|||
Originally posted 1/18/23 on Substack
Hey folks! It’s our first movie post of the new year, and our first since Smokey and the Bandit back in… September? Ugh. The goal for the new year is to have one new movie post per month, and one new tabletop rpg post per month as well, followed by a third wild card post if I’m feeling extra frisky. Today’s movie was requested by Ryan Godfrey, who blessed us with 11 Harrowhouse back in… June? Ugh. This is the proper time to announce that this will be the last Request Line post, at least for the foreseeable future. Two reasons for that. One, I’ll be changing this project’s mission statement in a small but significant way, a kind of course correction, and frankly there won’t be room for this kind of feature moving forward. Second… well, I just can’t really do it anyway. When I started the feature, I genuinely thought I could write a movie post per week. Clearly, that schedule is too strenuous for me (hence the revised schedule of only one movie post a month). This means the terms of the Patreon will be changing. My sincerest apologies to everyone for not being able to meet my own terms. I’m disappointed in myself, but I think it’s best for me going forward. If there’s some vagueness here, and there is, I again apologize, but it should all make sense come February. So please stay tuned for that. I think it’s going to be pretty exciting!
You heard me! Exciting!
Inevitably, there are spoilers here, but a) the most surprising thing is contained within the premise and b) it’s a romantic comedy, you can see where it’s going, even if the route this one takes is a little more scenic than usual. Nevertheless, read with care. Thanks!
What is it? Avanti!, directed by Billy Wilder, written by Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond, based on the play by Samuel A. Taylor, and starring Jack Lemmon, Juliet Mills, Edward Andrews, Gianfranco Barra, Giselda Castrini, Franco Angrisano, and Clive Revill as Carlo Carlucci.
First viewing? Technically yes, although I did end up watching it twice for this post, the first time on 27 Sept 2022 and the second time on 4 Jan 2023. Yes, I’ve been pondering this movie for nearly four months.
What’s it about? Wendell Armbruster Jr. (Lemmon) arrives at the Italian island of Ischia to retrieve the body of his father, killed in an auto accident. Things get complicated when he meets Pamela Piggot (Mills), and learns that his father and her mother — also killed in the accident — were having a decade-long affair.
What are your thoughts about it? Avanti! is a romantic comedy, and like any genre, it has its tropes. You know two very different people are going to meet under unusual circumstances, and they’ll fall in love. They’ll run into some problems, sure, and probably a misunderstanding that threatens to tear them apart. But by the end, all obstacles in the path will be cleared and true love will win out.
Adam and Eve.
Avanti!’s no different, really. Wendell Armbruster Jr. is the American vice president of Armbruster Industries, a superconglomerate with its fingers in so many pies, they have the ear of both the State Department and the Pope1. Pamela Piggot is the English daughter of a manicurist. They meet because each has lost a parent (his father, her mother), and because those parents were having an affair with each other. They fall in love, but not before Wendell deals with a blackmailing concierge and not before he discovers that Pamela did not, in fact, abscond with their parents’ corpses2. Once that’s out of the way, all they have to do is bury their parents without their relationship being discovered by U.S. government mucky-muck Jo Jo Blodgett (Andrews).
But this is Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond writing, so there’s some hard edges, even to this romance. Sure, we’re used to there being difficulties in a romantic comedy relationship, but how many start with the guy calling the woman “fat ass”? There are obstacles, then there are obstacles3. Hilariously, counterintuitively, this comes right after a long sequence where the two go to claim the bodies and, before they even know each other, are metaphorically wedded, complete with “I do”s. They’re bonded, and they don’t even like each other yet.
Speak now or forever hold your peace.
Even the non-hard-edged things have unexpected sharpness. Wendell Jr. and Pamela get a friend and guide in Carlo Carlucci (Revill), the world’s most helpful hotel manager. Carlucci does everything in his power to help them at every step, and he genuinely has their best interests at heart. But there’s something odd underneath this. His help doesn’t come out of nowhere — he was devoted to their parents, and his affection and care is passed down to them, like an inheritance. This results in a kind of doubling, or superimposition. Wendell Jr. and Pamela navigate their emotions in the moment, but, ultimately, their story is just a recapitulation of their parents’ experience, history repeating again as farce. Avanti! is a sweet story of two people finding unexpected love in a beautiful place, but its sweetness is tempered by the fact that the story only nominally belongs to its main characters. Everything they do is in the suffocating shadow of their parents.
Juliet Mills is also in the amazing, weirdo EXORCIST rip-off BEYOND THE DOOR, which you should watch.
And this is Wilder, a director known for his cynicism, delivering his masterstroke. On the surface, we have a fairly standard story of a guy who learns to loosen up and finds love because of it. It would be easy to assume this is because Wendell Jr. has been caught up in the sexual revolution of the ’60s, the age of throwing off the oppressive shackles of tradition. That’s why this movie exists, right? That’s why all the nudity, correct? But: who actually blazed this trail for him? His father, a 70 year old CEO of a multinational corporation. Not the hippies, but the previous generation, the one getting the cultural backlash.
We can presume that Wendell Sr. was the prototypical button-down grey flannel suit, the personification of capitalism and industry. We can also presume that his love affair with Kate was genuine, that it opened up something special and beautiful within him that he shared with her. But we can also presume that this love didn’t prompt any other changes in his life whatsoever. He clearly raised his son to be just like him, yet didn’t tell him a thing about the (presumably) most important thing to ever happen in his life. It wouldn’t have been proper.
Wendell Sr. didn’t cheat on his wife because he was railing agains the oppressive strictures of society; he did it because he could. Why wouldn’t he feel entitled to? Their “same time next year” affair may have been fulfilling, but it was also a release valve from the pressures of his normal life. For Wilder, true love isn’t necessarily transformation; sometimes, it’s just another way to prop up the status quo.
How many stars out of five? Four zinc-lined coffins out of five.
Where can I stream it? As of this writing4, you can stream Avanti from Tubi, Hooplaand Kanopy. You can also rent or buy it from Apple, Amazon, and Vudu - Fandango.
What can we take from it? Is there anything any of us couldn’t do with a Carlo Carlucci in our corner? This guy is just the tops. He’s always on Wendell Jr. and Pamela’s side. He’s always hustling to do the things they need done, and he’s there to run interference when necessary. He’s often the bearer of bad news, yes, but he’s also the first to offer a possible solution. Imagine if your dungeon delver had a Carlo Carlucci working for them on the outside, gathering supplies, having horses and wagons and medical spellcasting ready for you when you emerged from the depths with your newfound riches. Imagine if your rollicking space trader had a Carlo Carlucci, haggling over prices for your Neptunian ore, making headway in your negotiations with the Kramlucc Emperor, or just being there with an extra oxygen tank when you need it. Imagine your netrunning cyberhacker had a virtual Carlo Carlucci, disrupting code in the mainframe to distract the black ice, relaying an alarm to your strike team that the cops are on the way, or derezzing itself to give you that last bit of RAM to break through the firewall. Imagine if your mutant of the apocalyptic wasteland had a Carlo Carlucci. No, go ahead and imagine it, because I’m not even sure what that would look like. But if you want to do it, now you can.
Carlo Carlucci is, in Cypher System terms, an artifact. He’s not a character, he’s a tool, and a powerful one.
CARLO CARLUCCI (ARTIFACT)
Level: 1d10
Form: The Carlo Carlucci artifact can come in nearly any form, human or otherwise, and need not be named Carlo Carlucci; however, the GM or the player (whichever makes most sense in context) must specify whether this particular Carlo Carlucci is a real, physical being or a virtual one, existing as a hologram or a piece of software or even a ghost. This can have an effect on the exact capabilities of the Carlo Carlucci.
Effect: The Carlo Carlucci artifact is used by simply giving the Carlo Carlucci a task to complete. The basic rule is this: the Carlo Carlucci will always successfully complete the task.
Of course, there are limitations. The first limitation is that the task must be accomplished “off screen;” that is, it cannot happen in the encounter space where the player characters are located. If the player characters could conceivably see or hear the Carlo Carlucci, the artifact cannot accomplish its task. The second limitation is that it cannot engage in combat or otherwise harm a being or animal. It can do minor harm to an object; for example, it cannot blow up a spaceship, but it could dismantle an important piece of equipment that could lead to the destruction of the spaceship.
When a player character gives it a task and it moves “off screen,” determine how long the task should take (one minute, one hour, one day, one week, etc.). Once that amount of time has passed within the game world, the Carlo Carlucci returns to update the player characters on the situation. Give the Carlo Carlucci’s task a difficulty and have the player roll. On a success, the artifact reports that the task was completed as instructed. On a failure, the task is completed, but the Carlo Carlucci reports that there is a complication that prevents the desired results from coming to fruition. A failed roll does not result in depletion (see below). If desired, the artifact can be commanded to deal with the new complication. Repeat the same process (determine the amount of time the new task will take, the artifact returns after that amount of time, the player rolls against the task difficulty), only reduce the difficulty by one. The task will either be completed successfully, or the the process can repeat again, per the player’s instructions. In other words, a Carlo Carlucci can accomplish a task of difficulty 10, but it would take five attempts, at difficulty 6, before it had a chance of being successful. These five attempts would not result in depletion; the intended penalty is that of time, not resources. (Yes, time is a resource, you know what I mean.)
The Carlo Carlucci can be commanded to keep working at the task, or can be called off the task. If called off, this does result in depletion. If given the same task at a later date, this counts as a new task.
Depletion: Special — every time Carlo Carlucci completes a task (not including complications), its level drops by one. When its level is reduced to zero, the Carlo Carlucci is depleted and cannot be used anymore. There should be a sensible in-game reason for this result; the Carlo Carlucci leaves the players for greener pastures, sacrifices itself for one last effect, etc.
Optional Rule: At any time, a player can spend all of the Carlo Carlucci’s remaining levels to automatically succeed at its current task, regardless of difficulty level. This completely depletes the artifact and renders it forever unusable.
Wendell Jr. also notes that all the workers will get to watch Wendell Sr.’s funeral through closed-circuit television, which sounds dystopic as hell. ↩︎
Just want to head this off at the pass: the “big misunderstanding” scene in a romantic comedy usually happens at the end of the second act or sometime in the third. By that definition, this is not the big misunderstanding. The actual misunderstanding is dramatically small and quickly resolved. It’s an important moment overall, but not worth getting into here. ↩︎
Pamela’s weight issue is odd for a number of reasons, but probably narratively necessary; without it, she becomes a (the first?) manic pixie dream girl.↩︎
1/18/23↩︎
