TO ROME WITH LOVE: The Film Babble Blog Review

TO ROME WITH LOVE (Dir. Woody Allen, 2012)

This year’s Woody Allen film is a Rome-set ensemble rom-com, but you could probably guess that from its trite title. It’s a blend of several disconnected story strands, that comes off like Allen is cleaning out his notebooks of jotted down ideas without fully fleshing them out.

There is a bit of the winning charm of Allen’s last film, the hugely popular MIDNIGHT IN PARIS, mainly in a scenario which has a sly Alec Baldwin revisiting his youth through Jesse Eisenberg (a perfect fit for an Allen film) who finds himself in a love triangle with Ellen Pageand Greta Gerwig.

And there’s some amusement from Allen, acting onscreen for the first time since 2006’s SCOOP, as a classical music promoter trying to make an opera star out of his daughter Alison Pill’s fiancée (Flavio Parenti) who can only sing in the shower.

But mostly TO ROME WITH LOVE is a trifle; a fluffy only fitfully funny film. Yet it so pleasantly breezes along with such gorgeous photography of its Italian locales by Darius Khondji, that it’s still a likable lark.

Take, for instance, Roberto Benigni’s storyline - Benigni plays a man who wakes up one morning to find that he’s become the famous person in Italy, but for no given reason. The press follows him everywhere, recording his every moment, much to Benigni’s bemusement.

Throughout his career, Allen has so much better satirized the media’s obsession with meaningless celebrity (see 1998’s CELEBRITY), than this silly go-round, but here Allen seems to be having such fun with it that it’s hard not to chuckle - even if it’s just a few mild chuckles worth.

Another strand, maybe the most sitcom-ish, concern Alessandro Tiberi and Alessandra Mastronardi as newlyweds who have to separately deal with the sexual temptations of a prostitute (Penelope Cruz) and a famous actor (Antonio Albanese). The comedy in this bit creaks more than in the others, and the payoff is extremely predictable, but Cruz, stunning as she’s ever looked on the screen, still makes it pop.

I was happy to see Allen back in his familiar role as the neurotic nebbish, and married to Judy Davis (a veteran of 4 previous Allen movies), but wished he came equipped with better one-liners. It says a lot that the role he gave himself is as underwritten as everybody else's.

TO ROME WITH LOVE is an average later day Woody Allen film - it’s better than SCOOP, TO MEET A TALL DARK STRANGER, and WHATEVER WORKS, but not as good as VICKY CRISTINA BARCELONA, MIDNIGHT IN PARIS or MATCH POINT. For a 76-year old film maker who puts out a movie a year, that’s not a bad batting average.

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SUPER: The Film Babble Blog Review

SUPER (Dir. James Gunn, 2010)

Add The Crimson Bolt to the growing list of superheroes that aren't really superheroes.



Just like KICK ASS, this movie wonders out loud 'why don't people actually try to be superheroes,' gives us an ordinary schmuck who dons a costume, and has him get his ass kicked before he ultimately saves the day. However, the tone of SUPER is completely different. 





Rainn Wilson is our ordinary schmuck here, a short-order cook whose wife (Liv Tyler) leaves him for a slimy drug dealing kingpin played by Kevin Bacon. Rainn takes us into his deprssing existence by way of dry narration ("People look stupid when they cry" he says over a shot of him sobbing), with the film starting off darkly, but a blaringly bright cartoon credits sequence seems to announce that the film is going to be an outrageous romp.



It is and it isn't - there are some funny bits here and there, but once Rainn takes up bashing people's heads in with a wrench, the film's laughs get fewer and fewer.



As a comic book store clerk who is implausibly infatuated with Rainn, Ellen Page overacts like crazy, as if she's trying make us forget her graceful performance in last summer's INCEPTION. Page makes her own costume, which she poses in creepily, and despite Rainn's insistence that he needs no sidekick, asserts herself as "Bolty" - her Robin to Rainn's Batman.



  In one of many unpleasant moments, Page forces herself sexually on Rainn - why on earth did the film makers feel they had to go there? The pathetic duo arm themselves with heavy weaponry to take on Bacon's thugs, and the movie's final act is a ultra-violent shakily-shot shoot 'em up in which the film beats its premise into a bloody pulp. It's an unamusing assault on the senses with a flimsy conclusion. 





The only strength is Rainn's unwavering commitment to character. This guy definitely has more layers to him than Dwight Shrute, and Rainn fleshes them out intensely. It's a character that deserves a better more rounded narrative, not these worn out conventions.



On the sidelines Liv Tyler doesn't have much to do but look drugged out, Bacon seems to be having a ball probably because he could've done the role in his sleep, and as one of the heavies Michael Rooker just looks uncomfortable. Oh, I almost forgot the odd cameo by Nathan Fillion (Firefly, Castle) as a Christian superhero named the Holy Avenger that Rainn is inspired by when watching him on an religious cable channel. 





Really don't know what the point of that means either. SUPER is a tired take on superhero pipe-dreams that has nothing new to say satirically. I rolled my eyes more than I laughed, and I cringed more than I smiled. 





I guess those are fitting reactions to a film written and directed by the guy who wrote the live action SCOOBY-DOO movies. 





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INCEPTION: The Film Babble Blog Review

INCEPTION
(Dir. Christopher Nolan, 2010)





The buzz has been building for Christopher Nolan's followup to the THE DARK KNIGHT for some time now, and it's certainly going to get bigger as audiences see for themselves what this incredible mind bender of a movie is all about. What it's all about I'm still working out, but I can say that it's a vivid visual feast that's one of the best films of the year so far. 

It's a difficult film to describe without giving away some of the pure pleasures of the plot so beware of Spoilers! Leo DiCaprio is a dream extractor - an expert in mind manipulation who deals in the underworld thievery of, well, parts of men's minds when they are asleep and dreaming. 

DiCaprio works with a team including Joseph Gordon-Levitt as a "point-man" and a dream "architect" played by Lukas Haas. We meet them in the middle of a job inside of the dream state of Saito (Ken Watanabe) - a powerful Japanese business magnate.

Turns out Watanabe is auditioning DiCaprio and his crew for a bigger job involving "inception" -that is the planting of an idea into somebody's head through the dream world. 

For the job they need a new architect so through DiCaprio's professor father (the always welcome Sir Michael Caine) they are joined by a snark-free Ellen Page. DiCaprio also recruits the slick Tom Hardy to act as "forger" for the team. Dileep Rao rounds out the team as their chemist.

The target for their mind crime caper is Cillian Murphy as Watanabe's corporate rival who has the fate of his family's fortune in his hands upon his father's (Pete Postlethwaite) death. Much like in his last film, Martin Scorsese's SHUTTER ISLAND, DiCaprio is haunted by memories of his dead wife (here Marion Cotillard). Unlike SHUTTER ISLAND however here it's impossible to guess where it's all going.

Despite that it's crammed with a lot of action movie clichés - shoot-outs, automobile crashes, explosions, and there's even a sci-chase with machine guns - it never feels contrived. Its endlessly inventive dream inside of a dream inside of a dream scenarios are spell binding, and genuinely scary at times, and the towering worlds of the CGI crafted dream set pieces are overwhelmingly beautiful. Nolan and cinematographer Wally Pfister really outdid themselves on every frame. Likewise for Hans Zimmer who provides one of his most solid scores, one that swells and swoons at just the right moments.

I'll leave other critics to make comparisons to everything from METROPOLIS to the THE MATRIX because it's obvious that the decade it took to finish the screenplay Nolan has woven many influences and ideas into the framework. What wins out is the film threatens to burst out of the screen into real life - just like the most lucid dreams.

DiCaprio skillfully maneuvers through the action with a layered performance that's nearly as complex as the movie that's surrounding him.. Gordon-Levitt has a lot of screen time in his secondary role and he owns it - especially in the stressful yet seriously fun second half. 

In one of the best bits of acting I've seen from the actress, Page makes us feel the wonder of being able to create an entire world with intricate acrchitecture and the thrill of manipulating it to your own desires. At one point when she is learning how to structure a cityscape with thought, I really thought she was going to say: "Wow! This is awesome!" Because, well, it really is.

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