Woody Allen Redux-To
Rome With Love (2012)-A Film Review
DVD Review
By Film Critic Sandy
Salmon
To Rome With Love,
starring Woody Allen, Alex Baldwin, Penolope Cruz, 2012
I really believe, and
after watching this film under review Woody Allen’s 2012 filmed in Rome To Rome With Love I believe I have
additional ammunition, that once Woody got away from his roots in New York
City, hell, from Manhattan, the quality of his work overall fell off. Maybe it
was that quintessential Jewish nerdish comedian raised among the high rises and
absorbing the culture of the Jewish quarter, the city and maybe Coney Island in
the 1940s that left its mark on him. And was not transferable. He certainly
flaunted it in great NYC- based movies like Manhattan.
Other towns from LA to
Barcelona and here Rome leave me with very mixed feelings about his filming in
other locales. (Although Midnight In Paris worked it depended on the
heavyweight fantasy figures of Hemingway and his crowd in Jazz Age Paris times
to carry the thing off.) This despite the fact that he, a funny man almost
without talking, was in the film after an absence of some years.
Rome might be a great
locale for love but to hitch four basically unrelated stories together to fill
up a script seemed disjoined and unwieldy. The four: a standard boy meets girl
story; an average Joe waking up to celebrity; a young rural couple lost in the
big city, and; a trip down memory lane (by Alex Baldwin) in a semi-fantastic
setting don’t seem to have much to hold the whole production together. Too bad
Woody but I guess not every effort can reach Annie Hall or a slew of others
that made a poor gentile boy from the suburbs laugh, laugh hard.
No comments:
Post a Comment