My favorite coming-of-age movie is a tossup between E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (E.T.) and Cinema Paradiso, and I’m going to pick Cinema Paradiso because Spielberg represents other upcoming selections on my Reely Bernie Faves movies list.

Plus, you have to include the Italian filmmakers, right?

As an avid reader of Roger Ebert (RIP), I caught up on everything Federico Fellini, but I always found his work to be self-indulgent quagmire. Antonioni was too ambiguous and Vittorio De Sica too obvious.

Giuseppe Tornatore is a postmodern “just right” for me, and although Cinema Paradiso follows a conventional flashback formula, it is the quintessential sentimental, feel-good movie.

Boy befriends a Sicilian movie theatre projectionist, falls in love with the greats (Charlie Chaplin, Akira Kurosawa, Jean Renoir, John Wayne), and then falls in love with a girl.

Gradually, the boy’s rose-colored journey of movie magic encounters life’s inevitable darker tones when…

That world collapsed, utterly and completely late in his afternoon.
The pulse had stuttered, and the creatures in his mind silenced.
He’d finally reached a point of no return.
A cataclysmic undoing began deep inside his history.
Memories and actions unthreaded, while the skin began to fray.
Tiny tiptoes of bitterness and bittersweetness.
Both at odds and as one with the machine of fate.
He positioned himself by the near chaotic escape.
Leaning on the universe one final time.
Smiling, he watched those he hated pass by with ink spilling from their soul.
Unphased and unfettered by his sudden disappearance.
The loved ones paused, only for a moment, noticing a slight change.
Like a feather landing on an upturned hand.
And then gone, swept away by the breath of god.
His spirit now honey, raised upwards.
He lost his religion, the tethers and the trials.
And with this new found…