A year ago I said post-Annie Hall Woody Allen movies fall into one of three camps:

1—Everyone has affairs. How does it affect discourse?

2—Here’s how to get away with murder. Now you’ll be tortured by the meaninglessness of the universe.

3—I have a fairly literary existential crisis. I will explore it through a magical deus ex machina.

To Rome with Love is very much an example of number one. Very few  characters in this movie escape with their relationships unsullied. Thankfully, it’s not the only thing Allen is dissecting here, it splits the bill with an examination of our species’ obsession with celebrities.

There are four stories at play in To Rome with Love: One: A retired theatrical producer, Jerry(Allen, Scoop), and his wife (Judy Davis, Marie Antionette) fly to Rome to meet their daughter’s (Alison Pill, Midnight in Paris) Italian fiancé, but when Jerry hears his new paternal in-law sing opera in the shower, he’s convinced he must get him onto the stage. Two: A successful American architect (Alec Baldwin, 30 Rock) revisits his old stomping ground in Rome and relives a time when as a young man (Jesse Eisenberg, The Social Network) he fell for a passionate tornado of a girl (Ellen Page, Inception) when she comes to visit his girlfriend (Greta Gerwig, Damsels in Distress) whom he lives with. Three: A very normal Italian clerk (Roberto Benigni, Life is Beautiful) becomes an overnight celebrity when the media decide to focus their attention on him. He does his best to live a normal life now that he’s famous but soon finds the attention of throngs of adorning young women too much to resist. And four: A pair of young newlyweds move to Rome to start a new life, innocent circumstances immediately separate them and through misunderstanding and coincidence the young man ends up in the care of a gorgeous prostitute (Penelope Cruz, Vicky Christina Barcelona) and the young woman ends up on the arm of her favorite male movie star. I’m pretty sure you know what’s going to happen there.

Historically speaking, Woody Allen follows every smash hit he makes with something really REALLY awful, either boring, sickeningly pretentious, or a flat out flop. He followed Annie Hall with Interiors, Hannah and Her Sisters with Radio Days, Crimes and Misdemeanors with Alice, Bullets Over Broadway with Mighty Aphrodite (I maintain that it’s not good), Small Time Crooks with The Curse of the Jade Scorpion, and Match Point…I can barely even stand it…He followed Match Point with Scoop. So really, it’s kind of a miracle that To Rome with Love is as palatable as it is given that it’s coming after Midnight in Paris.

To Rome with Love isn’t a great movie, but it’s all right. The film begins and ends with random Italians telling the audience that Rome is a city full of stories. I guess so that Allen can tell these four different vignettes without having to connect them. I would have been fine without the intrusive Italian traffic cop at the beginning. Sure, his breaking the fourth wall right out of the gate clues me in to the fact that we’re more in the realm of satire and exploring themes than in a window to the real world, but he put me on edge right away. It made the beginning of every story feel overly written, like the actors were paying more attention to annunciating their words in a precise order than they were in getting into their characters. After all the setups fall into place though, the rest of the ride is an easy one to take.

The storyline that follows Alec Baldwin’s sardonic examination of the romantic misadventures of his past self and the women involved in his life is particularly interesting. Those scenes are usually really uncomfortable in Allen’s movies because you can see the mistakes the characters are making, but they’re made A LOT more fun with Baldwin telling the characters what the audience is thinking to their face. That’s the kind of rule-bending character examination I love to see Allen do. It was also nice to see Woody Allen play that familiar stuttering character again, wry intellectual asides and all. And Jesse Eisenberg and Ellen Page might be the closest pairing to Allen and Keaton I’ve seen in one of his movies yet. Or maybe they just wore the same clothes really well.

It was great to see Roberto Benigni on screen again and his storyline of an average shmoe being famous for being famous was a fun way for Allen to let us know what a fickle and illogical thing fame is. But his final word on the subject is something the entire internet generation will have no problem relating to: Life can be cruel whether you’re a celebrity or you’re poor and unknown. But of the two, it’s better to be a celebrity.

My personal opinion: The locations were nothing less than astounding. I want to go to Italy right now. As storytelling, not a bad rental (can I still say that now that video stores are extinct? Not a bad download?), but I’ll barely remember it by the time his next one comes out a year from now. –Jake Jarvi

With blockbusters steadily hitting the movie theaters every weekend, two vibrant theater companies have created pieces that rival any celluloid romantic comedy or action vehicle out there.

In Exit, Pursued By A Bear, Theatre Seven of Chicago presents a conflicted heroine in the Reese Witherspoon or Emma Stone mode. Billed as a revenge comedy, playwright Lauren Gunderson takes us on an eccentric journey as kindhearted Nan (a transcendent Tracey Kaplan) plots to teach her abusive husband Kyle (an effective, multi-leveled Ryan Hallahan)a lesson. With the help of Sweetheart (a joyous Elizabeth Hope Williams), an exotic dancer with acting dreams, Nan knocks out Kyle and duck tapes him to a chair. This Jimmy Carter loving Southern house wife plans to use Sweetheart and, quickly arriving best friend, Simon (enjoyably melodramatic Ryan Lanning), a gay man with a penchant for costuming, to help her get Kyle to show remorse. But, Nan is soon torn between reconciliation and leaving her savage mate for the wildlife to devour.

Granted, the scenario plays into its stereotypes. But, Gunderson and director Cassy Sanders allow enough subtlety and true creativity to shine, beginning with the show’s title – a stage direction from Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, that this enjoyable evening eventually washes over you with a slightly poignant mist. There is comedy, here, yet food for thought, as well.

Meanwhile, Roundhouse’s Predator: The Musical 2.0 emerges as a perfect filmic companion piece to Exit, Pursued By A Bear’s femme based antics.

Highlighting the often homo-erotic context of action and buddy films, this production plays high homage to the Arnold Schwarzenegger classic while continuously having fun at its expense, as well.

The events of the film, wherein a handful of dangerous men encounter an often invisible enemy, are delivered in flashback by an elderly Dutch, Schwarzenegger’s character in the film. Of course, here, much dancing and shirtlessness occurs as these guns for hire are hunted down and eventually retaliate against their vicious enemy.

Lead by an enthusiastically enjoyable Cody Evans as the young Dutch, this production does occasionally come loose at the seams.  But, director Derek Elstro and his smart writing crew are in on the fun, allowing the show to perfectly hit its marks as it own creation.

This is especially evident with Khalil LaSaldo’s hysterical Dillon, whose inspired dance moves cause contagious laughter, and the powerful presence of Glenese Hand, whose cool athletics seem to have no bounds, as the all consuming Predator.

Exit, Pursued By A Bear runs through July 15^th at Greenhouse Theater, 2257 N. Lincoln Avenue, 773-404-7336. Predator: The Musical 2.0 runs through July 7^th at Stage 773, 1225 W. Belmont, 773-327-5252. —Brian Kirst

I really love quirky, high concept movies. Steve Carell and Keira Knightley on a road trip when an asteroid apocalypse is imminent, running into the kind of dark and whacky characters and situations a global catastrophe might create sounded like a home run to me. Wrong-o. A novice director helming her own wishy-washy script was too much of an anchor for this great cast to keep afloat.

Dodge (Steve Carell, The Office) is the kind of guy who not only still goes to his unsatisfying job when the end of days is announced, he also still parks in his reserved spot on the far side of an empty parking lot. Penny (Keira Knightley, The Duchess) is a half-stoned, self proclaimed romantic [read: super hippie] who just wants to stop falling for the wrong men and get back to England to spend her final hours with her family. One riot-filled evening they join forces to try and help each other achieve one final goal and embark on a chaotic journey across the country where they encounter vignettes such as a crazy restaurant/free love commune, bomb shelter-ready military men determined to ride it out, and a poetic trucker determined to commit suicide by hiring an assassin to murder him. They also end up stumbling onto catharsis and falling in love or something, I guess.

It seems like the demands of the concept were just a little too large and unwieldy for screenwriter Lorene Scafaria to pull together, because she wrote the adaptation of indie favorite Nick and Nora’s Infinite Playlist, proving that she can nail small scale character comedies. It’s not only a single problem the screenplay has either, there are a few. High concept movies are about fleshing out and realizing an unconventional situation—let’s say, the world ending—so we can experience something very unique in a way we can relate to it. The situations she chose with which to explore the concept were extremely rote and rushed, like she was completely uninterested in her central conceit. More than that, the countdown to the apocalypse made all of the supporting characters either really mean spirited, ultra pathetic, or bong-hitting philosophers, which was probably supposed to be funny but instead just left me without anyone to root for. Also, our two protagonists are awfully distractible for a pair of folks in the ultimate race against time. Every time they stopped to sit on a beach and watch serene flower children get baptized in the ocean (I think???) while their missions remained unaccomplished I felt like screaming at them, “The world is ending! Stop stopping every five minutes! Make some progress!” Not only that, but every time they stopped for anything somebody seemed to have a monologue while the camera tracked toward them on the back of a team of snails. Some of the monologues were great, every actor performed their hearts out, but it all just played too long. The fact that every supporting character got to have a soliloquy is probably how they landed people like Patton Oswald, William Peterson, and Martin Sheen in characters that appear in 3 to 5 pages of an indie movie, but the speeches slowed everything down at every turn.

Scafaria also chose this as her directing debut, which is a little unfortunate, because she somehow managed to dampen the better moments in her writing. It’s like I could see them working on the page and it helped me understand why so many great actors signed on, but the pacing or the blocking kept knocking the setups flat. At least a couple of the gags were too good for the mispacing and over-writing to ruin. In a world where all the rules have just been thrown out, a conventional housewife telling her downtrodden party guest, “It’s okay. You don’t have to try heroine if you don’t want, sweetie,” is just too unexpected not to solicit a chuckle, but overall the best parts of the script were flattened by skipping ahead too quickly and some really potentially effective scenes were ruined by her aversion to trimming them.

Added to that, Carell and Knightley were really fantastic in their respective roles, but the total absence of romantic chemistry between them turned some pretty dodgy writing in the third act into an unmitigated disaster of cringe-worthy dialogue and plot turns. It felt so forced that I actually said “Come on!” out loud in the theater.

My personal opinion: Skip this. Go see Brave. I know I’m going to. –Jake Jarvi