Against my better judgement, I watched “When in Rome“. And how, do I regret it.
Not funny
Where do I start?
In a nutshell this movie is about a woman called whatever who is so career orientated that she’s jaded about love. Her little sister falls in love with an Italian and has a wedding a Rome.
The movie starts with a scene with a bunch of postcards rotating around and eases out into an actual scene, which was probably the only part of the movie that I liked.
And then that’s when craziness started. After that, there were so many cringe worthy moments.
- The acting is so forced and pretentious and fake and unoriginal. It’s like the writer of this movie completely gave up and just recycled every romance-comedy there is. No one in this movie seemed approachable to me at all.
With a storyline like that, not even an A lister could save the movie at all. Poor Danny DeVito! Poor Anjelica Huston!
I think that it’s enough to watch the trailer itself than enduring 1 hr 30 mins of this.
There were so many made up things like :
- Love fountain? There is no existence of a love fountain as far as I know. The closest to fit this legend would be the Trevi fountain but it looks nothing like this.
- Insofar, after attending a couple of weddings here, I’ve never heard of a tradition of breaking a vase to show how many years your matrimony will be.
- What really bothered me the most about this movie is that almost every Italian in this movie are not Italian and instead playing the stereotypical role and all these made up traditions. Which is forgiveable if it’s humorous (like Russell Peters) but the movie wasn’t even funny.
Like the overly friendly taxi driver in the beginning of the movie. His accent doesn’t sound convincing to me … not to mention his mannerisms. The wolf plushie with the Roma jersey is a nice touch though.
The ONLY Italian that I could detect are the carabinieri on horses. So yay for the token Italians!
In conclusion : It’s cute. The only saving grace of this movie is how the mains were eye candy enough for me to stay concentrated. Watch with caution when you want a mindless fluff romance and avoid it like the plague if you are an Italophile.
ugh i so agree with you! i watched this with my sister and after the movie we were like “erm… what?”. I also don’t like those hollywood movies with token Italians, or whatever other nationalities. It just feels so cheap!
Indeed. It really bugs me that a movie set would go all the way to Italy and get non Italian actors to portray Italians. I mean, was it really that hard to set up an audition there?