Bland

Rating: 5/10 (3 February 2013)

One of Woody's worst, probably my second least favorite after September (though I'll admit I haven't seen a lot of his films from the past 20 years). It's just so damned bland. Several plot lines, none of them interesting, play out with a mostly unexplored Roman backdrop (despite appearances by a few tourist attraction, this could have taken place anywhere in the world). The most notable one probably concerns Jesse Eisenberg, his girlfriend Greta Gerwig and her sexy best friend Ellen Page, with Alec Baldwin commenting upon them like a fly on the wall (we're never sure what exactly the situation is with Baldwin - either he's a Humphrey Bogart-like spirit like in Play It Again Sam or if he's the protagonist looking back on his own past). Another story concerns Alison Pill and her new beau introducing their parents to each other. Woody Allen annoys immensely as Pill's father (thankfully not her boyfriend) and Judy Davis is her mother. Allen, a former classical record producer, discovers that his daughter's soon-to-be father-in-law is a great opera singer, but only if he's in the shower. Thus plays out a hackneyed plot that I literally saw on the Pebbles and Bamm Bamm Show when I was a kid (I'm pretty sure). Two other, Italian language plot lines involve Roberto Begnini as a normal man who starts to get followed around by the paparazzi and a young couple who accidentally get split up and then end up with a prostitute and a movie actor. The Italian language plots I mostly lost track of after a while because I got bored of reading the subtitles for such an inconsequential endeavor.