Two Scoops of Italy - Hallmark

This week wrapped up Hallmark’s Passport to Love series with Two Scoops of Italy. They’ve had a good run these past couple of weeks. Did they finish it off strong? Well, I’ve got a lot of things to talk about so let’s dive right in and get to it!

Hi, I’m Stephanie and this is the Magical Movie Club - a place to come chat about Hallmark movies. On June 22nd we watched Two Scoops of Italy, starring Hunter King and Michele Rosiello.

Hunter King should be a familiar face with Hallmark movie fans. She was in last year’s The Santa Summit, also the Professional Bridesmaid, and A Royal Corgi Christmas. And like the others this month, Hallmark found some local talent from Italy to take the male lead. Michele Rosiello may be new to Hallmark but his bio shows he’s done a lot over in Europe.

The movie opens with Danielle, a professional chef, plating some different foods in her restaurant. They look amazing. But she needs to impress Owen, an investor in her restaurant. Apparently her restaurant only lasted about a year before she had to shut it down. It’s been closed for a month now and she is taking this time to revamp her menu in the hopes of reopening soon. She’s been stuck in a rut trying to find inspiration from anywhere she can find, including these magazine pictures she’s cut out and pinned all over a bulletin board. Unfortunately, Owen is still just not impressed, and he tells her if she doesn’t have a suitable menu to reopen by the end of the month he’ll have to pull out.

That evening she's having some pizza with her sister who, after giving her a little bit of a pep talk, convinces her she should go to Italy to rejuvenate and maybe even find some inspiration for her new menu. 

So, off to the Italian countryside she goes. I enjoyed the fact that she chose to stay not in a grand hotel, which is probably what I would have done, but in a quaint little cottage off the beaten path in a small town called Ostia Antica. It was such a small town that Bruno, her shuttle driver, had to drop her off about a half-a-kilometer away because the streets were too narrow for any vehicles. Besides, this gave her a chance to walk around and take in a bit of the local culture.  Which I find a bit interesting because she owns an Italian restaurant but she knows absolutely nothing about Italy, the culture, or even the language. That just makes no sense to me.

But, this is where we meet Giancarlo. His family owns a local cafe, specializing in gelato. Giancarlo feels like they’re stuck in a rut themselves because they haven’t offered any new flavors of gelato in three years. As his father points out, that was his mother’s specialty, reinventing new flavors every summer, but he feels Giancarlo is much better with the business side of the operation and wishes he would appreciate what they have now and leave well enough alone.

Well, the meet-cute in this movie was a scene where Giancarlo offered Danielle a taste of a new flavor of gelato he was trying out. It was grapefruit and rosemary. To me, that sounds awful, but I’ve never tried it so I would keep an open mind if I ever found any. As it turns out Danielle sort of liked it, and she offered her honest opinion to Giancarlo along with a suggestion on how she thought it could be better. Giancarlo was not particularly receptive to her advice and she left on that awkward note. I will say, though, that I appreciated the fact that that was a much more original meet-cute than the usual bumping into each other or childish bickering that we’ve seen lately.

So, after Danielle left and she had gotten settled into the cottage where she’s staying, she decided to try to get some sleep. Now, like last week’s movie in Greece, this one also has church bells ringing. These were ringing after dark and they interrupted Danielle’s chance to rest. We do learn that the reason they were going off is that meant there was a wedding that day. But I never figured out the point of that other than that it gave Danielle an excuse to get up and read a local book that the owner of the cottage had recommended to her. 

This was a bit of an interesting side-story. Every night when Danielle read a chapter, it appeared that whatever happened in the book predicted how her day would go. In the passage she read tonight they were playing a game called Tombola, which is apparently similar to Bingo. And, sure enough, that evening she went out to play Tombola where she was seated at a table next to Giancarlo. And yes, she actually sneered at him.

Well, it turns out she won that night. And after an awkward moment when she first yelled BINGO before remembering to yell TOMBOLA instead, the crowd seemed annoyed, or maybe just confused. I don’t know if they were irritated that this new American tourist had won? I’m not sure, but the prize was what looked like a nice cake. I thought they could have expounded on that just a little bit. Like maybe show us the bakery and maybe the owner who made the cake could have been a fun supporting character? I don’t know, I would have liked to have seen more than just here’s a cake. I mean we didn’t even see them enjoying the cake!

Now we haven’t quite gotten to the main theme of the movie, yet. But we’re close. The next morning Danielle was standing outside waiting at a bus stop so she could start checking out some local restaurants. She was waiting there for quite a long time. It was so long that she gave up and went inside to ask Giancarlo about the bus schedule, and he told her the bus stopped running about a year ago.

After chatting a little over breakfast which he made for her, Giancarlo makes her a deal. He proposes that he will help her find her way around if she helps him come up with a new summer flavor of gelato. 

And that’s what this movie is all about.

He starts by showing her how to make gelato. Or, as he says, “We do not make gelato, we sculpt it.” I noticed the dialog was pretty intense. It felt like practically every sentence in the whole movie was deep and profound like this. It got to be too much even for me!

But even through all the intensity, I did enjoy the tours he took her on, like walking through the old castle, the name of which I still can’t pronounce,  and even the rolling hills where she had to guess the herbs growing around them, with her eyes closed, just by their fragrance.

After they picked some herbs and went to a farmer’s market they gave it a go and tried making a new flavor of gelato. But sadly, their harshest critic, a 9-year-old boy named Nico, didn’t care for it. 

Fortunately, things turned around for them after they went olive oil tasting. Olive oil tasting? That was new to me! Well, there was a flavor there that finally inspired their new gelato flavor and even Nico approved. But what’s up with all the mint? It seems like Danielle put mint in literally everything!

Of course by the end they found a way to revamp her restaurant together and they lived happily ever after. But did it seem odd that Giancarlo happened to already have a passport when, for this entire movie, he talked about how he had never been further than Rome. I know, I’m being picky. I just wish we had actually seen how the newly revamped restaurant turned out. 

So, let’s talk about what I liked about this movie. Aldo’s cafe! I would love to visit a little place just like this someday. Actually, it looked like a work of art I would absolutely hang in this room. And I like Giancarlo. He was authentic, when he wasn’t being too overdramatic, charming, and delightful to watch. And I was so glad he found his happy ending with the support of his father to go do what he really wanted to do.

But how about Danielle? My feelings about this character are more complicated. It's not that I disliked anything about her. She didn’t do or say anything that rubbed me the wrong way. She wasn’t foolish or immature. I think she was just bland. And I had a hard time believing that she was a great chef or that she ever owned an authentic Italian restaurant. That’s probably because I have my own preconceived idea of what a great, authentic Italian restaurant should be. I used to know of one in San Diego where the owner’s dad came here from Italy and opened the restaurant many, many years ago and wow, it was far and away the best Italian food I know! 

So when I look at this young woman who has an Italian restaurant but doesn’t have any recipes that draw people in, nor does the restaurant look right for the part to me, I can’t help but wonder why Italian? If she’s this great young chef, what is she great at? We never actually saw her create anything.  You would think she would have served more than just one pan of lasagna, which by the way, we never saw her make. I mean, why didn’t she cook anything for Giancarlo, just once while she was there?

Anyway, I also love to see great supporting characters. And while I liked Giancarlo’s dad just fine, he was also just too intense. For example, he was dead-set against Giancarlo experimenting with new gelato flavors. I mean he was really adamant about that. And even when he finally consented to letting Giancarlo at least try some new flavors, it was like he was going out for a Nobel prize. I wanted to say, “Lighten up a little, it’s gelato!” 

As for the other characters, there really weren’t many that stood out as being spectacular. Bruno and Elida were sweet, but I’ve seen others recently that were so much better. Like the main character, Danielle, I found them to be bland. 

So this one is tough for me to come up with a rating because I don’t want anyone to think that this was a bad movie, per se. There was just nothing great about it, either. For me, it was forgettable. In another year or two if anyone asks me I’ll probably say, “Yeah, I’m pretty sure I’ve seen it but I can’t remember anything about it other than there was gelato in it.”  With that in mind I’ll give it a 3 out of 5. 

So how about you? What did you think? Maybe these characters or the overall story resonated more with you than with me this time? Perhaps I would have enjoyed it a little bit more if it hadn’t followed two other similar movies that, in my opinion, were just so much better overall.

Well I think that wraps up my review of Two Scoops of Italy. And guess what that means? Next week officially launches Christmas in July! And I am about half-way through a series of videos that I’m putting together just for that occasion. 

But that doesn’t mean I’m not watching the new ones, too. As a matter of fact, next Saturday is the first brand new Hallmark Christmas movie of the year called Falling Like Snowflakes. You know I’ll be watching and ready to share my thoughts about it next week.

Until then, and as always, thank you so much for being here and being a part of the Magical Movie Club. We'll be back next week to chat more about our favorite magical movies!  

Hallmark Channel's Original Preview:  Two Scoops of Italy - Preview

Hallmark Channel Movie Site: Two Scoops of Italy