There was a time when you won the heart of your loved one by making them a mixtape of your favorite songs and giving it to them serenade-style. In the Forcella district of Naples in the 1970s, a boy named Enrico Frattasio harbored ambitions of becoming a DJ while working as a cleaner at a record store. He began making mix tapes for his friends in the back, which soon became much in demand. He then had the brilliant but misguided idea of producing album copies on a much larger scale. Together with his brothers Peppe and Angelo, he established a financial empire...of a seriously illegal kind.
Mixed by Erry's premise is similar to that of I Can Quit Whenever I Want and shared by countless Anglo-Saxon and international films: the bad boys are so cute (or charming or sexy) that viewers can easily forgive their crimes. In fact, the director explicitly asks us to identify with the villain and his rise and fall. “I just wanted to be a DJ”, Enrico Frattasio allegedly responded to the question of the president of the Supreme Court: “Do you plead guilty or not guilty?”. This is not a spoiler, it is a fact.
Director: Sydney Sibilia
Writers: Sydney Sibilia, Simona Frasca, Armando Festa
Stars: Luigi D'Oriano, Giuseppe Arena, Emanuele Palumbo
The “pirates” in question, who had nonchalantly broken all the rules about wording, royalties and under-invoicing, racking up billions of lira, ended up being sentenced to a few years in prison. According to a Nielsen report from the time shown in the film, “Mixed by Erry” became Italy's third-biggest record label, a shell label that rubbed shoulders with giants like RCA and Sony. And before it closed, before it moved into newborn CD counterfeiting, it had sold 180 million cassettes nationwide.
Played with spontaneity and verve by Luigi D'Oriano, rapper Emanuele Palumbo and Giuseppe Arena, the three brothers make their way, sometime in a yellow Lamborghini with gull-wing doors, through a jungle-style Naples. , where the Camorra families make war with each other. another wielding machine guns. Our gullible criminals fly under the radar, until their business becomes so obvious that it attracts the attention of gang bosses and the Financial Police. Taking advantage of the vast network harnessed by cigarette smugglers, which has just been dismantled by Captain Ricciardi, they draw the eye of the hardened policeman played by Francesco di Leva, who clearly had fun in this role.
“I just wanted to be a DJ” is the key to understanding the moral philosophy of the hero, who believed that “you can't stop the music”. If, for example, you were to buy a bootleg cassette of Spandau Ballet's True album, at the end of the tape DJ Erry would give you two Duran Duran tracks, in a sort of "if you like this, I might as well…" Spotify style. And that's how he got the music around.
Not without its stereotypes, but happily endowed with a healthy dose of causticity, Mixed by Erry is a breath of fresh air on the Italian comedy scene and is sure to draw audiences to theaters. In fact, the marketing machine is already on and the real Erry, now an honest gift box salesman, has been seen mixing records, wearing his trademark headphones at the Modernissimo cinema, where his film enjoyed its Neapolitan premiere.
Watch Mixed by Erry 2023 Movie Trailer
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