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The Best of Rome:
MOVIES IN ENGLISH

Week of Friday, July 3 - Thursday, July 9, 2009

Metropolitan
Via del Corso 7 (near Piazza del Popolo)
tel 06 320 0933

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
A typical summer release aimed at the pubescent male. In this sequel, actress Shia LaBeouf again joins with the Autobots® against their sworn enemies, the Decepticons®. Michael Bay directs. Just how dumb is it? Well.... in the Wall Street Journal, Joe Morgenstern wrote, "Compared to this sequel, the first Transformers, which was released two years ago, ranks right up there with Kant's Critique of Pure Reason." In the Detroit News, Tom Long wrote, "A great grinding garbage disposal of a movie, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen isn't so much a narrative film as a cacophonous series of explosions intermittently interrupted by needless dialogue." And Michael Phillips wrote in the Chicago Tribune, "The first, comparatively lucid Transformers was a headache, but I sort of enjoyed it....Revenge of the Fallen is more like listening to rocks in a clothes dryer for 2½ hours."
4:45, 7:25, 10:10 pm
Also at the Warner Village Moderno, Piazza della Repubblica 44 (at the Esedera Hotel)tel 892 111
3:40, 6:40, 9:50 pm
trailer

The Boat that Rocked (I Love Radio Rock)
In 1966, British pop music's finest era, the BBC played just two hours of rock and roll every week. But pirate radio played rock and pop 24 hours a day , to an audience of 25 million faithful listeners. Recently expelled from school, Carl (Tom Sturridge) has been sent by his mother to visit his godfather, Quentin (Bill Nighy), who is the boss of Radio Rock, a pirate radio station in the middle of the North Sea, populated by an eclectic crew of rock-and-roll deejays, led by the brash American, "the Count," (Philip Seymour Hofmann). When pirate stations come to the attention of government minister Dormandy (Kenneth Branagh), he is out for the blood of these lawbreakers. Dormandy seizes the chance to score a political goal, and The Marine Broadcasting Offences Act is passed in an effort to outlaw the pirates and to remove their ghastly influence from the land once and for all. With Radio Rock in peril, its devoted fans rally together and stage an epic Dunkirk-style hundred-boat rescue to save their deejay heroes. Directed by Richard Curtis (Bridget Jones, Love Actually): Reviews were not good, and the film has yet to open in the US. In the UK, Guardian critic Peter Bradshaw wrote, "The movie is boisterous, sentimental and worryingly deficient in laughs for a worryingly large amount of the time."
5:30, 8, 10:30 pm
trailer


Angels & Demons
If you were in Rome last year during the shooting of this film, you may be curious to see the finished product. In a prequel to The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown, the mega-best-selling author who is single-handedly saving the publishing industry, again centers his story around Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon, again played by Tom Hanks. What terrifying discovery, you may ask, would make the Vatican turn to Robert Langdon, the man who cracked history's most controversial code? Langdon has discovered evidence of the resurgence of an ancient secret brotherhood known as the Illuminati "the most powerful underground organization in history" whose despised enemy is the Catholic Church. With the clock is ticking on an unstoppable Illuminati time bomb, Langdon travels to Rome, where he joins forces with Vittoria Vetra, a beautiful and enigmatic Italian scientist. The film is directed by Ron Howard and stars Ewan McGregor, Ayelet Zurer, Stellan Skarsgaard. The critics haven't fully weighed in yet, as the movie is opening world-wide this week. But in an advance article in New York Magazine, David Edelstein wrote, "It might have been a hit, but Ron Howard’s movie of Dan Brown’s Catholic-symbolist potboiler The Da Vinci Code stank to heaven: Howard did it for the money and was clearly too dispirited after the flop of Cinderella Man to fake the requisite conviction. (Brown’s dumbed-down Umberto Eco–isms at least had fervor.) For the sequel, Angels & Demons, Howard seems hell-bent on atonement—of a sort. He delivers a shapely, stylish, white-knuckle horror-thriller that hits its marks with blood and thunder. It stinks to heaven, too, but it isn’t lame." The studioìs marketing department has been trying to drum up a scandal about the fact that the Vatican wouldn't let them shoot the film on location at Saint Peter's, but hey, why would they?
6:30, 9:30 pm
trailer
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Nuovo Sacher
Largo Ascianghi, 1 (Trastevere)
tel 06 581 8116

Filth and Wisdom (Sacro e Profano)
Madonna's directorial debut is the story of three roommates who delve into questionable behavior in pursuit of their goals. A Ukrainian immigrant, A.K. (Eugene Hutz), finances his dreams of 'trans-continental superstardom' with his band, Gogol Bordello, by turning tricks as a role-playing cross dresser. As A.K. whips the privileged of London into shape, he also secretly pines for the object of his affection, Holly (Holly Weston), an aspiring ballerina looking for her big break while moonlighting as a stripper. Meanwhile, Juliette (Vicky Mclure) steals medicine from her pharmaceutical job in hopes of helping Africa's youth. Reviews were not encouraging. In the Washington Post, Neely Tucker wrote, "Madonna fans will probably want to go anyway — hey, I can't stop you — but I can tell you that the movie delivers on neither of the promises of its title." Anthony Lane was even more scathing in The New Yorker: "In technical terms, more professional productions than this are filmed and cut on iMovie, by ten-year-olds, a thousand times a day." Manohla Dargis gave the film a slightly more balanced review in the New York Times, writing "Seriousness per se isn’t the problem (never is); the problem is the air of self-consciousness about being serious (or being taken as such), a tendency that has plagued Madonna’s own acting ever since her breezy 1985 breakout in “Desperately Seeking Susan.” That self-consciousness weighs on “Filth and Wisdom,” creating moments that are cringe-inducing... “Filth and Wisdom” is a ridiculously easy target, but it also creaks and strains with more ambition than most mainstream throwaways that just recycle the usual guns and poses."
10:30 pm (In English with Italian subtitles, Monday and Tuesday only)
trailer

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Nuovo Olimpia
Via in Lucina 16 G (Off via del Corso)
tel 06 686 1068

No movies in English this week.
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The Casa del Cinema is located in a villa on the grounds of the Borghese Gardens. Inside you'll find projection rooms, a library, a cafe, and a 2,500 DVD library with 24 Toshiba laptops available for viewing movies in private cubicles. The auditorium shows both new and vintage films, sometimes in English. It's possible to purchase an "Amici Casa del Cinema" card, which gets you into the screenings and gives you preferred treatment when reserving space to view DVD's. To get there, enter the Borghese Gardens at the top of Via Veneto (Piazzale del Brasile) and proceed to Largo Marcello Mastroianni. For info call 06 423601.
www.casadelcinema.it

In Rome Now Travel Guide: Rome, Italy, Movies in English