Word: socialized
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Committee bill 362 to 49. That provides an overall tax cut of $16.3 billion. The message will not entirely appease the middle class, however, since the cut translates into an average of only about $163 per year in savings for the individual taxpayer. Because of the large increase in Social Security taxes scheduled to go into effect in January, many members of the middle class will be paying more to the Government than before, even with...
Viva Italia! consists of a series of nine brief vignettes, which taken together appear to reflect the current condition of social humor in Italy. Or at least the directorial triumvirate's conception of what Italians think is funny. But the big problem is that very little in the film is actually amusing, and much of it is either revolting, childish, or well outside any reasonable bounds of humor, no matter how sick...
...example, I don't know of too many people who find terrorism all that funny. But, in a sequence that I suppose is meant to be a comment on the Italian social condition (none too great, these days), a strange man (Yorgo Voyagis) who doesn't speak Italian, French or English spots and subsequently seduces a radiantly beautiful Alitalia stewardess (Ornella Muti, the best thing about this film). The next morning, as she is about to board her plane, he rushes up to her, embraces her and then gives her a tape recorder playing the tune to which...
...scenes bomb so badly, no pun intended, but there are a few others that fail both as incisive social commentary and as humor. In a sequence near the end of the film, a waiter at a rustic country restaurant with a ritzy clientele gets involved in a grotesque food fight in the kitchen with the chef, who turns out to be his lover. The slapstick technique employed here went out of vogue in America at about the same time that Hal Roach stopped making Spanky and Our Gang films. After all, squids perched atop the suddenly toupee-less head...
...British humor, but there's a common cultural bond there; that bond is much weaker with regard to Italy. It is a strange and deeply troubled nation, small wonder then that its filmmakers should present such a dark vision. But while that vision might, possibly--just maybe--have some social significance, the flaws that pervade Viva Italia! make it hardly worthwhile, save for the hardiest Italophile. No one needs to offended, bored, and bewildered; at least no one should have to pay for that privilege, even if Vincent Canby tells them...