Own the rights?
17 out of 19 people found the following comment useful :- Brilliant, hopelessly romantic, full of life!, 13 September 2005 Author: overfedcinemafan from United States
This is a terrific film and probably one of the sweetest, funniest comedies ever made. The fearsome foursome never miss an opportunity to make a total mess of established society, all in the name of a good time. Nothing is sacred and anyone can become an instant, impromptu victim or their pranks. The scene at the train station is by far my favourite, and just the thought of the old guys lining up to slap people straight in the face makes me want to laugh out loud. See this film wherever you can, it's heartwarming and hilarious.If only it were more accessible so that younger generations could enjoy this!
17 out of 19 people found the following comment useful :- absolute masterpiece, 3 August 2004 Author: roberto dandi from Rome, Italy
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.
13 out of 15 people found the following comment useful :- Absolute Perfection!, 22 August 2000 Author: Lilith-14 from New York, US
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!
11 out of 12 people found the following comment useful :- It's larger than life!, 20 November 2006 Author: mic-hell from Italy
Look. If you're not Italian, or at least you don't speak Italian and you see a translated version, probably you won't get it. I don't know how the various pranks like the "supercazzola" have been translated and how they sound like. Here they sound like pure genius. I know a lot of people, scattered through the nation, that just WORSHIP this film, probably thanks to the fact that this movie is quite an underdog, neither a mainstream film, nor an artistically praised "commedia all'italiana". But who cares about artistical merits. The characters and the situations are so lively like is rarely seen. The film is an humble tale about life, women, friendship and death, with five men using their wits to avoid the tragedies of their lives. It's a lesson about taking life with a light heart, even if things are terribly grim. I think that the final laugh means it's all about that.PS Excuse me for the bad English. I'm Italian and i'm supposed to do a lot of errors!
8 out of 13 people found the following comment useful :- excellent movie, 3 May 2005 Author: Joan Duarte from Barcelona, Catalonia
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
4 out of 6 people found the following comment useful :- A sample of "Commedia all'italiana", 14 January 2006 Author: Close_The_Door from Italy
"Amici miei" goes with other films to write the history of the Italian Comedy, or better to say, "la commedia all'italiana" (Comedy the Italian way), which reached its peak in the 1960-70's and turned out to be so different from the comedy genre I happen to know in other countries.Sour? Oh yes, absolutely sour. In "commedia all'italiana" films, you are typically made to heartily laugh through the film, although the situation may be grotesque and tragic, and usually made of razor sharp social satire. The characters are rather "types", masks embodying (social) vices. They can be embarrassing disagreeable people in which you usually recognise your neighbour. But they cannot be yourself, of course.Watching this film then, you may be surprised to be shown hypocrisy, compromises, inane wedding lives. These four family fathers enjoy going wild by making pranks to helpless people. They are selfish rogues who never take anything seriously and make a strange contrast with their children, 30-year-old very serious and reliable children. A situation "blinking" to the 1968 disorders and the social commitment of young people of the time, contrasting with the bourgeois way of life of elder people.Besides, I don't think it is TOTALLY extravagant to think that "Amici miei" is quoting Giovanni Boccaccio's "Decameron". In many of the short stories of this 13th century collection, we see that Florentine people had a taste for pranks since then...
4 out of 6 people found the following comment useful :- Review., 5 January 2002 Author: Gerald A. DeLuca (italiangerry@gmail.com) from United States
*** This comment may contain spoilers ***
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.
7 out of 13 people found the following comment useful :- Laughing is good for health but, be careful..., 25 May 1999 Author: Gustavo S. D. Bastos (daumas@earthlink.net)
One of the most hilarious films I've ever seen. From the beginning to the end. Unfortunately, it's not avaliable in video. The story is about five friends that often decide to meet and go out to make fun and jokes with unknown people and friends. From a train station where they hit the faces of passengers outside the windows of the trains, to going in a child's bathroom during a wedding party of people they know!!!
A Hidden Treasure, 3 January 2009 Author: warrel from Greece
Oh God,I am so lucky.I live in a small town in Greece and I have never heard of this film before.And it must be almost impossible to find it in DVD.I accidentally read about this film on the TV program.It was the movie of the day and it is rated with the highest grade.So,I decided to stay awake(because the film started around midnight-like many other great films in Greek TV!)and watch that really great film.It was one of the best decisions I have made recently.The film is about a company of middle-aged men.But they aren't typical 50-year-old men.These men don't care about right behavior,about what others say,about what the rules of society say.They decide to enjoy their lives,so they start making jokes to people and have real fun.They are like children that don't want to get older.First of all,it's one of the best comedies I have ever seen.The scene with Toniatsi and the others slapping the passengers of the train,who have their heads out of the window is one of the funniest scenes ever made.But the greatest part of the movie is,in my opinion,when they pretend the gangsters to make fun of an old man.But,apart from the funny scenes,this films has some things to teach us.It shows,first of all,what real friendship is.Secondly,it teaches us to enjoy our lives.These men have also problems in their lives,like other people.But they decided not to worry so much about them,and as result,they really LIVE THEIR LIVES.And I was really jealous of them,because that's the most important thing,but we often forget that.To sum up,this film is hilarious,moving,sentimental,with really lovable characters and it has some important things to teach.What else do you want from a film?
Amusing Italian comedy, 16 April 2008 Author: The_Void from Beverley Hills, England
My experience of Italian comedy before seeing this film extended only to the sex comedies featuring such beauties as Edwige Fenech and Barbara Bouchet, and although I enjoyed the humour in most of the ones I've seen; I have to admit that generally I enjoyed the films more because of the stars. My Friends is a straight Italian comedy and thus the reliance is on the jokes and situations more than sexy lead stars to sell it; and while I cant say that the film is laugh out loud funny (at least not to my tastes), this is a very good film and certainly one that will appeal to fans of Italian humour. The plot is fairly simple and, as the title suggests, basically just focuses on a group of four friends. They're all middle aged and have good professions (with one exception). They wander around town and get their kicks by pulling pranks and generally annoying people. The film features a number of plot threads; the first of which sees the gang land themselves in hospital and one of them ends up meeting the beautiful wife of the top surgeon.My Friends is something of a film of two halves and I have to say that I enjoyed the first half more. The tone is always light and breezy although the film does get a bit more ambitious and involving in the second half and that doesn't suit it as well. There doesn't really seem to be a defining point to it; the only one I could see really was the idea of the central characters being older men and still enjoying life. The lead characters are depicted as almost being like children and that's one of the film's biggest running jokes and seeing grown men mess around like the characters in this film has a sort of surreal humour of it's own. The film focuses more on situation than any actual gags and we do get some interesting and well worked scenes that are very funny; seeing a load of middle aged men slapping passengers on a train for example is fun to watch. I would imagine that most of this film's fans are native Italians and I can't see a film like this ever being a big hit outside of it's native country - but for fans of Italian movies, this comedy is a winner.
Add another comment
