I am returned. I am skipping at least two very good movies that I have seen since the last one I reviewed, because I have been moving intercontinentally. This has been very traumatic and stressful and I have not written. The first is Melancholia (2011), which I cannot recommend highly enough to anyone that watches heady, cerebral films. I'm sorry that I stole those terms from Netflix, but I miss her. My time with Netflix has long past outlasted any romantic relationship I've ever had and to leave her when I came to France is hard, though not as hard as my family. I do not want to be too autobiographical; I only wanted to explain my long departure and mention these two things.
Melancholia is long and slow and it really uses an absolute non-economy of time to give us a sense of what depression is like and I for one feel a better understanding of it, even when the sense of depression that von Trier, our writer/director by the way, is trying to give us. I would definitely suggest it.
I also watched The Five-Year Engagement (2012) multiple times on my 9 hour plane flight from Houston to Paris. I would definitely rate it with best Judd Apatow-like comedies that have been coming out for a while. Jason Segel co-writes with Nicholas Stoller, the director, who also co-wrote The Muppets with him and co wrote with him and directed Forgetting Sarah Marshall. It does what I remember Judd Apatow talking about with The 40-Year-Old Virgin, whether Apatow succeeded or not with that film. Apatow said that he wanted this unusual story to not be heaping mockery on a strange, awkward character who is just socially awkward, but to show someone who is relatively normal who just happened to be in this situation, through bad luck, etc. In The Five-Year Engagement, one never looks at these people and expects that they will have this awkwardly long engagement, but normal situations, if ones involving some pretty bad luck and behavior, continue to drive back that date at which the wedding will take place. It also manages to encompass five years in one film without skipping about. But this is not a review of The Five-Year Engagement.
I would like to relate my impressions of To Rome with Love, Woody Allen's latest film. First, I should briefly explain my story. I went to a local cinema in Paris called Cinema Lincoln, after the street name, which shows French films and English films with French subtitles. It did not occur to me until I had bought the ticket and the movie had started that this film that is about one third in Italian would have for the Italian parts not English subtitles, but French ones. For me, the situation was exhausting, reading the French subtitles and trying to keep track of the movie as it sped by in Italian. I think I did mildly well, but just so you know what I went through to bring this to you.
To Rome with Love is a lot like many of Allen's recent comedies, like Midnight in Paris, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, or Melinda and Melinda, but with a dash of Paris, Je T'Aime in there. That is, there were various mostly unconnected stories in it, connected only by being in Rome. This is forgivable if done well, but I find it can be annoying. I prefer films about characters and stories to those about ideas or feelings. Meanwhile, I love Intermission, which brings these seemingly unconnected stories together, much like Tolstoy does in Anna Karenina or Hugo in Les Miserables.
As far as wit, I've gone with an 8.5 because I began comparing it to Annie Hall, a 10, which will annoy people, but it is one of the funniest movies I've ever seen still. TRwL obviously failed that test and I passed it by Another Earth, a 9.5, then by Arn: The Knight Templar, a 9, and landed it by Branagh's 2006 As You Like It. This seemed right. They are both truly lesser works by great authors and thus still distinguished. It is funny. Allen, Alec Baldwin, Ellen Page, Roberto Benigni, Alison Pill, Jesse Eisenberg, Greta Gerwig, and Penelope Cruz are all predictably good, but the stand-outs are the Italians I don't know: Alessandro Tiberi and Alessandra Mastronardi as the young Italian couple almost don't require translation, Fabio Armiliato plays the shy Italian undertaker who only sings opera well in the shower with a beautiful sense of comedy, and Sergio Stoli stands out as a wise chauffeur for Benigni. I was pleasantly surprised at the way that Allen dove into a surrealist approach without explanation. It's not uncommon for him, but he truly dove, much to my delight.
In terms of wisdom, unfortunately, it does compare well with Annie Hall. The understanding that two people can have meaningless, adulterous sex each without the other's knowledge and not be negatively affected by it is a farce. One perpetrated multiple times. Alec Baldwin's character did spout some interesting wisdom, so I gave it overall a 7.
The music and other wonder might save it if Allen ever did anything else. The style is not bad, but it is too well known to have the same effect it did before. I gave it overall an 8.5 again.
Realistically, this film barely makes over the lip of the reviewable, but I needed to do it. I bet the next film I do will be Moonrise Kingdom, which I plan to watch tomorrow afternoon and I expect much better things. This seems like a return to The Royal Tenenbaums without the loss of depth of cast developed further by The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, a title I insist using the whole of, much like The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. Au revoir.
No comments:
Post a Comment