some good moments

Rating: 6/10 (28 May 2014)

I've said it before and I'll say it again - you can't churn out movies the way Woody Allen does and not have a few clinkers along the way. To Rome with Love is not a masterpiece, but it has some good scenes.
Set in beautiful, breathtaking Rome, the film tells four stories: A retired opera director (Allen) visiting his daughter and her new fiancée discovers the boy's father can sing like Caruso; a prostitute (Penelope Cruz) is mistaken for a man's wife by his family; the man's wife is quite naive, ends up on a film studio and is taken to the apartment of one of her favorite actors; a man (Alec Baldwin) returns to the place of his youth and serves as the conscience/adviser to a young man (Jesse Eisenberg) about to fall for his girlfriend's friend (Ellen Page). And a director (Roberto Benigni) becomes an overnight celebrity and is hounded everywhere he goes.
Some of these worked better than others. I'm partial to the opera singer story - Allen and Judy Davis play Jerry and Phyllis, the parents of Hayley (Allison Pitt), and her future father-in-law, Giancarlo, is portrayed by opera star Fabio Armiliato. Giancarlo's voice is magnificent, but only when he's in a shower, so Allen comes out of retirement (which he is dying to do) and stages a Pagliacci with Canio in a portable, decorated shower.
My second favorite is the newlyweds, featuring Alessandro Tiberi as Antonio, Penelope Cruz as Anna, and Alessandra Mastronadi as Milly. This is the most "Italian" part of the film and perhaps the most successful. Milly leaves the hotel, becomes terribly lost, and loses her cell phone. While she's wandering around, Anna (Cruz) enters Antonio and Milly's hotel room, mistaking it for the room she was to go to, and starts trying to kiss Antonio on the bed, just as Antonio's relatives arrive. His uncle mistakes her for Milly, and she goes along with it.
Milly, meanwhile, finds herself at a movie studio and meets her favorite actor, who wants to seduce her. Everyone winds up at the same restaurant together.
I didn't find the acting all that great, particularly in the beginning; it seemed very artificial, though later, I didn't find that as much. I frankly found the Jesse Eisenberg-Ellen Page story a little annoying, as I did the Robert Begnini one. By the way, Penelope Cruz in a tight-fitting, short red dress was drop dead gorgeous.
All in all, worth seeing. I think Allen always has something to offer and even at his age is trying new techniques and new cities.