To Rome with Love (2012)

Woody Allen is best known for playing neurotic New Yorkers for decades. Here, he plays a retired opera conductor whose daughter has relocated to Rome, Italy. Woody Allen has written, directed, acted and produced an all star cast with Alec Baldwin, Jesse Eisenberg, Ellen Page, Judy Davis and Allison Pill in the cast. The film is centered around Roman landmarks like the Trevi Fountain and Piazza Navona. The stories don't intermingle. Davis and Allen played a retired couple visiting their daughter and make a discovery in the shower. Alec Baldwin guides Jesse Eisenberg through a love triangle during his stay. Roberto Benigni and Penelope Cruz also star in this film. There are some scenes done completely in Italian with subtitles. Woody Allen wanted to pay homage to the great Italian film directors like Fellini and others in this film. The film is not so serious but delightful and entertaining to watch overall.

What's up with Woody Allen and adultery?His 'romantic' films don't end up being romantic, but cheap excuses for him to portray adultery as something that just happens. I bet every single one of his films starts with a not so happy couple and ends with one of them or both cheating on each other. And he makes it seem so natural, as if it's just bound to happen and everyone does it, yet no one feels bad for it. I understand cheating is very common and sometimes makes a film interesting but I've come to believe he is obsessed with the deed...and it bores the hell out of me.Also, his romantic partner, spouse, mistress in his films is always 20+ years younger than him...always.Is that a coincidence, too? This film wasn't any different, though I hoped it would have been.6/10 for the famous cast and nice view of Rome.

The four unrelated plots that compose this mess of a movie focus on classic Allen's themes he tackled better many times before.The plot featuring Benigni is a compressed version of "Celebrity", the Allen movie about the absurdity of contemporary fame-worshipping. Benigni is a most overrated actor/director with a very limited range. His scenes are painful to watch.The story featuring Eisenberg, Gerwig and Page is the standard Allen's fodder of a young man falling for a neurotic/pretentious/unreliable female, in the past the classic Keaton's role. In "Anything Else" Christina Ricci played the Page role. This story is also annoying and the dialogues bad and repetitive. Comments fly around about how sexy and irresistible the Page character is supposed to be, even if she does not strike me as such...A third story features a young Italian couple acting as if they lived in the 50s. They both are ludicrous but manage to cuckold each other given the first chance. The "wise" hooker played by Cruz is straight out of "Deconstructing Harry".The fourth plot was for me the most unbearable, featuring Allen himself at his most Allenish. Stammering, afraid of death and involved in a stupid plan (see "Small Time Crooks" and many others), Allen manages to concurrently insult Italian families and operas.Even the soundtrack is atrocious, with some corny Italian tunes from the 50s. The only saving grace is the photography. However, the real Rome is a mess of ugly buildings and traffic, not the golden collection of monuments showed in the movie…Really an awful mess that should be voted in the negative.... even without mentioning the overbearing product-placement.

One changes a mortician into a literally shower opera singer; one lives out the predictable eventual unfaithfulness accompanied by the 'guardian angel' senior; one focuses on the instantaneous yet utterly stupid fame; the last one speaks about a husband and wife couple, each having their own strange experience of sex lesson in Rome. The screenplay is just purely stupid for me, particularly with all those stupid twists within each of the sub-stories. Why the senior architect did just stands still and did not tell Sally about what happened between Monica and John? Where did the prostitute come from? And why would Giancarlo be willing to a great degree humiliate himself with the stupid shower on stage? Yet I find the acting is quite sufficient. Ellen Page didn't do enough to hide her real sexual orientation here. Alec Baldwin got really undermined with such an insignificant role. Jesse Eisenberg sticks to his usual character of the timid and often sloppy character.