'Everybody Wants to be Italian' shamelessly apes ethnic romances

PHOTOGRAPHER: Dan DiNicola

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Somebody saw “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” and “Moonstruck,” and decided to manufacture a clone set in Boston.

That someone, or should we say the latest someone, is writer-director Jason Todd Ipson. His pasta entree, served mushier than al dente, is “Everybody Wants to be Italian.”

’Everybody Wants to be Italian’

WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY Jason Todd Ipson

STARRING Jay Jablonski, Cerina Vincent, John Kapelos, John Enos, Richard Libertini, Marisa Petroro, Dan Cortese and Penny Marshall

RATED PG-13

RUNNING TIME: 104 minutes

It’s a love story between two characters, neither of whom is Italian. It’s set in Boston’s very Italian North End in the shadow of Old North Church where Paul Revere never departed for a pasta run.

The guy is Jay (Jake Jablonski); he is 27, and the woman he reluctantly begins to court, at his friends’ insistence, is Marisa, six years his senior (Cerina Vincent). She is a veterinarian, he is a “fishmonger” earning more than some veterinarians.

“This chick is the real deal,” his Italian-American chums in the fish shop tell him, imploring Jake to abandon his torch for Isabella (Marisa Petroro), a woman who rejected Jake after he cheated with her sister almost a decade before.

“I’m a guy. It’s not my fault,” says Jake, who once a year buys flowers and $3,500 suits to court his lost honey with three kids, right under the eyes of her husband. Of course, you have to believe that a prominent professional, one of the most accomplished in Boston, would take up with a guy who, as she says, is just “a little boy.” A fellow, who in a profane outburst intended for comic effect, brags about the orgasm he provided as a sign of his worth.

Silly effort

It’s silly, flimsy stuff in a movie that serves up much of the same, trying shamelessly to catch the “Moonstruck”-“Greek Wedding” vibe. Along the way, we meet the stock characters of aforementioned friends and a patriarch (Richard Libertini), who doles out advice about love, namely the ways in which the Italian man knows how to take care of women, for it is the Italian man who understands their needs. After each date, Jake returns to get more advice from his friends about love.

It’s a way of keeping the film properly Italian, adhering to the axiom that there must be truth in titling. But this ploy and just about everything else about the ethnic conceit is transparently opportunistic and clichéd.

Harmless and pleasant, “Everyone Wants to Be Italian” may begin to capture the ambience of the Boston Neighborhood, but it is about as convincingly ethnic as a slice of deli pizza.