SnoReptilePlenty Memorable, crazy movie

Sexyloutak Absolutely the worst movie.

Ketrivie It isn't all that great, actually. Really cheesy and very predicable of how certain scenes are gonna turn play out. However, I guess that's the charm of it all, because I would consider this one of my guilty pleasures.

Hattie I didn’t really have many expectations going into the movie (good or bad), but I actually really enjoyed it. I really liked the characters and the banter between them.

Rodrigo Amaro "One Last Kiss" is one of those cases where I had nothing better to do, it appeared on the TV and I decided to watch. But first I look to the comments of IMDb users about it and most of them were very positive about Gabrielle Muccino's film, ratings flying high and all. But I must say that one of the reviews caught my attention and it was a bad one where the reviewer repeated terms related with "cry" "whine" and "Poor me" several times throughout his review, complaining on how this movie was so melodramatic and excessive. I laughed a lot with that review but he's totally right on that.The non amusing story covers the life of a man and his four friends, all of them in its 30's behaving themselves like if they were a bunch of teenagers,and all of them has issues with relationships, some are married but they've lost interest for his wives, they're immature, emotionally unstable and their lives is just as fast as a spinning wheel. Sorry, this paragraph was too long and I didn't had the chance to make you breathe right? Right! This movie was like this, it didn't calm us down, it only explores situations where all the casting has to shout to proof a point, they only shout and cry about how miserable their lives are.I usually love fast paced films and my disappointment with this was because, like many viewers pointed out, it was similar to "Magnolia" (one of the best films of all time), where several characters are connected, everything is frantic, the viewers can't hardly breathe only waiting what happens next. "One Last Kiss" is only inspired by the rhythm of Paul Thomas Anderson's movie and that's it. I don't get it all the noise about this movie. Everything is so boring about it, the story, the situations, the characters, the concept of love and fidelity, everything bothered me. Why all the characters have to shout their lines? People are not deaf, they can hear just fine, but after this movie you might get deaf for a moment. Every single scene has a cry, a shout, an argument, and so in the spirit of the characters I shouted a little bit in some parts to see if there's anything special about the act of shouting. Well, I laughed and keep thinking "This movies is boring me" and stuff like that. Woody Allen's "Husbands and Wives" was better than this, and "The Broken Hearts Club" was way better than this. What they have in common? Both movies are about the difficult in maintain a love relationship, infidelities, and both know how to mix comedy and drama with a great ensemble cast and characters, something the Italian film failed poorly. I mean, all these characters trying to find a meaning for their lives by running away from their wives and girlfriends, cheating with younger girls or dating more than one at a time, this whole immaturity thing that this guys had, all of this disenchanted me from the movie.Real people lives are enough filled with doubts, fears, love or angry, many questions and few answers, and when a movie doesn't know how to copy that and at least entertain you, and instead leaves you thinking about your own problems cause you can't care anymore for the characters it means that the so-called movie was bad. The scene where the main character discovered that his wife knew about his affair with someone, he was desperate and all trying to lie to her and I was like "You know what? That's his problem, he's gotta find a way to solve it because I don't care". No sense of identification with him and any other characters at all. I can't think of more reasons why I didn't enjoyed this thing. Thumbs Down! 3/10

pinolaricio I think many foreign viewers have missed the point of the film because they are trying to relate it to their own personal experiences without taking into account the overall Italian context. Young people in Italy are eternally cosseted and dominated by controlling and indulgent mothers, particularly males. They also live in a society where the young must follow the advice and occupational footsteps of their parents because any other career choice is much more unlikely than in any other 'developed' country. In Italy jobs are secured on connections not on merit. Nor can one just leave a job with impunity. Mobility in the Italian job-market is practically nonexistent. Throughout the film the women appear controlling/dominating and/or resentful, whilst the men are all too weak to break away from their influence and strike out for themselves. The focal point of the story revolves around an adulterous affair where a thirty something man, who has meekly allowed his companion control his life and his future, seeks escape through an adventure with a girl almost half his age. (There are echoes of the latter-day Berlusconi here). The relationship ends almost as swiftly as it begins because the young enchantress ends up being just as manipulative as the partner he was trying to leave. Caught between two controlling women, our weak kneed Romeo goes running back to his 'safe' Mummy/Wife whose approval he thinks is guaranteed because she is pregnant with his child. The subplot of his three friends 'escaping' to an African adventure is just that, an impossible and unrealistic dream, which would never really be contemplated by young Italian males, unless their ultimate return to the fold, their mothers and their secure - but dispiriting - professions was guaranteed. Such a plot is sad enough, but it has been made even sadder by my impression that the director is not even fully cognizant of how he has portrayed gender relations in his film. His portrayal of Italian women, and of their inconsequential and infantile men folk, I believe, reflects his own subconscious awareness of the underlying reality, that is all the more revealing of the state of gender play in Italy for being unintended.

Philip Van der Veken "L'Ultimo Bacio" is probably a movie most men will recognize themselves in all too well, because it was based on what most of us actually feel when they are finally expected to grow up when they are around thirty. They are expected to settle, to get married and to start a family. All very important decisions and we never feel very comfortable making them. Do we want to give up life as an irresponsible "bachelor", will we try to spend the rest of our lives with only one woman, are we ready to raise kids...If you expect any answers from this movie, than I'll have to disappoint you, because you won't really find any good ones. It shows how four male friends desperately try to be free. One of them meets an 18-year old schoolgirl at a wedding party, falls in love with her and betrays his pregnant fiancée, jeopardizing his entire future and family. One of the others only fights with his wife, the third one wants to escape form his dying father and the last one wants to keep living as a hippie. They all have their reasons to leave their actual lives and they start making plans to make a trip around the world, but will they leave or finally accept the real life...In a way this is a very typical Italian movie. Personally I love that, but I guess there are several people who don't. The style, the music, the acting, it all can be found in similar Italian movies and less in other European productions. So if you absolutely hate Italian movies, than you better don't even start watching it. In my opinion this isn't a movie for very young people either. I'm not saying they shouldn't watch it, but I think an 18-year old probably can't understand all too well why it's so difficult to make that important step once you're thirty, just because he or she doesn't have to think about it yet. Being almost 27 myself, I know all too well, what it means.All in all this is a very nice movie that I would recommend to most people. Despite what you might think this isn't a very corny movie and has absolutely nothing to do with how most Hollywood comedies with such a message would look like. It's wonderful, it's realistic, it's everything I need in a movie and that's why I give it an 8/10.

Chris Knipp [s p o i l e r s] You have to admit there's much that's life affirming and technically accomplished in Gabriele Muccino's movies about superficial Italians coupling and uncoupling. His scenes never stop moving, and his camera has learned to keep up with the flow. Undoubtedly his most polished effort so far is L'ultimo bacio (The Last Kiss). A box office success in Italy and abroad (though not a critical one), The Last Kiss is a splendid operatic swirl of melodramatic ensemble acting and liquid editing. Its succession of slick, fast-talking, emotional roller coaster scenes is a beautiful thing to watch. It's got irresistible rhythm if you don't mind that the high energy leads to an awful lot of yelling. The episodic structure and musical links may owe something to P.T. Anderson's Magnolia; but this is Italy and it all works differently. It isn't about anomie and chance encounters: everyone's connected. The Last Kiss is a well-oiled machine with jaw-dropping energy. Its action is so lively, its motion so perpetual, you may fail to notice what a stagnant society The Last Kiss represents - how complacent the characters and their creator are. The way they buckle down and accept the mind-numbing `comforts' and intellectual limitations of Berlusconi's Italy. It's a place they all seem destined to accept as the best of all possible worlds.The Last Kiss revolves (almost literally: the steadicam pans from scene to scene while operatic music swims across the transitions) around five young men about to turn thirty in a provincial town. At the center is Carlo (Stefano Accorsi). His fiancée Giulia (Giovanna Mezzogiorno) is pregnant and he can't face the prospect of a wife, a child, and a house. He's not ready to grow up. Most of Carlo's buddies have the same problem. Paolo (Claudio Santamaria) goes through the death of his father right after he's had an angry breakup with his girlfriend, and he can't face going into the family religious object business. The mercurial Adriano (Giorgio Casotti) has a young child and a ball-buster wife (Livia, Sabrina Impacciatore) and these challenges have him fed up with his marriage and ready to leave it. Alberto (Marco Cocci), a dreadlocked, joint-smoking Greenpeace hippy, amuses himself seeing how many women will jump into bed with him; he's a sciupafemmine, a Don Juan who chews them up and spits them out: marriage is not on his horizon.But Marco (Pierfrancesco Favino) is getting married: he's buying into the normal life. Marco's four friends are all at Marco's wedding, and it's there that Carlo meets Francesca (Martina Stella), a tantalizingly delicious blonde schoolgirl who successfully puts the make on him. Meanwhile Giulia's mother Anna (a simpatica Stefania Sandrelli) is fed up with her taciturn psychiatrist husband Emilio (Luigi Emilio) and goes through her own period of rebellion, trying to revive an affair of three years ago with a college professor (Sergio Castellitto).Carlo gets his wild night with Francesca, his `last kiss' which turns into more than that after Giulia finds out and they have a big fight (where the movie's yell-fest reaches fortissimo). He runs back and sleeps with the 18-year old, and then spends the rest of the movie trying to patch things up and get his life back on its track. Meanwhile Adriano, Alberto, and Paolo are planning to run off to Africa, or somewhere-an escape that's really a last fling: but their whole series of tantrums and complaints are background noise, an obligato to the main themes. The focus is on Giulia's mother, Adriano, and Carlo. Where the movie is really headed for its finale is to Carlo and Giulia reuniting, and a soothing voiceover from Carlo about how nice it will be to have grass and a suburban house and kids. . .and all the rest, and the two of them are reconciled at her parents' house where Anna is back with her father. It seems that Adriano really has left his wife, for a while anyway, but that subject is dropped.Closely examined, despite its Magnolia-like intercutting of related subplots, its splendid cast and beautiful look, The Last Kiss reveals a worldview that's numbingly vapid. Its young men on the verge of thirty and one older woman in revolt against the ordinary paths they've chosen only play at escape: the final sequence is a corny affirmation of comfortable bourgeois family life, big house, big car, perfect bambini. Anna is back with Giulia's father. Her little revolt is over.What is the theme that unifies Muccino's movies? Is it coming of age, as in Come te nessuno mai, or is it playing at revolution, as in that same rather charming first film about high schoolers staging a Sixties-style strike while what the boys really want is only to get laid? If Come te is Muccino's freshest and most unassuming effort, Ricordati di me, his most recent one, is his cheesiest: again, a swirl of stories about individuals in a family who are all in revolt against their lives - and come back to conventionality at the end - but with much tackier subplots. He's made a trilogy: (1) first sex, (2) last infidelity before marriage, (3) first infidelity after, with being aTV go-go dancer treated as a viable life choice. The theme is simply: revolt a little, it'll make you feel better. `Normality is the true revolution.'Italians who remember the great directors of the past shake their heads at such stuff. The idea that all temptations to rebel end in a little reconciliation is complacent even for TV sitcoms. It's as if Muccino has all this promise as a filmmaker - he can orchestrate his subplots in such an entertaining way and the editing is inspired - he's a real Robert Altman with a Tuscan accent - but his head is too empty; there's no there there. Muccino's characters, for all their charm and good looks, are pretty silly people. Carlo, Last Kiss's main character, is attractive in his way but his shit-faced grin palls: he's an airhead to be tempted by Francesca, the blonde Lolita, because she's an airhead too, just a pretty schoolgirl who confuses wanting to get laid with finding the love of her life. There's no edge to the temptation, because Francesca's pull on Carlo was so superficial. It's lively and glossy and it has moments of flirting with satire and farce, the sheer energy of it can be lots of fun to watch, but when you get down to it, Last Kiss is on the level of a TV sitcom. In fact American cable network dramas arguably go deeper than this. Is Muccino the best that mainstream Italian cinema can now produce? Let's hope not.