Last night we saw Nanni Moretti's Caro diario (1994), and while it's easy to see why someone would dismiss it as a muddled jumble, dull and uninspired, or self-indulgent, it spoke to me. I liked the tour of a deserted Rome he gives us in the first part, and his ridicule of the whiny yuppies in a pretentious movie, his disgust at the bloody cult film "Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer" and the critic who recommended it, as well as what happens to his intellectual friend, who hasn't watched TV in 30 years, becomes addicted to a dubbed American soap opera. It's on Stromboli that the friend has him seek out Americans to find out about the latest episodes of the soap opera. The island certainly has changed since Rossellini filmed Stromboli there in 1949. And the last part, poking fun at doctors misdiagnosing his illness, was a third serving of irony. But it wasn't just that, it was the way he did it, which I have trouble putting into words.