unless their ultimate return to the fold, their mothers and their secure - but dispiriting - professions was guaranteed. Such a plot is sad enough, but it has been made even sadder by my impression that the director is not even fully cognizant of how he has portrayed gender relations in his film. His portrayal of Italian women, and of their inconsequential and infantile men folk, I believe, reflects his own subconscious awareness of the underlying reality, that is all the more revealing of the state of gender play in Italy for being unintended.

kyrat Warning: Ending revealed & discussed.I enjoy foreign films and prefer original movies to their remakes. I really dislike when foreign films are remade for American audiences and changed (usually sugarcoated, with a happy ending tacked on). I loathe this need to pander to our sentimentalism and our refusal to accept more "realistic" films.However, after seeing this film, I'm curious to see the American remake of this film to see if it's sensibilities are more in line with my tastes. Maybe I'm being unrealistic in thinking American guys wouldn't have quite the same reactions.I was looking forward to these 30-something characters exploring/struggling with what it meant to be in a relationship. However I didn't like any of the characters. The women barely existed except as foils for the male characters. They were one-dimensional. All of them were portrayed as wanting nothing more than a marriage and kids. They were shown as jealous, shrew-like and clingy/dependent. The men on the other hand (with one happily married exception who was barely shown, and one unhappily obsessed w/ his ex) were shown as feeling trapped by women/relationships. I really disliked the main storyline of the guy who is about to have a child with his girlfriend and yet suddenly decides he needs to screw a high school student. I was even more mad the way the film let him have his cake and eat it too. In effect the film said it was OK to cheat on your pregnant girlfriend because if you really apologize she'll take you back. I don't feel like he felt guilty for the act. He was just sorry he got caught. I don't feel that he learned anything from the experience. Nor did I feel is he unlikely to do it again.I was sad that his girlfriend took him back. She admits he killed her love/trust and that it would never be the same. I was even sadder at the end that (to me) seemed to imply she was going to cheat on him too.I thought the film was going to be about finding contentment in a monogamous relationship - to show that it's OK to give up "the chase", the desire for others because the committed relationship would be a more rewarding experience than a series of one-night stands. (This is not to say it also can't show that people can be perfectly happy as single and free -- I had no problem with the dread-locked guy who openly admitted he was just in it for sex). Instead it showed relationships/marriage as suffocating and unhappy for both parties. It showed that straying out side the relationship seemed to be normal (at least for the men).I wasn't asking for ALL the characters to be blissfully happy and not have any doubts - or for everyone to feel they needed to be in a relationship. (clearly the obsessed guy needed to learn to be on his own.) I was merely hoping for a exploration of both sexes dealing with these doubts and issues - and I feel what I got was one-sided and very biased towards a particular conclusion. I'll admit I was biased too -I'd hoped for a ending that showed the people in a relationship as seeing that giving up others for a committed relationship is worth it. Instead I feel like I got the reverse. Perhaps it's my fault for coming with certain expectations.I simply couldn't relate to any of them (being in the same age, having entered a long term relationships, thinking about these issues) - I'd really hoped it would resonate and make me think. Instead I found it rather depressing and disheartening.And while I hate to stereotype, I'm sort of hoping that was an Italian mentality that would not translate to a different culture's version of this film/these issues. So I'm going to break my cardinal rule of not seeing remakes and watch the American version called "Last Kiss" to see if it plays out in the same manner.

noralee "Last Kiss (L'ultimo Bacio)" is a rollicking, sped up, very Italian version of "Four Weddings and a Funeral," though here it's two weddings, a funeral, a couple of affairs and a separation. This is a very contemporary take on Northern Italian upper middle class society in modern apartments and houses and lots and lots of mobile phones. The casting is marvelous, as each character is made distinct by each actor's appearance and the character's foible and romantic situation within a large ensemble of four almost-30 friends from college, their significant others, and a set of parents and their friends.The music is coordinated briskly with the zooming editing and I'm sure if I knew Italian pop music would be commenting on each character's taste. Ironically, the characters who seem languid and peaceful at the beginning, of course by the end are running around yelling when everyone else has calmed down. The subtitles are in yellow, though still difficult to read, but barely communicate the characters' conversations; they speak at breakneck pace and can't possibly just say what's written, which was confirmed by my Italian friend (she also said that the written language is considerably cleaned-up, even with the subtitles including the occasional assh*le and f*ck -- that the insults are considerably more biologically descriptive). If Hollywood makes a version, there will be some cleaning up of the characters' actions (particularly as regards an "American Beauty"-like obsession, as the audience I was with gasped a few times at how far sympathetic characters went and then lied about it. Unusual for such a "When will you grow up?" movie, we also see the impact of impending grandparenthood. But extremely rare for an Italian movie (and for Italian society, says my friend) this showed what's good for the goose can be good for the gander.(originally written 9/2/2002)

Chris Knipp [s p o i l e r s] You have to admit there's much that's life affirming and technically accomplished in Gabriele Muccino's movies about superficial Italians coupling and uncoupling. His scenes never stop moving, and his camera has learned to keep up with the flow. Undoubtedly his most polished effort so far is L'ultimo bacio (The Last Kiss). A box office success in Italy and abroad (though not a critical one), The Last Kiss is a splendid operatic swirl of melodramatic ensemble acting and liquid editing. Its succession of slick, fast-talking, emotional roller coaster scenes is a beautiful thing to watch. It's got irresistible rhythm if you don't mind that the high energy leads to an awful lot of yelling. The episodic structure and musical links may owe something to P.T. Anderson's Magnolia; but this is Italy and it all works differently. It isn't about anomie and chance encounters: everyone's connected. The Last Kiss is a well-oiled machine with jaw-dropping energy. Its action is so lively, its motion so perpetual, you may fail to notice what a stagnant society The Last Kiss represents - how complacent the characters and their creator are. The way they buckle down and accept the mind-numbing `comforts' and intellectual limitations of Berlusconi's Italy. It's a place they all seem destined to accept as the best of all possible worlds.The Last Kiss revolves (almost literally: the steadicam pans from scene to scene while operatic music swims across the transitions) around five young men about to turn thirty in a provincial town. At the center is Carlo (Stefano Accorsi). His fiancée Giulia (Giovanna Mezzogiorno) is pregnant and he can't face the prospect of a wife, a child, and a house. He's not ready to grow up. Most of Carlo's buddies have the same problem. Paolo (Claudio Santamaria) goes through the death of his father right after he's had an angry breakup with his girlfriend, and he can't face going into the family religious object business. The mercurial Adriano (Giorgio Casotti) has a young child and a ball-buster wife (Livia, Sabrina Impacciatore) and these challenges have him fed up with his marriage and ready to leave it. Alberto (Marco Cocci), a dreadlocked, joint-smoking Greenpeace hippy, amuses himself seeing how many women will jump into bed with him; he's a sciupafemmine, a Don Juan who chews them up and spits them out: marriage is not on his horizon.But Marco (Pierfrancesco Favino) is getting married: he's buying into the normal life. Marco's four friends are all at Marco's wedding, and it's there that Carlo meets Francesca (Martina Stella), a tantalizingly delicious blonde schoolgirl who successfully puts the make on him. Meanwhile Giulia's mother Anna (a simpatica Stefania Sandrelli) is fed up with her taciturn psychiatrist husband Emilio (Luigi Emilio) and goes through her own period of rebellion, trying to revive an affair of three years ago with a college professor (Sergio Castellitto).Carlo gets his wild night with Francesca, his `last kiss' which turns into more than that after Giulia finds out and they have a big fight (where the movie's yell-fest reaches fortissimo). He runs back and sleeps with the 18-year old, and then spends the rest of the movie trying to patch things up and get his life back on its track. Meanwhile Adriano, Alberto, and Paolo are planning to run off to Africa, or somewhere-an escape that's really a last fling: but their whole series of tantrums and complaints are background noise, an obligato to the main themes. The focus is on Giulia's mother, Adriano, and Carlo. Where the movie is really headed for its finale is to Carlo and Giulia reuniting, and a soothing voiceover from Carlo about how nice it will be to have grass and a suburban house and kids. . .and all the rest, and the two of them are reconciled at her parents' house where Anna is back with her father. It seems that Adriano really has left his wife, for a while anyway, but that subject is dropped.Closely examined, despite its Magnolia-like intercutting of related subplots, its splendid cast and beautiful look, The Last Kiss reveals a worldview that's numbingly vapid. Its young men on the verge of thirty and one older woman in revolt against the ordinary paths they've chosen only play at escape: the final sequence is a corny affirmation of comfortable bourgeois family life, big house, big car, perfect bambini. Anna is back with Giulia's father. Her little revolt is over.What is the theme that unifies Muccino's movies? Is it coming of age, as in Come te nessuno mai, or is it playing at revolution, as in that same rather charming first film about high schoolers staging a Sixties-style strike while what the boys really want is only to get laid? If Come te is Muccino's freshest and most unassuming effort, Ricordati di me, his most recent one, is his cheesiest: again, a swirl of stories about individuals in a family who are all in revolt against their lives - and come back to conventionality at the end - but with much tackier subplots. He's made a trilogy: (1) first sex, (2) last infidelity before marriage, (3) first infidelity after, with being aTV go-go dancer treated as a viable life choice. The theme is simply: revolt a little, it'll make you feel better. `Normality is the true revolution.'Italians who remember the great directors of the past shake their heads at such stuff. The idea that all temptations to rebel end in a little reconciliation is complacent even for TV sitcoms. It's as if Muccino has all this promise as a filmmaker - he can orchestrate his subplots in such an entertaining way and the editing is inspired - he's a real Robert Altman with a Tuscan accent - but his head is too empty; there's no there there. Muccino's characters, for all their charm and good looks, are pretty silly people. Carlo, Last Kiss's main character, is attractive in his way but his shit-faced grin palls: he's an airhead to be tempted by Francesca, the blonde Lolita, because she's an airhead too, just a pretty schoolgirl who confuses wanting to get laid with finding the love of her life. There's no edge to the temptation, because Francesca's pull on Carlo was so superficial. It's lively and glossy and it has moments of flirting with satire and farce, the sheer energy of it can be lots of fun to watch, but when you get down to it, Last Kiss is on the level of a TV sitcom. In fact American cable network dramas arguably go deeper than this. Is Muccino the best that mainstream Italian cinema can now produce? Let's hope not.