Just a few weeks after calling out Barbra Streisand, Italy is all over another American celebrity, this time slamming director Quentin Tarantino for saying their current film output is "depressing." Tarantino is due to host a series of spaghetti westerns at this year's Venice Film Festival, though that may be in jeopardy now that newspapers have picked up on the comments he made in the country's leading TV magazine, Sorrisi & Canzioni, where he said:
"Recent films I've seen are all the same. They talk about boys growing up, or girls growing up, or couples having a crisis, or vacations of the mentally impaired."
Many of the Italian film industry's biggest players have fired back, including Sophia Loren ("How dare he talk about Italian cinema when he doesn't know anything about American cinema?") and director Marco Bellochio ("Tarantino is a brute"), and the left-wing daily L'Unita even went so far as to call him "mentally impaired."
Uh, snap Parmesan?