Watch My Friends For Free

Good movie but grossly overrated

A lot of perfectly good film show their cards early, establish a unique premise and let the audience explore a topic at a leisurely pace, without much in terms of surprise. this film is not one of those films.

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

Hello from Barcelona again This movie is very good. Actors play an excellent role. Ugo Tognazzi and Philippe Noiret are the best ones. Italian humor is present all the movie. I can't explain with the correct words how good is this movie. I have it in Catalan, my language. The 2nd part is very good but I think the best is the 1st one. Guido Necchi (played by Duilio del Prete) didn't act in the 2nd part. We have Renzo Montagnani who plays a good job but not better than Duilio del Prete. You can see Rambaldo Melandri (Gastone Moschin) in The godfather part 2. He is the old man dressed in white suit who Robert DeNiro shoot with a gun while there is the crowd in the street. Adolfo Celi does an excellent role too, very funny. Also in the 2n part. There is a 3rd part with Ugo Tognazzi, Renzo Montagnani, Adolfo Celi and Gastone Moschin. Philippe Noiret wasn't here (only in 1st and 2nd part). This 3rd part is not so good but it is interesting anyway. We can see Bernard Blier again, who did the role of Niccolo Righi in the first part, the old man who in the first moment believes sugar is drug... You can find the three parts in Internet, in Emule (look for Amici miei). The sound is Italian and very interesting. The 1st part longs around 20 minutes more than the first edition of the film, and shows very funny scenes with the 5 men and Niccolo Righi. There is a pack with the trilogy in DVD in Italy. And I think it should be a 4th disc with deleted scenes, interviews and more. But I think there were some problems and now it is hard to find it. Finally you can enjoy watching Ugo Tognazzi and Philippe Noiret together in the Marco Ferreri film La grande bouffe. I hope there is someday a DVD with English subtitles for all of you. Enjoy! Joan Barcelona

OK, again another Monicelli's masterpiece (based on an idea of the genius Pietro Germi). This movie talks about: friendship, comrade's, love, sex, loneliness, betrayal, fun, sadness, death, sons. In one sentence: it talks about life.There is a lot of FUN in this movie, as the main characters seem to never grow up, they just want to joke about everything, NOTHING is really THAT important or serious to be spared by jokes. The son of the journalist is more mature and serious than his father... remember that we are in 1975 and this is absolutely counter-intuitive!! in that period young people were fighting on the streets for freedom of thoughts, of sex, and for political reasons!! Well, in some ways young people during that period were more socially "committed" than their fathers who wanted to preserve the status quo. In this movie however the middle-aged characters make fun of the status quo: the broken noble betrays his wife for a teen-ager, the surgeon does not care to leave the hospital in troubles for joining his friends, the journalist does not understand his son and never tries to, the architect wants to conquer the heart of a married woman, etc... it's like: "OK, you youngsters do not care about the old moral rules? we, your fathers, too, even more than you..." It's also a sad movie, as this search for continuous fun is a sign that something is wrong in their lives. The architect leaves his new family to join the company for the joke at the train station, as he is fed up with all the problems a real and traditional family provide. Normality is boring and annoying. Fun comes from friends and from breaking the moral or society rules. It's better a good joke (even a cruel one) and have fun than keep a normal life-style and be bored (this is a philosophy that some Italians really have).There is plenty of UNpolitically correct situations... feminist people can be very nervous seeing this movie... remember that it's a movie that reflects a particular culture, the Tuscany of almost forty years ago (the movie is set in the 60's). But real love is not banned in this movie... it's just a cynic point of view (real love ends up eventually, when it becomes normal life). I have seen several times this movie and every time I enjoy it. Also the sequel is good, but the first is just incredible. Do not miss this movie. You'll have lots of laughs and an essay about certain Italian culture.

At several points during the superb Italian comedy MY FRIENDS, the four friends, all overgrown adult children, pull pranks as though they were college dorm buddies rather than the middle-aged fools they are, chant a sort of barber-shop version of the quartet "Bella figlia dell'amore" from Verdi's "Rigoletto."We hear them sing while riding in a car on one of their frequent gypsy-trips to nowhere in particular. Wherever they go they bring mayhem with them. Their lunacy is both a reaction to and a comment on the lunatic world they see around them. The operatic clown Rigoletto was a sad fool too, and this quartet of sad fools elicits both our laughter and our pity. The film was directed by Mario Monicelli from a script by Pietro Germi, creator of some of Italy's best comedy-satires like SEDUCED AND ABANDONED and DIVORCE, ITALIAN STYLE.There is Mascetti (Ugo Tognazzi), a former count who has squandered his own and his wife's inheritance. He now sells encyclopedias, is soon fired from that job, and treats his long-suffering wife and child as excess baggage, shipping them off to her relatives, so he can be alone with his crackpot cronies. He also pursues a lame-brained little lush called Titti even after her colonel-father almost kills him with a shotgun and after discovering her in a lesbian attachment.There is Necchi (Duilio Del Prete), a horny cafe' owner, who while atop his wife tells her to hurry so he can get out with the guys and have some real fun. Male camaraderie means more to these people than heterosexual love and implies an ambivalent latent homosexuality.We see Melandri (Gastone Moschin),a lovesick cop who is eager to possess Olga Karlatos, the neurotic wife of a gifted surgeon (Adolfo Celi). The doctor oddly consents to turn over his wife to him, provided Melandri accepts two small daughters, a German governess, and a two-ton St.Bernard. No way. Erotic love has its limits. He quickly returns to the boys in a state of exhaustion.Then there is Perozzi (Philippe Noiret), the narrator, whose death ends the film. He lives with a humorless son who does not approve of the father's childish pranks, such as pretending to be a hunchback to ward off an unwanted woman. Perozzi is also estranged from a wife who loathes him. She is unable to express pity at his death. "What was he? Nothing." she says. Yet we know it to be that kind of "nothing" that is a challenge by a sad fool to the smug complacency of his son who is a person that faces life as though it were a death sentence. Whatever these clowns are, at least they are alive! In the hierarchy of fool-dom the son appears as loathsome while his father commands some admiration.Some of the episodes in the film are comedy of the first magnitude. Pietro Germi,who wrote the screenplay, had to withdraw from directing the film after a serious illness. He later died. Mario Monicelli, a notable directorial talent in his own right, took over the film and imparts to it a winsome ribald flavor you have to savor to appreciate.There is one episode in which the four, with the addition of sometime-member Celi, the doctor, enter a small town with maps and surveying equipment and convince the townspeople and a bewildered priest that the village must be leveled to make way for a new highway. In a truly hilarious episode we watch the group slapping the faces of passengers leaning out of the windows of a train departing from a platform.Another fairly grotesque scene has the group inviting itself to a party at a villa. Necchi relieves himself in a little child's potty, and the resulting volume of excremental emission provokes hysteria among the child's family when they discover the contents.In another long sequence the men dupe gullible Righi (Bernard Blier) into believing they are a group of gangsters pushing heroin. It too is hilarious, and it, and the entire movie are very, very clever.

Italian comedy has never been as pure and simple as in Amici Miei. Many Italian comedic actors have taken inspiration from this gem. Unfortunately, this movie is not available to the greater audiences in the US. I saw this movie when it was released and many times after that. Grazie, Mario!