Purely Joyful Movie!

i know i wasted 90 mins of my life.

Excellent, Without a doubt!!

A clunky actioner with a handful of cool moments.

Most people agree that the Golden Age of Italian movies started with Rosselini's "Rome-Open City" and ended about 15 years before Mastroianni's death. What's the cause of that, we can't be sure of.This film about the drug depending teacher, who remembers his mother during the last decade of that era and how she involuntarily destroyed the lives of him and his sister. They really haven't begun yet. His mother another example of the common Italian film theme "Too beautiful for her own good".But that theme would have been done better in the hands of the golden Italian directors and good acting really don't make that much difference here.

Although the golden age of Italian cinema probably stopped a couple of decades ago after a formidable run beginning with the neo-realist movement, Paolo Virzi's The First Beautiful Thing captures some of the realism and confusion of life in the 1970's through present day. Propelled by several sometimes confusing flashbacks, it still makes sense when it focuses on mother and son and a tempestuous, oedipal string of lasting impressions.Anna (Michella Ramazzotti) is a beautiful mother, wife, and local hottie who wins the Summer Mother Beauty Contest of 1971, setting off a series of jealousies (even her young son), and infidelities, as befitting the not quite stereotypical mother/whore motif. Son Bruno, played as an adult by Valerio Mastanrea, grows up to be a professor and a misanthropist whose recurring images of his chaotic mother disturb him and alienate him from his sister Valeria (Claudia Pandolfi) and his mother, played in her later years by Stephania Sandrelli.Bruno is more memorable than his mother because he is far more complicated, a drug addict who struggles to please his cancerous mother in her last days and reconcile with his sister. While Bruno's oedipal inclinations have not been overpowering, mother Anna has a couple of scenes where she treats him like a lover rather than a son. Regardless of those clues, it is not until they are permanently separated that he is free to swim with his girlfriend, seemingly washed of his mother and free to love.Compare this mother/whore story with the recent much more oblique I am Love or the more openly incestuous Murmur of the Heart, and you can see why it comes closer to telenovela than a classic, The Priest's Wife, in which Sophia Loren challenges a priest's vow of celibacy. Anna wrecks her children's lives, according to her son, but she has an aura of likability that begs the audience to care for her when she has mostly confused the lives of many men and children, too.Although the story lacks sophisticated dialogue and the plot is unnecessarily complex, the film is a moving treatise on the effects of absent mothers and estranged sons on family happiness.

Paolo Virzi, the last heir of Italian comedy recounts the resentment of a child for a mother too generous, the ambitions of a great little woman in Italy in the sixties, the Italian province full of prejudices, the disease as an instrument of reconciliation. Between past and present, helped by a splendid cast including Stefania Sandrelli (muse of Pietro Germi and Bernardo Bertolucci, Ettore Scola return in a leading role with all his talent as an actress animal). Paolo Virzi signs his best movie, a film that makes you cry and laugh at the same time, a film that remains in the heart... Paolo Virzi, the last heir of Italian comedy recounts the resentment of a child for a mother too generous, the ambitions of a great little woman in Italy in the sixties, the Italian province full of prejudices, the disease as an instrument of reconciliation. Between past and present, helped by a splendid cast including Stefania Sandrelli (muse of Pietro Germi and Bernardo Bertolucci, Ettore Scola return in a leading role with all his talent as an actress animal). Paolo Virzi signs his best movie, a film that makes you cry and laugh at the same time, a film that remains in the heart...

I live near director's town of birth, the town where this movie is set, too, and I had, last summer, the great opportunity to see how this man works, and I can say he's so nice and he tries to be calm, even when the actors (the younger ones, in particular) couldn't do that he wants.But I've noticed an other thing: production was very very rich (in economical terms), and maybe my judge could be partial, but when I've seen this movie, I've seen a beautiful story, rich of messages and themes (family, and the incapability to repudiate that; impossibility to escape from past and nostalgia; against the drug, even if it could seem the opposite etc..), so great job as regards the screenplay; acting is good, although many actors were very young, and "for first time on screen"; photograph is quite good (some scene have a big and quite bad using of color correction), and sounds are right.I think (joking) Virzì is happy whenever he reaches to export his accent in the world, and his own crusade includes, in my opinion, the justice for the speaking, which before him it was the same for Florence and Tuscany's Coast. In this way, actors like Mastrandrea and Pandolfi show their great capability to give a great interpretation even with a different accent (both come from Rome).But the worst side of the movie I think it's the shoots. They aren't bad, but probably I believed Virzì's work had a greater attention for originality, and I asked me why, with the big quantity of entourage and money he had, he forgot the attention for the originality in shooting. The shoots are many times ordinary, far from other great movies, like Fellini's Amarcord, which the review Ciak had compared with this.With an other kind of shoots (or maybe is just the video editing, I hope) which gives to movie that "ordinary taste", breaking a little part of amazing magic of the movie, this could be one of the greatest works of Virzì, because is a personal and introspective work, like Italians know to do very well.Although this, "La Prima Cosa Bella" is able to move the spectator, and it's a good movie, but just a little better than the standard of the genre. My final vote is a 7,5.