Manual do Amor

I really enjoyed the first novel. Jasmine Trinca is absolutely sexy and smart there. Although, I would not find Tomasa a perfect match to her, he did played very well.

I am surprised that this movie has not received much of attention of critics and media.

I am big fan of Jasmine after this movie. She is the best! Next novels were not so interesting for me, although I did find amusing one scene about pregnancy and the way everybody watched mother delivering a baby in a hospital.

I would recommend watching Manuale Di Amore to everyone.

A flaw that I feared before watching this movie was stereotypes about love, like men playing tricks on women to conquer them or betrayals with best friends. As a matter of fact the movie is divided into various parts, each one describing a stage of love: falling in love, crisis, betrayal and abandon. The different mini-stories are tied with each other by characters who are somehow related and the end of the movie connects with the beginning as an ideal circle. Despite the same old stories about relationships and developments of love stories, this movie has anyway some good aspects. For example, each actor plays his own repertoire, displaying their qualities in what they do best and for what they're known for. The best sketches, in my opinion,are made by Goffredo, played by Carlo Verdone, and Marco, played by Sergio Rubini, who offer the sense of humor shown in their own movies.

This is a fine Italian comedy that I would recommend to anyone. The movie is about the several steps of love relationships: falling in love, crisis, infidelity, parting. Each of these four steps is represented by a couple: Muccino-Trinca fall in love, Rubino-Buy are on the verge of disaster, Abbrescia is unfaithful to Littizzetto (and vice versa), while Verdone is mad about losing his woman (but will finally fall in love with another one, thus closing the circle).

The feature is structured in almost separate episodes, which is a reference to many "commedie all'italiana" of the '60s. Nevertheless the stories are ingenuously linked among each other and the writing is so skillful that the movie never loses its pace. Plus, it is very well acted. Verdone and Buy are almost perfect, and so is Littizzetto. (This actress became famous thanks to TV shows, but is actually very good and definitely deserves to play a dramatic role to show how credible she is and how versatile).

Verdone proves brave by accepting a character both ridiculous and tragic. He is a physician who has been abandoned by his wife and tries to re-build his life out of its pieces. Maybe the script is a bit excessive here, as it is not clear whether we have to laugh at or identify with him. Anyway he redeems himself in a beautiful ending almost reminding of "La dolce vita"'s.

The episode that I liked the least is the first. It avoids most of the stupid clichés of Italian comedies for teenagers, but why then all those swearwords? They are just annoying and don't add anything to the story and the characters. Plus, the episode is kind of unrealistic.

Obviously, this is not a revolutionary movie, but it is very funny and, most of all, not spoiled by silly character parts as so many Italian movies are.

Saw this film during a class, it's surprise to see Carlo Verdone and Silvio Muccino again, last time I saw them together in "Il Mio Miglior Nemico" (2006), so I guess both are marquee actors in Italy (actually Carlo Verdone is a director too and the cast includes a dozen of the most famous Italian contemporary actors/actresses).

Actually I heard of this series before, the "Manuela D' Amore 2" also has become a huge success in Italy (with Monica Bellucci, a current sexy symbol of Italy), and rumor says the 3rd installment will invite Robert De Niro to join a star-studded cast, which shows its ambition to conquer a more international terrain.

The film has been a successful domestic box-office bomb in 2005 and also met with mainly positive feedbacks. It consists of four stories of love, from "falling in love", "the crisis", "the betrayal" to "the abandoned", four different sets of protagonists interpret their own chapter with a previous one educes a latter story and finally the fourth chapter encircles with the first one to make everything looks so perfect.

It is an innocuous comedic film with predictable farce and generally it is quite enjoyable. Although each chapter seems nothing particularly outstanding (when we talk about love, I think we have already seen ALMOST everything on screen), the advantage is that with four different stories altogether and each lasts for only 30 mins, the film shrewdly changes to a new chapter as soon as the previous one shows a sign of burning out, which at least will not annoy the audience (critics are not included).

The film got 10 nomination of David di Donatell Awards (Italian Oscar) and won several of them (including Best Supporting Actor and Actress, Carlo Verdone and Margherita Buy), which cruelly shows the truth that now we are in a world starving for great comedies, it is not only in Italy, but the whole earth as well.

It's a very well-made light-hearted, romantic comedy consisting of several small stories sorted out by the different stages of relationships. The stories were told in such a fluid way that you don't feel disturbed by the director's chronically linear view on relationships, although the figures in different stories were connected in a way or another.

The outstanding performances from every actor in this film also makes the everyday love stories naturally telling. Although the audience can share lots of jokes about relationships in this film, I also like that sometimes the actors talked to the audience directly through the camera. This is a skillful technique to get the audience's empathy and involvement.

Brava & carina - this film is surely very entertaining.