At first, when suburban mom Kristin gets the mysterious call to head to Italy to settle the affairs of a dead relative, she protests she’s too busy. Then she realizes there’s not much keeping her: Her son is off to college, her job is dead-end, and her husband? He’s cheating with the school guidance counselor.
So why not treat herself to a me-focused trip, a la Julia Roberts? Maybe an Eat, Pray, Love trip, muses Kristin (Toni Collette), to which her friend (Sophie Nomvete) replies that what she really needs, bluntly, is to “Eat, Pray, $%&$.”
Soon that’s the slogan for her trip. It also would a great alternative title for Mafia Mamma, if they could get away with it. And really, they try to get away with most everything else.
Photo: AP
That includes some cringe-worthy slapstick, some Tarantino-level violence and also every Italian stereotype you can imagine (Grape-stomping? Check. Gelato, gnocchi and cannoli? Check. Speaking of cannoli: The Godfather? Check. Stanley Tucci’s food show? Check!) Some of this is to be expected, but Mafia Mamma, directed by Catherine Hardwicke, is over-saturated with shtick. And in a script which seeks to empower its protagonist by having her don a tight dress and commit murder with a stiletto heel to the groin (and eyeball), the goriest death is by cliche. Nobody escapes it.
Not even the wonderfully versatile Collette, who does yeoman’s work selling the increasingly repetitive plot developments, especially in the latter half, and maintaining sympathy for her character, who’s such a wide-eyed fish out of water, she’s never even seen The Godfather (a running joke, which like many jokes here is funny the first time).
The opening scenes are promising. We begin with always-welcome Monica Bellucci, as hardened consiglieri Bianca, surveying a crime scene full of dead bodies, including her boss Giuseppe Balbano, and declaring: “This is war.” Soon, Kristin gets Bianca’s call about grandad, whom she never knew. Kristin grew up in America and always assumed grandad was a vintner or (and Tony Soprano was in waste management...).
Photo: AP
Soon Kristin arrives in Rome, ready to eat, pray and you-know-what. (After all, her husband’s you-know-whatting with the guidance counselor, who has one of the film’s funnier lines when she says, caught in the act: “I want you to know I’m a feminist!”) It seems like the you-know-what is about to happen quickly for Kristin too, because an impossibly handsome guy just happens to show up at the airport and take her number.
At the funeral, Kristin narrowly escapes death when the procession itself is attacked by the rival family (a cascade of oranges running down the cobblestoned street is a clever Godfather reference, until the joke gets tired). At the family home, she’s shown a video message designating her as the successor. She tries to flee, but Bianca tells her she can’t run from her destiny.
And so the film chronicles her making peace with that destiny, even if peace means severing a few eyeballs from their sockets along the way.
Photo: AP
Not that Kristin becomes evil or anything. Most of her bad deeds are done by accident or in self-defense. But the worst deed of all is that the movie can’t decide what it wants her, or itself, to be. It’s not fully slapstick comedy — wine-stomping scenes aside — and hardly a serious crime saga.
Most of all, it seems to want to tell a story of female empowerment; at one point Kristin is reminded to never let a man dictate who she can be or what she can do. Nice message, but it’s muddled. Who exactly is dictating? Surely not her husband, a caricature of a doofus.
And so, despite some satisfying moments, by the increasingly cringe-worthy last third of the movie you’re just annoyed that it seems to want to cover all bases — to have its, er, cannoli and eat it, too. Maybe Kristin should just eat, pray, you-know-what, and head on home.
Last week, the government rejected a petition to amend the law that would allow permanent residents a path to citizenship. This was widely expected, but it came amid a flurry of negative trends about the future of the nation’s labor force. There was much ironic commentary on the juxtaposition of that decision with its idiotic, abusive reasoning with the urgent demand for labor across a wide range of fields. This demand was highlighted by the government’s plans for five NT$10 billion (US$307.6 million) funds to promote development in key fields, including artificial intelligence (AI), “smart” healthcare and green growth announced
It is dangerous to engage in business in China now, and those considering engaging with it should pay close attention to the example Taiwanese businesspeople are setting. Though way down from the heady days of Taiwanese investments in China two decades ago, a few hundred thousand Taiwanese continue to live, work and study there, but the numbers have been declining fast. As President William Lai (賴清德) pointed out approvingly to a visiting American Senate delegation, China accounted for 80 percent of the total overseas investment in 2011, but was reduced to just 11.4 percent last year. That is a big drop.
Dec 2 to Dec 8 It was the biggest heist in Taiwanese history at that time. In the afternoon of Dec. 7, 1982, two masked men armed with M16 assault rifles knocked out the driver of a United World Chinese Commercial Bank (世華銀行) security van, making away with NT$14 million (worth about NT$30 million today). The van had been parked behind a post office at Taipei’s Minsheng E Road when the robbers struck, and despite the post office being full of customers, nobody inside had noticed the brazen theft. “Criminals robbing a
Supplements are no cottage industry. Hawked by the likes of the Kardashian-Jenner clan, vitamin gummies have in recent years found popularity among millennials and zoomers, who are more receptive to supplements in the form of “powders, liquids and gummies” than older generations. Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop — no stranger to dubious health trends — sells its own line of such supplements. On TikTok, influencers who shill multivitamin gummies — and more recently, vitamin patches resembling cutesy, colorful stickers or fine line tattoos — promise glowing skin, lush locks, energy boosts and better sleep. But if it’s real health benefits you’re after, you’re
RSS