"You, Me & Tuscany" Flat Out Embarrassing

    This movie, is so, so bad. It's shameful really. I kid you not when I say this is a very, very sad attempt at a rom-com. It's not complete garbage, there are bits and pieces here and there that make you perk your eyebrow up and go "huh?" But by and large, this movie is just so, so, so, painfully bad. I don't even want to spend that much disparaging it, because while yes there's a lot to go through, you do eventually have to ask yourself, is it worth the time? My sister asked me to watch this film, and honestly I think we both regret it deeply. I mean I already had an inkling it was going to be bad. We had actually seen the trailer for this film in theaters, and I swear they had to spend half of the trailer explaining the bizarre premise of this film. Let's talk about it.

    One of the main issues with this film is it's simultaneously too short, and also too long at the same time. Too short in the sense that this film is only 1 hour and 45 minutes, and leaves much on the table (thankfully?). Like there are so many hanging plot point and threads that are seemingly left on the cutting room floor for this film to magically reach both it's climax and ending in less than 10 minutes with somehow everyone being happy. Whether it be well whatever happens with this Isabel character, the dynamics between the brothers of Michael and Matteo, their family, why Matteo seemingly refuses to be with the family despite being his own successful person, and well the whole cooking thing. 

    At the same time this film is somehow too long. THEY TAKE 30 MINUTES FOR THE FILM TO ACTUALLY SET UP THIS STUPID PREMISE, LET ALONE FOR THE TWO LEADS TO ACTUALLY MEET AND START DOING ROMANCE. It just hinges too much on this stupid plot point, when it really needs to focus on other things. Did we really need Halle Bailey have this whole origin story where she's house-sitting then this stupid convoluted side-plot where she finds a man who shows her a nice house in Italy, she decides to break into there, and then pose as his fiancée? I understand that this entire film is basically just meant to be an excuse to Halle Bailey to go galivanting in Italy (fully funded by sponsors might I add) but it's not that hard to make it like 30% less stupid.

    Listen to this. Halle Bailey has no real motivation in life and is house sitting because she doesn't want to cook since her mother died. At the advice of her friend after a particularly bad job she finally uses the ticket to Italy her mother bought years ago to go work for an old employer of hers to try and rekindle her love of cooking in Italy. While there she watches the eyes of two brothers, one who clearly just wants her because it'll help him get closer to his family, and the other is the adopted brother. Boom, it's not that hard. Same setting, no dumb fake fiancée plot, and then the film can actually focus on what could have been semi-interesting in this film. Which is the cooking and the family dynamics. Instead we get this mess where Matteo is painted to be a bad person like two-thirds into the movie despite being fine enough in the beginning and just kind of conflicted by the end, and I feel very little sympathy for Halle Bailey's character at any point of this film.

    By the way, don't even get me started on this film and how it's actually shot. If you want a movie to study just how far the art of filming has come watch this film. I kid you not almost every single scene in this movie is shot like an advertisement. If you took the clips of Halle Bailey looking for a phone charger at the villa it'd unironically look like an ad for the Google Pixel or like some Google home assistant. Don't get me even started on the egregious, shameless ads by the way. In one of the scenes some poor set designer had to draw the real Aperol Spritz logo in chalk on a sign which the camera zooms in on at multiple moments of the scene, and one of the characters directly tells another that "you need to calm down, have an Aperol Spritz." Oh and did I forget to mention the final one where they tell her to take the super nice car, it zooms in on the Maserati logo on the keyfob, and the rest of the film is shot exactly like a car advertisement? It's so shameless it's insulting.

Final Score: 25/100

    I won't even go into the rom com part, because Rege-Jean Page is hot, and frankly he deserves better. Him and this amusing side character named Lorenzo were by far my favourite parts of the film. It's just a real shame that he unironically gets like only three or four scenes with Halle Bailey, despite it being a rom com. There's the first one in which they're unaware of each other and what's about to happen to them circumstance-wise. The second one in which they pretend to be a couple, drink wine, then hang out in the vineyard and get wet. Then no more. They don't have a real scene together until they talk about being orphans, and when they finally make up. This is what I'm talking about when I say it's too long and too short, there's not enough romance. How are you going to make a rom-com in which the couple feels almost secondary, and frankly they do like the bare minimum amount of scenes together. It's embarrassing. Which I suppose applies to the entire movie.