Page 139 of Marcello

She shook her head. “Nope.”

“Why not?”

“He’s extremely overprotective.”

“Why don’t you just move out, then?”

She sighed. “It’s complicated.”

“How complicated can it be?”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” she said tersely.

“Okay… well, what do you do all day?” I asked.

“I watch a lot of Netflix.”

Oh shit.

Then she surprised me again.

“I’m going through the works of major film directors,” she said. “Last month, I watched all of Federico Fellini’s movies. This month, I’m watching Akira Kurosawa. You know the Sergio Leone movie A Fistful of Dollars? His first one with Clint Eastwood?”

I raised one eyebrow. I’d been expecting to hear about The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, not Akira Kurosawa and Sergio Leone. “I’ve heard about it, but I’ve never seen it.”

“Well, Kurosawa did a whole bunch of samurai movies that were inspired by old Hollywood westerns,” she said. “The Seven Samurai, Throne of Blood – but he did one called Yojimbo about a samurai who walks into a small town run by two rival families. They both try to hire him to take out the other side, and he plays them against each other and beats them all. Well, Sergio Leone totally ripped off the plot for A Fistful of Dollars. After it became a gigantic international hit, Kurosawa wrote him a letter that said, ‘I really enjoyed your film A Fistful of Dollars. I enjoyed it a lot more when it was called Yojimbo.’ Then he sued Leone’s ass and won. It’s funny – Kurosawa made more money from that lawsuit than he did off of any movie he ever directed.”

“Whoa,” I said, genuinely impressed and amused.

“Yeah. Although, I have to say, while Yojimbo’s a great film and all, I still prefer A Fistful of Dollars. Do you know why they call them ‘spaghetti westerns’?”

“No.”

“It’s because a bunch of Italian directors started shooting westerns in the 1960s. Sergio Leone was one of them, though he shot almost all of his films in Spain because it was so sunny and looked a lot more like the American West. If I could travel, I’d go to Spain and see where all of his movies were shot – and then I’d go to Japan and see where Kurosawa shot all of his.”

She went on for another ten minutes about various directors.

Some of them, I’d seen a film or two they’d directed – like Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, and Martin Scorsese.

Of course I knew who Francis Ford Coppola was. Every Italian did, as did every gangster alive.

Other directors, though, I had no idea who they were. Orson Welles, Ingmar Bergman, Fritz Lang, Andrei Tarkovsky, Jean-Luc Godard.

But Giulietta threw their names around like she was talking about fashion designers.

“Who do you like?” she finally asked.

“Uh… Steven Spielberg, I guess?” I said hesitantly. “And, uh… George Lucas…?”

I expected her to make fun of me, but she did the exact opposite.

“Oh – Star Wars was totally inspired by Hidden Fortress by Kurosawa!” she chirped. “Two bickering characters help a general rescue a princess from a giant castle – just like C-3PO and R2-D2 help Obi-Wan Kenobi rescue Princess Leia from the Death Star!”

And then she started raving about how Spielberg was one of the greatest directors ever at blocking his scenes, and how he used camera moves like old Hollywood masters.

I was completely and utterly charmed.

I’d spent the entire day arguing with a psychopathic moron about the best way to kill Cosa Nostra bodyguards…