{"id":1045,"date":"2016-09-05T09:04:51","date_gmt":"2016-09-05T09:04:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/lifeatthemovies\/?p=1045"},"modified":"2017-01-23T07:23:17","modified_gmt":"2017-01-23T07:23:17","slug":"celebrating-august","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/lifeatthemovies\/2016\/09\/celebrating-august.html","title":{"rendered":"Celebrating August"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A mid-August lunch sounds appetizing. To whet your appetite, a movie with the title Mid-August Lunch sounds salubrious. Must see it.<\/p>\n<p>Having seen Italy&#8217;s\u00a0<em>Mid-August Lunch<\/em> (2008), it is about celebrating food and life. What would you expect from Italiano?<\/p>\n<p><em>Mid-August Lunch<\/em> is the first of three Italian comedies headlined by\u00a0Gianni Di Gregorio. The 60-plus-something writer also starred and directed in all three films.<\/p>\n<p>He plays Gianni, who lives with his elderly mother in Rome.<\/p>\n<h4>Not judgmental<\/h4>\n<p>The style of the film is to approach life naturally, and the conversations are a slice of life, between mother and son.<\/p>\n<p>There is no judgment of Gianni and his life. In Italy, a son living with his mother is quite normal.<\/p>\n<p>From where I live, I&#8217;ve heard radio disk jockeys make fun of children in their older age living at home, as if unnatural.<\/p>\n<p>In this so-called unnatural state, there is no criticism of it, in <em>Mid-August Lunch<\/em>. Gianni helps his mother as if it is quite an ordinary part of life at his age.<\/p>\n<p>He seems to quite enjoy it.<\/p>\n<h4>Accommodating<\/h4>\n<p>The lifestyle in Italy seems to allow for it. Gianni and his mother won&#8217;t be kicked out of their condo for not paying their bills, so they can keep on going at leisure. The condo manager will erase some of the debt if a couple of older ladies can come and stay for a month.<\/p>\n<p>Slicing off debt is as easy as that and mother and son can stay in the condo. So Gianni is off to work, cooking for their guests, preparing their visitor&#8217;s medicines, and making their beds, while paying off their debts, by &#8216;mucking&#8217; in for the older folk.<\/p>\n<p>Wonderful.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<p>Subtitled in English. Spoken in Italian.<\/p>\n<p>Lead actor, writer and director: Gianni Di Gregorio<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A mid-August lunch sounds appetizing. To whet your appetite, a movie with the title Mid-August Lunch sounds salubrious. Must see it. Having seen Italy&#8217;s\u00a0Mid-August Lunch (2008), it is about celebrating food and life. What would you expect from Italiano? Mid-August Lunch is the first of three Italian comedies headlined by\u00a0Gianni Di Gregorio. The 60-plus-something writer&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":602,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[326,21,221],"tags":[22,8,10,9,54,41,240,241,16,243,242,7,39,244],"class_list":["post-1045","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-celebration","category-comedies","category-inspirational","tag-comedy","tag-film","tag-film-commentaries","tag-film-reviews","tag-freedom","tag-friendship","tag-italian-films","tag-italy","tag-life","tag-mother","tag-mothers-and-sons","tag-movies","tag-relationships","tag-son"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v23.9 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Celebrating August - Life at the Movies<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Mid-August Lunch (2008) is the first of three Italian comedies headlined by Gianni Di Gregorio. He plays Gianni, who lives with his elderly mother in Rome.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/lifeatthemovies\/2016\/09\/celebrating-august.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Celebrating August - Life at the Movies\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Mid-August Lunch (2008) is the first of three Italian comedies headlined by Gianni Di Gregorio. 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A 3 star rating out of 5 stars is above average from me.","sameAs":["http:\/\/www.peteswriting.wordpress.com","https:\/\/x.com\/peteswriting"],"url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/lifeatthemovies\/author\/pveugelaers"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/lifeatthemovies\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1045","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/lifeatthemovies\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/lifeatthemovies\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/lifeatthemovies\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/602"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/lifeatthemovies\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1045"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/lifeatthemovies\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1045\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1566,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/lifeatthemovies\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1045\/revisions\/1566"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/lifeatthemovies\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1045"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/lifeatthemovies\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1045"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/lifeatthemovies\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1045"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}