To Rome With Love
$35.99 (Blu-ray), Sony Pictures Home Entertainment
Woody Allen's latest postcard from abroad, "To Rome With Love," is heartwarming, funny and sexy, with a fierce competition between two actors over who steals the movie. Is it Alec Baldwin, as an architect who becomes something like the Ghost of Christmas Past, counseling a student (Jesse Eisenberg) not to fall into the web of a young man-eater (Ellen Page)? Or is it Pen?lope Cruz as a blindingly alluring prostitute with, if not a heart of gold, a well-hidden charitable streak? Baldwin and Cruz (who share no scenes) both deliver the goods for writer-director Allen.
Of the film's four storylines, one is expendable: Roberto Benigni as an office wonk who suddenly, inexplicably becomes a celebrity. It goes nowhere, despite Benigni's charm.
Allen gives himself a role as Jerry, a recently retired classical-music producer who equates retirement with death. His daughter's future father-in-law Giancarlo (Fabio Armiliato, a renowned tenor in real life) is a mortician who happens to sing opera like an angel ? but only when he's in the shower. Jerry coaxes Giancarlo onstage ? albeit, naked and scrubbing himself in a makeshift shower ? to sing Pagliacci. It's an old bit, but to hear Allen, 77, saying lines that he has written for himself is always comforting. No one makes neurotic funny like the master.
A featurette on the location shooting in Rome is a bonus feature.
The Paperboy
$28.99 (DVD), Millennium
There is plenty going on in Lee Daniels' "The Paperboy" ? a murky murder case with a wholly unsympathetic defendant (John Cusack in good, sweaty form); his oversexed pen pal/fianc?e (Nicole Kidman at her bravest); a simmering family drama; and the persistent stench of bigotry amid the swampy heat of late-'60s Florida. Heaping on more in the form of unnecessary deviations ? in both senses of the word ? does it no favors.
The murder case is no whodunit. We kind of figure Cusack's sociopathic Hillary Van Wetter stabbed a sheriff who terrorized, and himself occasionally murdered, hapless townies. Matthew McConaughey plays Ward Jansen, prodigal son of a newspaper publisher (Scott Glenn in white mutton chops), who returns to defend the repugnant Van Wetter. Ward is accompanied by fastidious journalist Yardley (David Oyelowo), a black interloper in a land where bias endures, though his British accent lends him a measure of cultural superiority. Then there's Ward's little brother Jack (Zac Efron, a long way from "High School Musical"), who falls hard for the wrong woman: Van Wetter's Charlotte (Kidman). Watching the whole psychodrama from the periphery is Jansen family servant Anita (Macy Gray, nailing it).
By the time you get to the nasty detour about Ward's, ahem, predilections, it feels like "The Paperboy" has finally added one dilemma too many.
Extras include cast interviews.
Mark Voger can be reached HERE.
Source: http://www.nj.com/entertainment/index.ssf/2013/01/zac_efron.html
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