at the Varsity.
Made by Italy's most celebrated and influential director, I Vitelloni is about four men in a small town who spend their days burning to nothing the abundance of free time they have on their hands. None in the group is under 20 or far over 31, and only one, the group's eldest and its spiritual leader, Fausto (Franco Fabrizi), has a job during the course of the film (he sells angels and other Christian fetishes/ornaments for an overstocked shop). The only reason he has taken this horribly boring job is that he impregnated the sister (Leonora Ruffo) of the youngest member of the group, the film's narrator, Moraldo (Franco Interlenghi). Fausto, however, is not ready for fatherhood, nor is he much of a husband; he has a serious thing for older women, whose very presence (their sad eyes, preserved youth, mastered elegance) reduces him to nothing but animal instincts. The group also has a resident intellectual, Leopoldo (Leopoldo Trieste), who wears black-rimmed glasses and wastes the time he should be using to improve his playwriting and literary knowledge seducing a simpleminded house girl, who lives next door, has a round face, and thinks he is a great writer. Another friend, Alberto (Alberto Sordi), is something of a mama's boy, a big baby who is scandalized by his elder sister's open romance with a married man. The group does nothing but roam around the town, drinking wine, attending beauty pageants, walking by the sea, and playing pool in bars.

As one would expect, there isn't much of a story in all of this loafing and languishing--but there is a great deal of cinematic poetry. As a whole, the picture is not important; just the moments within (carrying a stolen angel from church to church, dressing up for the carnival, the departure and arrival of trains) matter. CHARLES MUDEDE

Hey Is Dee Dee Home

dir. Lech Kowalski

Plays Fri-Sun Feb 13-15 at the Little Theatre.
Hey Is Dee Dee Home may be billed as a movie about the life of the Ramones bassist, but the reality is it's a mostly joyless look at his addiction to dope. For a full hour, the bald, skinny, fiftysomething punk legend recounts story after story about getting fucked up--from the time he sold Joey Ramone's TV for dope, to the time Debbie Harry got sick of his shit and threw him out of her apartment, to the times he got knifed or threw an OD'ing girlfriend in the bathtub.

These aren't the "ha ha, wasn't that killer" Mötley Crüe boasts of being a wasted rock 'n' roller. Dee Dee's stories are delivered in a sobering monologue, against a black background, with only a couple detours into other aspects of his life during the height of the Ramones era. But even those tangents circle back to dope at some point, such as when Dee Dee explains how he got his first tattoo after a fight with his mother and his desire to go score. Again and again this frail, sad soul recounts his youth with a soft, childlike delivery that starts to weigh on you, especially because he comes off so lost at the end of his life. And even when Dee Dee is smiling, it never seems like his past was very happy because his delivery is tinged with more regret than fondness. His stories are of dope desperation and all his friends--Jerry Nolan, Johnny Thunders, and Stiv Bators, among others--aren't the heroes they're painted to be when the focus is on the music of the '70s New York punk scene. The way Dee Dee tells it, all these legendary band members could've been your average street-corner junkies and the results would have pretty much been the same--a lot of wasted moments, pointless fights, close calls, and dead friends, which is especially depressing since Dee Dee himself died of a heroin overdose in 2002. JENNIFER MAERZ