"To Rome with Love" and "Starry, Starry Night"
GH and I went with P and J last Saturday to watch Woody Allen's new film "To Rome with Love" at the Angelika. I liked it more than his last movie "Midnight in Paris." For one thing, the Rome movie, unlike the Paris one, did not hang on a single conceit, and an endless procession of semi-believeable mimicries of famous personalities of 1920s Paris. "Rome" consisted of four stories, unrelated in plot, but connected through the common themes of love, fame and aging. The best story had a pair of Italian newly-weds coming from the countryside to the Eternal City for the first time to meet the husband's influental relatives. For them Rome was a place of confusion but also of experience. They returned to their small town, wiser and surer of their rightful place. Alessandro Tiberi and Alessandra Mastronardi were pitch-perfect as the hapless innocents. Another story had Alec Baldwin finding his younger self (played by Jesse Eisenberg) in Rome when he was ...