Love Is All There Is (1996)

the audience applauded

Good story, Not enough for a whole film

Bad Acting and worse Bad Screenplay

While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

I love the cast of this film which reads like a great party. Real-life couple Renee Taylor and Joseph Bologna adapts Romeo and Juliet to contemporary Italian families living on City Island in the Bronx. They filmed this film mostly on location. It's worth noting that Angelina Jolie makes her debut as well. Taylor plays a psychic while Bologna plays the Rosario's father who runs a wedding hall on the island. His wife is played by the wonderful Lainie Kazan who seeks spiritual assistance with Mona played by Taylor. Joy Behar also has a small role in this film as one of the Italian wives and mothers. The movie is set around July 4 where the local play is Romeo and Juliet. A mishap causes the original Juliet to lose the role. Then comes Jolie's Regina into the role. Regina and Rosario fall in love as quickly as Romeo and Juliet but it doesn't end badly. Paul Sorvino and Barbara Carrera play Regina's parents who also own a wedding hall.

The movie itself made me want to go and call someone so they could enjoy it too. It was extremely funny. Angelena Jolie was wonderful as Juliet. The parents are hilarious.They are caterers as well as enemies.The kids play the parts of Romeo and Juliet in the church play.They fall in love and their parents try to keep them apart.(Spoiler Ahead. I think) They sneak off after a party and do it. Surprisingly they still want to get married in the end of the movie. If you don't like stereotypes and the defilement of classic literature don't watch. If you don't mind those you will have a blast watching this one.

Love Is All There is a funny movie. It's basically an adaptation of Romeo and Juliet, Italian-American style. Two teenagers fall in love, much to the disgust of their feuding parents who own competing catering companies. Lanie Kazan is Rosarios (aka Romeo's) mother who is always going to this nutty psychic-type lady who gives her some obscure clues that her dear son is going to fall in love with someone and forget all about his mother. It turns out that the girl is Gina (aka Juliet) played by Angelina Jolie. So the feuding parents go all out to stop the two from falling in love, and ridiculously enough, the 16 year-olds want to get married at the end. The movie is hilarious, though some of the other comments posted by other views would probably discourage people from viewing the movie. Sure, the entire love affair between the son and daughter is so stupid. But, I guess that's to be expected since they're just supposed to be dumb teenagers in love. In fact, the real gems of the movie are the parents, particularly Lanie Kazan's role, and the wacky psychich (Joe Bologna's real life wife) because they are just totally wacko people, so it turns out to be a totally wacky comedy. One that I sure enjoyed.I think it's worth a shot.

***SPOILERS*** ***SPOILERS*** This Italian-American farce is one of those intentionally "so bad it's good" sorts of movies. It's a decidedly B movie, but it's campy fun. She radiantly plays an angelicly pure but smoldering 16 year old princess, more than ready to pop the cork on her sexuality, previously successfully guarded by her parents. Phew!!! It's her youngest soft, romantic type role. "I'm crazy in love with you Rosario". "My parent's don't like any man for me. Especially they don't like you. Because you are sexy, and dangerous." "Be tender with me Rosario. I'm a virgin." In what other movie will you get to see Anglina lose her innocence??? (Well, maybe in Cyborg 2. There she's a kick boxing sex assassin robot though, so perhaps it doesn't count.) Of course "Love is All There Is" fully intends to be campy. It's a broad humor romp though 60's or 70's Italian working class bad taste, mixed with endearingly warm personalities and high sex drives. It's plot is a reprise of the Romeo and Juliette story, played with an in your face lack of subtlety. The unlikely 16 year old couple are the children of two rival NYC Bronx (City Island) catering families, brought together by their roles in a community play. It's staged by Gina's (Jolie) parents to attract the goodwill of the bedrock S. Italian working class (culturally, if not necessarily economically) community, which is crucial for their business success. They are titled Florentines, but economically reduced enough to be trying to make a big success in the same business and community where Rosario's (the Romeo) parents are better established, in a down scale sort of way. Rosario's parents' have decidedly working class S. Italian roots (like most of New York's, and America's, Italian community) and working class taste, although they have made good, if precariously, in the local wedding banquet business.Of course the stage kisses that really bring this couple together become vastly overheated by their ripe sexuality and first love passion. Jolie's father is horrified, and the onlooking S. Italian women from grandmothers to teenagers become overheated in sympathetic excitement. Their impetuous, reckless romance then proceeds at a galloping pace in their real lives, while the two families try to keep the two apart for their class different but essentially similar reasons.The humor is often too broad to feel just right, though it nearly always scores some sort of hit. You tend to wince through some of it. You also can't help but chuckle or laugh at other parts. There is no doubt that the direction in this movie was always to overact, to make characatures of all the parts, and that's just what the actors do. Paul Sorvino was at the time the big name here and is only so-so, but Barbara Carrera, who though stunning is usually a poor actress given limited eye candy sorts of parts, is actually very good here as a haughty aristocrat. (She's most famous as Fatima Blush in some Bond films.) Anglina Jolie is one of the few who doesn't overact -- though the others no doubt do so by design. She's absolutely radiant as a previously virginal but precociously sexually overflowing 16 year old. It's easy to suppose the whole farce was structured around her -- though at the time she was a little known fledgling actress.The conflict between Northern and Southern Italian culture, often symbolized by the cuisine of these feuding catering families, is a running joke -- sort of. Jolie is seen holed up in her room at one point, with a plate of elegant N.Italian butterfly pasta, with a thin white sauce, left untouched. (It looks right out of countless Manhattan northern Italian restaurants.) Meanwhile Rosario's parents are given to roccoco four food wedding cakes, to impress their mostly seriously overstuffed clients. Their house is filled with elaborately awful 'sculpted' plastic objects, and the like. In one hilarious scene, Rosario and his buddies make good on their scheme to snatch Gina from her parents by staging a chaotic diversion at their northern Italian style catering hall. They sabotage the pale pink pasta sauce warming in a huge sliver serving dish by -- horror of horrors -- pouring in a huge cooking pot's worth of dark red tomato sauce!! The guests start gaging at the results, of course.Well, it's all worth it for the still virtually teenage, way beyond luscious, Angelina.