“Little Italy,” a new rom com starring Hayden Christensen and Emma Roberts, is good hearted enough but feels like it arrived via a marinara sauce splattered time capsule from 1985.
Leo Campo (Christensen) and Nikki Angioli (Roberts) were inseparable while growing up in Toronto’s Little Italy. “To us Little Italy wasn’t just a few blocks, it was our whole world.” Their families were tight, working side by side at the Napoli Pizza Parlour until the Great Pizza War erupted, causing a split that saw the pizza place sliced down the middle, cleaved into two separate businesses. Years pass. “It’s Little Italy’s oldest food fight.” Nikki moves to England to study the culinary arts while Leo stays home, working with his father.
Five years later Nikki returns home to renew her English work visa and is drawn back into the world she thought she had left behind. My Nikki is coming home today,” says mother Dora (Alyssa Milano). “Now we have to find her a husband so she’ll stay.” Will there be amore? Will the moon hit her eye like a big pizza pie or will she return to her cooking career in London?
“Little Italy” is an “I’m not yelling I’m Italian” style rom com. Desperate to establish the flavour of Little Italy it parades stereotypes across the screen speaking in loud exaggerated Italian accents. It’s annoying but it is all played for laughs, tempered with the easy sentimentality of the most rote of rom coms.
Director Donald Petrie, whose “Mystic Pizza” made a superstar out of Roberts’s Aunt Julia, never finds the balance between the slapstick, romance and cliché. Sometimes it feels like sketch comedy, other times like every rom com you’ve ever seen. Either way, it never feels original or particularly likeable. Top it off with a been-there-done-that run to the airport climax that would likely get everyone involved, if this is anything like real life, arrested and you have a movie that is all about love that is anything but loveable.
Like an over-stuffed kachori “Dr. Cabbie” fills its story to over flowing with dance numbers, social commentary, slapstick humor, romance and even some political intrigue. There’s something for everyone, but the movie goes for heart-warming rather than heart-burn, so what happened to the spice?
Vinay Virmani stars as Deepak, a new immigrant from New Delhi, who arrives in Toronto with a degree in medicine and dreams of following in his MD father’s footsteps. Instead he is met with bureaucracy and frustration. The medical establishment in Canada doesn’t accept his hard-earned degree and he won’t be able to practice medicine in his new country.
A friend (“The Big Bang Theory’s” Kunal Nayyar) gets Deepak a job driving cab, and in one eventful night he meets Natalie, the girl of his dreams (Adrianne Palicki), and delivers her baby in the back of the hack. When a video of the birth goes viral he becomes a something of a sensation. Soon people are flagging his taxi, looking for medical treatment. With a thriving practice on wheels, he doles out medical advice and prescription drugs to customers from the back of his cab. When one of his patients over medicates a lawsuit ensues and Deepak must prove why he deserves to call himself a doctor.
“Dr. Cabbie” means well but maybe if it didn’t mean so well it would be a better movie. The relentlessly upbeat tone of the film doesn’t allow the story, which has an underpinning in a real and compelling immigrant experience, to breathe. The story is so cluttered with stock characters, slapstick and sweetness that the seriousness of Deepak’s plight—his inability to practice medicine—gets lost. In the cartoony world the movie creates the most realistic element is the depiction of Toronto’s chaotic traffic.
In Dr. Cabbie, Vinay Virmani stars as Deepak, a man from New Delhi, who arrives in Toronto with a degree in medicine and dreams of following in his MD father’s footsteps. Instead he is met with bureaucracy and frustration. The medical establishment in Canada doesn’t accept his hard-earned degree and decree that he won’t be able to practice medicine in his new country.
Virmani was inspired to write the story after taking a cab ride in Toronto.
“When you get into a cab, you form that Indian-to-Indian thing,” he says. “The driver is like, ‘Where are you from?’
‘No, where are you really from?’
“It always starts off like that. Then he told me his story. I was really moved by it because here’s a guy who was young and naïve when he came here, very passionate about being a doctor, and had that dream shattered.
“Then I heard about a Chinese dentist in Vancouver who was doing dental work for families who couldn’t afford dental. They called him the Bedroom Dentist. So all these things played in my head.”
In the film, a friend (Big Bang Theory’s Kunal Nayyar) gets Deepak a job driving a cab, and one eventful night he meets Natalie, the girl of his dreams (Adrianne Palicki), and delivers her baby in the back of the hack.
When a video of the birth goes viral he becomes a something of a sensation. Soon people are flagging his taxi, looking for medical treatment.
With a thriving practice on wheels, he doles out medical advice and prescription drugs to customers from the back of his cab.
“If somebody told me a cabbie delivered a baby in a cab I would want to see that,” he says.
“I would want to see how he did it. It’s not far fetched to believe a video like that would go viral.”
The movie is a broad comedy, but one with serious underpinnings.
“Right now we do have a doctor shortage in this country, we do have qualified PhDs not only driving cabs, but doing all sorts of work,” he says, “and I really hope the movie sheds light on that, but in a fun, comedic way.
“I hope we’ve given integrity to the issue.
“Through the fun and games and the loud characters and situations, we say a doctor is a doctor is a doctor — that the Hippocratic Oath does not change just because you cross a border.”
From top to bottom, left to right, Richard on carpet, Paul Gross, Rick Mercer and The Dirties director Matt Johnson. Richard’s other red carpet guests included Jian Ghomeshi, Sarah Gadon, Kim Cattrall, Don McKellar, Katie Bolan, Bruce McDonald, Jennifer Baichwal, Edward Burtynsky, Nicholas de Pencier, Noah co-directors Patrick Cederberg and Walter Woodman, the F-Word writer Elan Mastai and Dr. Cabbie star Vinay Virmani.
Two things occurred to me while I watched “Breakaway,” a new hockey comedy set against Toronto’s cultural mosaic. 1. Russell Peters does the worst drunk impression ever. 2. Only one letter separates the word “hokey” from “hockey.”
Vinay Virmani plays Rajveer Singh a first generation Canadian with a passion for hockey and a father (Anupam Kher) who wants him to join the family trucking business. Determined to follow his dream, he cobbles together a team, the Speedy Singhs, and takes on the reigning Hyundai Cup champs. Cultures clash on and off the ice as his traditional father pushes him toward devotion and truck driving and the predominantly white hockey league looks down on his team.
It’s amazing that a country which professes to love hockey makes such lame movies about the sport. Ripe with sports clichés—goals scored just as the buzzer rings, determined underdogs and a life flashing in front of a player’s eyes as they storm down the ice—bad puns—Mahatma Gretzky anyone?—and jokes so old they were moldy when Bob and Bing used them seventy years ago—“You just have to stay positive.” “Oh, I’m positive. Positive we’re going to embarrass ourselves!”—“Breakaway” isn’t so much a story but a place where sport movie truisms go to die. The movie has some heart, but feels like an echo of many other sports movies, most noticeably “Bend it Like Beckham.”
There is probably a good movie to be made about the colour wall of hockey, or the first generation Canadian experience of the game but “Breakaway” isn’t it.
