Director: Woody Allen
Year Released: 2012
Rating: 1.5
Woody's Euro Tour continues, having gone from Spain to England to France and now to Italy, where he rehashes old jokes and skits into four sadly tedious narratives of chance meetings and intersecting lives. Most painful of the segments (to me, personally) is Jesse Eisenberg - playing "Young Woody" - cheating on his girlfriend (Greta Gerwig) with a ditzy actress (Ellen Page) - it's like a bad simulation of Allen's past work and fails to make much use of Gerwig's talents (not even Alec Baldwin's dry observations can save this storyline). Also bad is the Roberto Benigni segment, which has the paparazzi and camera crews surrounding an Italian nobody and making him a reality TV star - it's limp, sub-SNL satire. The storyline with a newly married couple having wild affairs (his with a prostitute, hers with a professional hotel thief) is fun but trivial, though it's tough to complain about Woody's one-joke scenario featuring a mortician (Fabio Armiliato) who is a brilliant opera singer (but only in the shower!) because of the always great interactions between Allen and Judy Davis.
