Possibly more entertaining than any film in the history of Italian cinema is the new internet micro-celebrity Gino the Ginny. Watch ten seconds and you’ll have the entire Youtube series figured out: a kid, probably no more than 12 years old, acting like a egotistical Jersey club rat with the nastiest mouth on the planet. In fact, it plays so perfectly that we may in fact be watching a grown man acting like a little kid acting like a grown man. Mind-boggling, I know, but that’s the quality of work we’re looking at. To get back to my first claim, I don’t feel as though I’m going out on a limb when I suggest that Gino represents everything that Italian cinema aspires to. In fact, the series of Youtube vignettes featuring this crude, miniature Italian stereotype may have everything that something like the Italian Realist movement lacks: humor, subtext, and a visceral emotional connection with the audience. Gino has more to say about the human condition than any tedious, and drawn-out meditation on the stuck-up pretensions of the self-pitying middle class depicted in the films of Fellini or Antonioni. Gino, rather, like everyone else, is concerned with his VIP status, his girlfriend, but above other things, how well he can dance with his wife-beater on. Combine that with the 10 million hits the site has received, and it’s plain to see he’s touching a lot of lives; and on a level much more realistic and penetrating. One last note. For those of still asking, pedantically, “Why would you compare fine, classic cinema to this five minute or so of low-brow garbage?” Watch a Fellini instead of this? Or Rossellini? Gino will answer this for me: "Go fuck yourself."