Europe has been mostly kind to Woody Allen. After years of documenting life on the Upper West Side of Manhattan the famed filmmaker decamped to the continent, beginning his European vacation in London before moving on to Barcelona and Paris. The latest city on his whistle stop tour is one of Europe’s most interesting places, and the setting for his least interesting film in years.
“To Rome with Love” may be the only mainstream comedy—maybe the only non-mainstream comedy, for that matter—to simultaneously contemplate love, fame and Ozymandias Melancholia. Allen has created a portmanteau starring Alec Baldwin, Roberto Benigni, Penelope Cruz, Judy Davis, Jesse Eisenberg, Greta Gerwig and Ellen Page as people under the thrall of life in the Eternal City.
“To Rome with Love” is well-meaning, but feels like something Allen would have written forty years ago. It’s an episodic screwball comedy with loads of characters, identity mix-ups, the comic’s trademarked highbrow references—will today’s audience get a Howard Roark joke?–and surreal situations. It has the same kind of farcical feel and references of his earlier work—look for older men paired with younger women, anxiety, comments on death and discussions on foreign film—but I think if he had written this decades ago it might have been funnier.
Allen, playing Alison Pill’s father, gives himself most of the funny lines, (“I was never a communist,” he says, “I couldn’t even share a bathroom.”), and while he manages to raise a laugh or two, the master’s touch is missing from much of the film.
Sporadic laughs dot the movie, but aren’t in abundance. The most surreal—and effective—part of the film involves Roberto Benigni as a clerk who becomes famous for being famous. It is a study on the nature, and ultimately the fickleness of fame. (K.K. are you watching?) It’s the strangest segment, but also the most charming. Benigni is just one step below his amped up walking-on-the-backs-of-chair-at-the-Oscars mode, and is a pure pleasure.
“To Rome with Love” is long on ambition and Italian scenery, but short on execution.
At age 20 Ellen Page became a star playing Juno in the film of the same name. She was nominated for an Academy Award and would go on to make movies like Whip It and Inception, but first she took some time off.
“I studied permaculture, design and eco village development at a place called Lost Valley in Oregon with a lot of people who had the same philosophy — strictly freegan,” she says.
Freeganism, or the practice of salvaging discarded food, was just one of the things that fascinated Page during her month-long stay at the settlement.
The experience taught her to live more simply and to really think about her relationship with the planet. Her time there also prepared her for The East, a new eco-thriller co-starring Alexander Skarsgård and Britt Marling.
“On top of it being an incredibly beautifully written piece of work, there were so many ideas that I was very excited about and thinking about,” she says.
In the film she plays Izzy, a member of a shadowy group of eco-activists called The East — think a more hands-on version of real-life group Anonymous — who live by an anarchist eco code.
“We were able to talk about the experience I had and relate what that does to you as a person when you’ve been raised with this narrative given to us by the system that exists.
“Then you go experience something that completely flips everything on its head,” she says.
“That is a wild ride to go on. Then to walk back out into the world and society, you see things differently.”
It’s a way of life she thinks about daily.
“Every morning when I wake up and open my eyes I am unwillingly oppressing a lot of people and the environment to live in the privilege that I have—that we all have living in this area of the world. Not that everyone in this area of the world experiences that… and that’s a hard thing.”
“I think that is something a lot of people are dealing with right now and it is hard to know if running away to the woods and becoming a freegan is the best choice, or do we stay in the infrastructure we’ve inherited and do our best to create positive change? I don’t necessarily know the answer. Maybe I’m just being a selfish jerk.”
There’s nothing groundbreaking about Whip It, the directorial debut of American sweetheart Drew Barrymore. It’s the dance movie where the hero or heroine learns about life through ballet or hip hop. Or it’s the Spelling Bee movie where the main character learns self confidence at the Scripps National competition. In this case the back drop is the wild and wacky world of women’s Roller Derby, but the story is very familiar.
Based on the Shauna Cross novel Derby Girl Ellen Page plays Bliss Cavendar an unhappy teenager from small town Texas who suffers from adolescent ennui. She’s Juno without the pregnancy or the sharp tongue. She’s tired of beauty pageants, her over protective mother and being seventeen. When she stumbles across a flyer for a female Roller Derby league in nearby Austin she sees a way out of her mundane life. Turns out she has a natural ability as a derby demon, and an equally natural ability at attracting skinny guitar players. Soon enough, though, she realizes that skinny guitar players aren’t always the best dates and just because she’s found a new family at the roller rink she can’t throw her old family away.
The world of female roller derby is a colorful, eccentric world that should really lend itself to a rollicking big screen treatment. Unfortunately Whip It doesn’t do it justice. First time director Drew Barrymore gets some of the details right—the women all have fun, campy names like Bloody Holly, Smashly Simpson and Babe Ruthless, and play for teams with names like the Hurl Scouts—but the Roller Derby sequences don’t have the over-the-top rock ‘n’ roll feel they should have. The game scenes are too genteel by half and could have used a bit more rough and tumble energy. It is worth noting however, that the actors seem to be doing their own stunts and some of their falls look quite realistic and quite painful but it isn’t enough to make it feel like authentic down and dirty roller derby.
The feminist aspect of the story—roller derby is often associated with third wave feminism—is blunted because the game is more a plot device than the focus of the story. There is camaraderie among the women on the team and their journey is quite interesting but the film too often detours from the roller rink to Bliss’s love life or struggle with her family.
Barrymore does some good work here. She does a nice job at wordlessly showing Bliss’s alienation in the scene where she takes a bus to her roller derby audition. As she physically leaves the town she has come to hate you get the sense that in her mind she had really left years before. It’s a nicely handled bit of business as is a touching “please don‘t judge me” sequence late in the film between Bliss and her parents (Marcia Gay Harden and Daniel Stern). There’s also some very funny moments and a show stopping performance from Eulala Scheel (Harden’s real life daughter) as Bliss’s younger sister.
But for all the well handled moments there are still the bungled derby scenes which should have added real punch to the story, but instead don’t make much of an impression. If you want to see the real deal derby check out Hell On Wheels, a documentary about the creation of the all-female roller derby league in Austin, Texas in 2001.
This weekend Drew Barrymore makes her directorial debut with Whip It, the story of a young girl who finds the antidote for her small town blues on the roller derby track.
Barrymore’s movie delves deep into the murky world of women’s roller derby, but it isn’t the sport’s first big screen treatment.
In the early 1970s UCLA student Barry Sandler saw his master’s thesis, a screenplay called Kansas City Bomber, become a Golden Globe-nominated movie starring Raquel Welch. She plays a single Mom roller-derby queen (Jodie Foster is her daughter) who has an affair with her boss and a skating showdown with a rival.
The 1970s were the height of roller derby’s popularity but the sport made a comeback early in the millennium. That return was chronicled in Hell On Wheels, a documentary about a women-only Roller Derby league in Austin, Texas.
Ain’t It Cool says this inspirational movie has “the kind of twists, drama, cat fights and compound fractures that only happen in real life.”
Maybe that explains why the roller derby is popular again. Sure, the action is wild and wooly and it has a punk rock attitude but its recent recognition has to do with the people and girl power.
Europe has been mostly kind to Woody Allen. After years of documenting life on the Upper West Side of Manhattan the famed filmmaker decamped to the continent, beginning his European vacation in London before moving on to Barcelona and Paris. The latest city on his whistle stop tour is one of Europe’s most interesting places, and the setting for his least interesting film in years.
