items tagged with concert movies

TO ROME WITH LOVE

After Woody Allen’s rather staggering success with Midnight in Paris – personal-best box-office, the man’s first Academy Award in 25 years – I guess it was inevitable that critics, as a whole, would greet the filmmaker’s follow-up project with a collective “meh.” And that’s certainly happened with Woody’s new To Rome with Love. (Not that it matters, but the comedy is currently sitting with a “45-percent fresh” rating – i.e., “not fresh at all” – at the review aggregator RottenTomatoes.com.)

But I’d argue that the movie’s less generous critics have picked entirely the wrong picture to be indifferent toward, because the To Rome with Love that I saw was sensational – charming, hilarious, imaginative, and, in its offhanded way, enormously adventurous. As Woody’s latest is composed of a quartet of frothy comic vignettes set in the Eternal City, all of them reminiscent of the short fictions he occasionally writes for The New Yorker, it’s easy to see how the film is being perceived as slight. Yet that description, while somewhat accurate, doesn’t begin to suggest the masterly finesse and intelligence that Woody and his tremendous cast demonstrate here. If Midnight in Paris remains the writer/director’s finest achievement of the past two decades, To Rome with Love easily lands in the top five, and with more than 20 releases to choose from, that’s hardly something to sniff at.

JUSTIN BIEBER: NEVER SAY NEVER

Leave it to that great Socratic thinker Ozzy Osbourne, in a recent TV commercial, to ask the question that’s been on many a middle-aged mind of late: “What’s a Bieber?”

JONAS BROTHERS: THE 3D CONCERT EXPERIENCE

(With apologies to my godchild Jordan, who is surely the most rabid Jonas Brothers fan I've yet met. Sorry, sweetie. Just remember that I'm a bitter, cranky old man.)

THE RUINS

I caught The Ruins during a minimally populated Saturday-afternoon screening, so I pray that a larger, rowdier audience laughed like mad when our surgeon-to-be hero (the hilariously stalwart Jonathan Tucker) surmised the deadly situation he and his friends were in and barked, with absolute earnestness, "Four Americans on vacation don't just disappear!"

That poor, dumb kid. Never saw a horror movie.

FOOL'S GOLD

At one point during Fool's Gold's opening sequence, Matthew McConaughey's fortune-hunting hero is seen slo-o-owly hopping along the ocean floor, and for the next 110 minutes, the whole movie seems to be moving at the exact same speed. I understand that director Andy Tennant's (supposed) comic adventure isn't meant to be anything more than a featherweight romantic diversion - an excuse to watch the perfectly tanned McConaughey and Kate Hudson swap barbs while being photographed against intoxicatingly pretty Key West locales - and many in the audience appear content to accept it as such. But, good God, aren't these viewers at all bothered by how mind-numbingly lethargic the pacing is?