Dorathen Better Late Then Never

Cleveronix A different way of telling a story

Grimossfer Clever and entertaining enough to recommend even to members of the 1%

Tayloriona Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

billcr12 One of my top ten movies of all time is One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. It still holds up 48 years after its' release. Crazy Life is sort of a step child of Milos Forman's masterpiece. While not as good as Jack Nicholson's best film, it is one of my favorite foreign films of the last ten years. Donatella and Beatrice are a couple of emotionally unstable women who meet at a mental hospital. They click on a shared level of being outcasts from normal society. The misfits team up for a really wild adventure. The actresses are tremendous, with a screen chemistry as good as I have ever seen. The script is both sad and funny, with a completely unpredictable story which kept me guessing from beginning to end. One slight drawback is the rapid fire dialogue here. If you do not speak Italian; and I don't, be prepared to speed read for two hours. Even with that, I highly recommend Crazy Life.

Nuri Baltalioglu I translated this movie for a TV network, and had to watch it several times. Each time it got harder to watch, not because a flaw in the script, or acting, or even directing, but because the movie gives you no closure about the characters in a movie about closure for the characters. Nothing is solved, everything goes back to where it begins,and all we find out in the end that the Italian judiciary system for the criminally insane is horrifying at best.That being said, the acting is truly amazing. I don't think I could have gone through this movie a second time if it wasn't for the leading actresses. Valeria Bruni Tedeschi is especially brilliant. But even her performance could not make me like this movie. One review of this movie refers to it as a mash-up of "One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest" and "Wild Tales." I haven't seen the latter, but this movie is NOWHERE near the former. It's like comparing an average TV show about food to "the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly" just because the genre has the name "spaghetti" in it.

jwsanfrancisco if you take any of the episodes in 'Wild Tales' & expand it to 118 minutes,you have the premise of this latest by Paolo Virzi('HUMAN CAPITAL');where Valerie takes the place of Bruno(Vittorio Gassman),a worldly wise nutjob who mentors another struggling mental patient to escape the nuthouse,& score free meals at restaurants, on a road trip w/ a similar car(Lancet Aurora Sport?);notice every time the car breaksdown(gas,flat tire, blown head gasket), a new one mysteriously pops up for the taking? Almodovar(Spanish),Matteo Garrone(Italy),Virzi(Italy),&Christian Petzhold(Germany)are able to milk the human condition more accurately than their celluloid Hollywood blockbuster counterparts. Virzi planning to film a send up to period dramas?Valerie Bruni Tedeschi, & micaela Razzamotti are inmates who escape a lunatic asylum near Leichester estates,& don discarded clothing to masquerade as Michelle Dockery as Lady something-something, & WREAK HAVOC on the waitstaff?; a Groucho Marx send up: 'A NIGHT AT THE DOWNTON ABBY'?; Anyways, investigators have found traces of a 'wild-tales' accelerant used in the firestorm comedy, Almodovar, & Virzi, once legitimate filmmakers,now on the lam(serial comedy arsonists?); if you see these fugitives at large,contact your local Cannes Film Festival FBI office.. ..HUMAN CAPITAL=insurance companies,using google search algorithms can calculate insurance settlements,calculating the deceased's net worth in compensation claims, taking into account the victim's education level,years of employment, relevant job skills, emotional bonds within the community, any past criminal history, number of siblings,or surviving family members; reducing a person to a commodity?>>

conannz I saw this at a film festival where it was very well received by an English speaking audience. As one of the lead characters talks almost non-stop and very fast I suspect the overall audience impact might be higher on Italian speakers. Certainly it is hard to keep up with the sub-titles at times. At the psychiatric care facility where the women live the daily cycle seems to be predictably noisy but largely routine until the two lead characters catch a bus away from their "work in the community" jobs at a nursery. Their usual transport is late and by catching a regular bus to the local shopping centre a series of escapades start snowballing around them. The "Beatrice" character is off her meds and seems to be having a manic blowout that leads her from one precarious situation to the next. The other character "Donatella" seems quite sober and somewhat surprised by their unauthorised leave of absence. As events unfold we learn more of both characters back story. Some sequences seem to be too coincidental to be true but most of the time the snowball of events keeps moving towards some moments of truth for each of the characters.Given that the film subject matter includes characters who are seen as crazy or mad by the system it is a real challenge to portray something of what that might be like from the centre of the storm - as it were.Mostly though the juxtapositions work and we learn something about friendships and maybe a few insights along the way.