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Format: VHS
Aug 1991
Not Rated
Recording Mode: (unknown)
84 min. |
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Movie Description
Imagine your watching a vintage movie interrupted by a million commercials. Suddenly, a sexy swimsuit model disappears from a car ad and reappears in the movie in full color, encouraging the characters to abandon their black and white integrity for the colorful glitz of commercials.
Synopsis
A director gets pulled into his television set while watching the TV broadcast of his latest film. The film is intercut every 11 minutes with sexy commercials, and he finds it hard to tell the difference between the text of his film and the text of the advertisements. His actors, it seems, have the same trouble, and begin changing their lines to accommodate the additional plot line of the commercials. Simultaneously, a family sits in their living room, prepared to watch the film, but they are interrupted by phones, newspapers, the sound of children playing, and the ever-threatening remote control.
Film Notes
The film, whose title is inspired by Vittorio De Sica's 1948 classic of Italian neo-realism "Bicycle Thief," is a parody of this style of filmmaking, as well as a satire on the way films are chopped up to accommodate all of the commercials when they are aired on television. The biggest target of director Nichetti's humor (and wrath) is the ridiculous nature of commercials and the excessiveness of what they sell.
Neo-realism was the predominant style of Italian filmmaking in the late war and postwar years, popularized by directors like De Sica, Roberto Rossellini, and Luchino Visconti. It was a style that stressed "social realism," and tended to feature working class characters or characters who are dealing with the social and political difficulties of contemporary Italy.
This film would be even more ironic shown on commercial TV, but fortunately, in 1989, the Appellate Court in Rome passed a law saying that the interruption of a film with commercials "alters the identity" of a film and "violates the director's rights."
Director Nichetti's fourth feature film, made after a 7-year absence during which he (ironically) developed 2 well-regarded series for television.
Industry Reviews
"...In his ingenious comedy THE ICICLE THIEF Nichetti has taken a wide-eyed look at his own cinema, past and present, and has staggered back his vision, his mind brimming over with invention..."
Los Angeles Times - Sheila Benson (09/07/1990)
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