Jane Austen and Mark Twain both left their final novels unfinished. Orson Welles didn’t live to see the completion of his swansong . Bach and Beethoven and dozens of classical composers began works they never lived to see to fruition. Painters like Benjamin West and J.M.W. Turner left behind work they were only in the middle of. And ironically enough, Robert William Buss as well -a grand portrait of the figure and stories of Charles Dickens, who likewise penned a final mystery unsolved. Incomplete masterpieces are common among great artists -who die, get waylaid, or lose inspiration. And yet the value in these works is tremendous. The notion of actually finishing them a daunting one. Should someone else dare to make that attempt? Can they? That question is of tremendous importance in The Christophers , the latest movie from Steven Soderbergh, written by Ed Solomon; and one that does feel uniquely personal to both -even as it comes at a time where Soderbergh seems strangely detached fro...
It should be stated clear upfront, You, Me & Tuscany is one of those romantic-comedies made purely to showcase hot people falling in love against a gorgeous scenic backdrop. The last movie of that variety I saw, Anyone But You , interspersed it with a loose Shakespeare adaptation, but that itself played perfectly into the standard rom-com enemies-to-lovers trope. You, Me & Tuscany , directed by Kat Coiro, doesn’t have a classic literary element to it, but engages in the tried and true fantasy of the young woman travelling to an exotic locale where she is swept off her feet by a handsome stranger. There’s nothing wrong with that premise as a generic starting block, the bones to something more. But this is a movie that doesn’t really have much more despite its efforts to carve something of a unique situation into it. Halle Bailey stars as Anna, a cook turned house-sitter in New York who meets an Italian man called Matteo (Lorenzo de Moor) in a bar one night after losing...