#10
To Rome with Love
PLACE ON MY MOST ANTICIPATED LIST: #6
I have come to look forward to every single Woody Allen film and my level of anticipation is more of an excitement to see how great Allen’s next film will be rather than an expectation it actually will be great — I hope that makes sense. He’s always going to get the majority of the stars he wants and To Rome with Love was stuffed to the gills with Jesse Eisenberg, Ellen Page, Penélope Cruz, Alec Baldwin, Roberto Benigni, Riccardo Scamarcio, Judy Davis, Greta Gerwig, Alison Pill, Ornella Muti, Flavio Parenti and even Allen himself taking on a role.
In the last five years Allen has taken us to Barcelona, New York, London, Paris and now to Rome and it has been a whirlwind tour with five films I would watch long before several others and yet Vicky Cristina Barcelona and Midnight in Paris are the two gems in that line-up while New York, London and Rome just didn’t have quite the same energy, and a bit too much cynicism.
To Rome with Love‘s biggest issue was that it was simply too much. All the stories didn’t tie together and the Benigni storyline could have been excised entirely and could have actually made it into quite a good film. I know it’s tough to cast one of the more popular Italian actors in recent history and then cut him from your film, but to save the project, maybe it’s worth it.
SNIPPET FROM MY REVIEW: (read the full review here)
Woody Allen’s To Rome with Love is great at moments, good in others and, at times, tedious. In all it’s a testament to the lesson that less is more as he’s loaded this thing with so many storylines, had the lesser of the bunch been excised he just might have had something to talk about as a solid follow-up to last year’s hit and Best Picture nominee, Midnight in Paris. […]
All-in-all, this is lesser Woody Allen on a whole with splashes of brilliance peppered throughout. The use of the Starlite Orchestra’s “Amada Mia, Amore Mio” is so fitting and Darius Khondji’s cinematography brings a few moments of wonder as a definite mood is set. There is fun to be had, but overall it’s a bit too much.
