Review: Everybody Wants to Be Italian

The modern romantic comedy has long treated novelty like a venereal disease, fleeing any thought of invention as it foists the same tired, rigid formula on viewers content to consume familiar pap dressed up in slightly different duds. Still, if the average studio rom-com offers little of worth aside from the occasional endearing performance (and no, I don’t mean you, Ms. Bullock), there’s something even more noxious about the strain of ethnic-indie romances pioneered by 2002’s smash hit My Big Fat Greek Wedding , which charmed audiences by taking recognizable conventions and spicing them up with broad, brash stereotypes. It’s this subgenre to which Everybody Wants to Be Italian belongs, since Jason Todd Ipson’s film is a lovey-dovey fantasy in which every character is an Italian cliché save for the two protagonists, who both pretend to have descendants in the Old Country because they think the other does. This posing-as-an-Italian conceit is...