Popcorn Kernels: Q4 Review Purge

In which, while I'm still gearing up to begin reviewing current films in earnest, I release mini-reviews of some 2017 releases that aren't quite recent enough to meet my cutoff for getting the full review treatment, but still deserve a nod.

Lady Bird

Year: 2017
Director: Greta Gerwig
Cast: Saoirse Ronan, Laurie Metcalf, Timothée Chalamet
Run Time: 1 hour 34 minutes
MPAA Rating: R

In her senior year of high school, Lady Bird navigates her prickly relationship with her mother and a series of friendships and relationships as she comes of age and gets ready for college.

Given the Oscar buzz surrounding Lady Bird and the fact that it was being described as the female iteration of Boyhood, I was worried that the film would leave me a bit cold. Well, I'm here to report that I needn't have worried. Lady Bird is a frickin' delightful warm breeze of a film. It's especially relatable to me, because there's a large portion of the film dedicated to putting on a musical theater performance, something I dedicated a good 85% of my high school life too, but this film is genetically engineered to be relatable to as many people as humanly possible.

The central relationship of the film is between Lady Bird and her mother (played by Saoirse Ronan and Laurie Metcalf respectively), an effortlessly sharp evocation of the sharp edges and mercurial bonds between mothers and daughters, but every aspect of a teenager's developing friendships and loves is explored with a fine-toothed comb. Obviously nothing can beat Metcalf and Ronan (Metcalf especially delivers up a healthy platter of emotionally-laced barbs that cut to the bone), but every relationship in the film is a well-observed, matter-of-fact marvel, preserving in amber the vast spectrum of feelings that make up one's youth.

Like Boyhood, Lady Bird presents its story as more of a series of vignettes than an actual structured plot, but unlike Boyhood, it's damn funny while it's at it. I bark-laughed more than once in the theater, and the warm joviality of the film's tone makes it so that the dark moments are even more powerful, cast in sharp relief against the genial humor.

I'd say Greta Gerwig the writer is much more on the ball here than Greta Gerwig the director, who is content to bathe her terrific ensemble in desaturated, flatly presented frames, but that writing is whip-smart, capturing the lived-in reality of its setting and characters as if they've always existed, just waiting to be brought to life by her hand. Presumably on a vintage typewriter, because this is still Greta Gerwig we're talking about.

Rating: 8/10

Ingrid Goes West

Year: 2017
Director: Matt Spicer
Cast: Aubrey Plaza, Elizabeth Olsen, O'Shea Jackson Jr.
Run Time: 1 hour 38 minutes
MPAA Rating: R

Ingrid is an ex-mental patient who becomes obsessed with an Instagram lifestyle blogger, moving to Venice Beach to Single White Female her and ingratiate herself into her circle of friends.

If I didn't already have the CW show Crazy Ex-Girlfriend in my life, I'd think Ingrid Goes West was the work of a mad genius. And perhaps that's not fair to Ingrid, but that show handles how mental illness and obsession collide with the cold modern world in a way that wrings tears from me like a sopping wet rag. This movie doesn't quite reach that point, but what it does succeeds in its own, entirely unique way.

Taking the common inclination for Instagram stalking and ramping that up to its logical conclusion, Ingrid Goes West turns the psychologically dubious underbelly of social media into a twisted tale of terror. But as much as Ingrid's scheming is frightening and depressing, the fact that everything she does is instantly and completely relatable adds a startling layer of familiarity that is grotesquely juxtaposed with what could only be called a psychological thriller. It's a satirical indictment of the closed-off emotional world that social media creates, and it cuts deep.

Oh, and did I mention it's a comedy? It's not frequently laugh-out-loud hilarious, but Elizabeth Olsen is perfectly cast as the ne plus ultra of the perfectly primped Instagram hottie who lives her life out in a series of hashtags, misquoted authors, and superlatives. Then there's O'Shea Jackson Jr. (in only his second onscreen role), who breathes life into every scene he's in with an easygoing charm that allows you to forget that his character has literally one dimension and that dimension is that he loves Batman, which is maybe the most thoroughly boring character trait I could possibly imagine.

And Aubrey Plaza reaches emotional depths here that I never imagined her capable of, converting her usual deadpan personality from a sardonic sidekick role to a hollow shell for a totally empty personality. It's a shocking, sublime performance that interacts with the film's themes of identity formation and loneliness in a satisfying and visceral way. Sure, it's far from perfect, with a series of decisions in the third act that don't make a ton of sense or push the plot forward much - if at all - but as a showcase for these performers and the deeply felt central character arc, it's a tremendously satisfying bit of business.

Rating: 8/10

Coco

Year: 2017
Director: Lee Unkrich, Adrian Molina
Cast: Anthony Gonzalez, Gael García Bernal, Benjamin Bratt
Run Time: 1 hour 45 minutes
MPAA Rating: PG

On Día de Los Muertos, a young guitarist named Miguel rebels against his family, which has banned music for generations. He becomes trapped in the world of the dead, on a quest for a long-lost musician relative who can release him and approve of his love of music.

A lot of people have been saying Coco is a step down for Pixar, and they might not be totally wrong. The plot is entirely predictable from twenty minutes in, and it pulls much more from the Disney animated musical tradition than films like Up or Wall-E. But if you approach it as a Disney musical, then... Well, it's pretty superb.

Never forget for one minute that The Book of Life did more or less the same thing several years ago, a fact that I'm upset few people seem to have pointed out, but it's impossible to complain about getting multiple films based around the design and folklore of Día de los Muertos. And a mainstream American movie being so steeped in Mexican culture is almost unheard of. From the inclusion of a beautiful rendition of the folk song "La Llorona," to the appearances from many famous Mexican historical figures (including an extended cameo from Frida Kahlo, playing a hilariously exaggerated version of her personality that lovingly pokes fun at her favorite tropes and designs), Coco thoroughly pays homage to a non-American sphere, to the tune of becoming the highest grossing film in Mexican history.

But social issues aside, it's just a fun film to be around. It might not linger in the memory as long as Finding Nemo or even the short film Piper, but it's an emotional roller coaster with original songs that are much better than I would have expected from Pixar's decidedly un-musical crew (the most boring one, an inevitably Oscar-nominated musical theater standard called "Remember Me" that hits on the film's theme with the subtlety of  a jackhammer, was of course written by the Disney duo behind Frozen, and all the great ones that actually channel a distinct musical tradition were by co-director Adrian Molina and Germaine Franco - who also worked on The Book of Life, so she knows what she's doing).

Its depictions of the land of the dead are also pretty dang beautiful, an unnatural barrage of colors and lights and skeletal character designs that are enough to earn back the goodwill that the 22-minute short film Olaf's Frozen Adventure worked hard to obliterate. It's a tremendously satisfying film in its own right, even if its not totally unique or perfect. I'll be listening to the soundtrack for months to come, even if I don't feel the need to see the film again for a while.

Rating: 8/10

The Mountain Between Us

Year: 2017
Director: Hany Abu-Assad
Cast: Kate Winslet, Idris Elba, Beau Bridges
Run Time: 1 hour 52 minutes
MPAA Rating: PG-13

When their charter plane crashes in the mountains, two strangers must fight for survival and just maaaaybe fall in love while they're doing it.

There's maybe nothing better than a soapy romance movie if you just want to have a good time in the theater, and The Mountain Between Us has all the ingredients of being a perfect good-bad romantic thriller. Who wouldn't want to watch a movie you could describe as "Alive meets An Affair to Remember"?

Unfortunately, once again the vengeful gods of boilerplate cinema have struck. Mountain is hovering somewhere exactly between good-bad and mediocre, which is the most boring place to be. It just doesn't commit to being much of anything. Whenever the movie threatens to briefly become The Revenant, every problem from a slip down a mountainside to nearly drowning in a frozen lake is solved in less screen time than it takes for Kate Winslet to take a pee.

So what we're stuck with is a low-stakes survival thriller welded to a hideously contrived erotic romance. The script makes such an effort to paint Idris and Kate's clashing as a Brain vs. Heart conflict, it forgets to give them any character traits whatsoever, other than Winslet's fake American accent, the strained vowel sounds of which are the scariest thing in the movie.

But then the movie has the gall to very clearly end, then prattle on for a good fifteen more minutes, scraping up a thin gruel of drama from a pot that has long since been drained. There's nothing worse than a boring movie that overstays its welcome, and therefore I refuse to celebrate The Mountain Between Us as the second coming of B-movies, no matter how many mind-boggling unmotivated close-ups I get of Kate Winslet's watery eyes.

Rating: 4/10
Word Count: 1189

Popcorn Kernels: Smashing Pumpkins

In which we explore mini-reviews of movies I watched during the month of October, but weren’t quite important or horror-y enough to break their way into my scary movie-exclusive run of reviews.

Miss Bala

Year: 2011

Director: Gerardo Naranjo

Cast: Stephanie Sigman, Noé Hernández, Irene Azuela

Run Time: 1 hour 53 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

A beauty pageant contestant accidentally witnesses a raid on a club and becomes embroiled in a Tijuana drug war.

I was quite excited to see Miss Bala. A Mexican thriller from producers Diego Luna and Gael García Bernal, from the description I was imagining an edgy, female-led action romp that’s part Miss Congeniality and part Sicario. Of course, that’s not how the Mexican drug wars work. Unfortunately in its pursuit of grim, arty authenticity, Miss Bala completely eradicates any reason for it to exist.

If there’s one thing I hate in movies, it’s a protagonist without an ounce of agency in her body, and our beauty queen Laura Guerrero is empty of almost everything else, too. We know nothing about her, save that she has a friend who pushes her to join a beauty contest. We can guess as to why she agrees, but one hypothetical trait does not a lead character make. Laura is an empty plastic bag drifting through this movie, doing what other people tell her and consistently making the single dumbest choice it’s possible to make in any given situation. This is a chick who would order the salmon at a Denny’s if given the opportunity.

I get what they’re doing here. Laura is meant to be an innocent who is randomly swept up in the pure evil of the drug wars just by being in the wrong place at the wrong time. She’s not allowed an arc or a happy ending, because that’s the reality of it. Frankly, it’s a Halloween-esque storyline. That pure simplicity could have worked, but we need to understand more about Laura in order to sympathize with her plight. Unfortunately Miss Bala is an arid thriller that doesn’t allow any humanity to leak out.

Also the character motivations (both from the good guys and the bad guys) are incoherent, and the criminal plot is a sloppy mess, so Miss Bala is running on three flat tires. The opening act has a confused, frenzied energy, but as the story plays on and things don’t get any clearer, the film shows its hand: It really doesn’t know what it’s doing, and pretty much everything good is an accident. Then the pointlessly artsy lingering shots suffocate the film even more, as if it needed the help. It’s a damn shame that this movie utterly failed to meet its staggering potential, but they can’t all be winners I suppose.

Rating: 5/10

Death Proof

Year: 2007

Director: Quentin Tarantino

Cast: Kurt Russell, Zoë Bell, Rosario Dawson

Run Time: 1 hour 53 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Two groups of girls are stalked y a psycho stuntman who commits murders with his tricked-out car.

I’ve seen the highlights of the oeuvre of one Quentin Tarantino (Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs, what have you), but I’ve still seen far too few of his films, by some people’s accounts. I probably shouldn’t have rekindled that viewing with Death Proof, his contribution to the 70’s throwback double feature Grindhouse, which he created with Robert Rodriguez back in 2007. And no, I didn’t watch Planet Terror, but if you have a spare three hours handy, I would gladly borrow them.

Anyway, it turns out there’s a genre of film that Tarantino does not have mastery of, and that’s 70’s-style exploitation, which you think he’d fit into like a glove. But all his usual Tarantino-isms, which he applies liberally to Death Proof, are actively rejected by the genre like a bad transplant. First off, a key element he totally missed about grindhouse movies is that they’re short. The simplistic plot, which at certain points maps onto either the proto-slasher or rape-revenge genres is too elemental to be sustained for two f**king hours, especially when there are five minute swaths of film that so obviously could have been cut if he wasn’t so obscenely overconfident in his writing and his obnoxious cameo performance.

Speaking of writing… Tarantino is well-known for his dialogue, especially his long conversations laced with pop culture ephemera, during which he tosses all pretense of filmmaking to the floor and bathes in his own words for eight to ten minutes. This happens no fewer than four times in Death Proof, inflating the already punishing run time, and proving one thing beyond a shadow of a doubt: Tarantino can’t write for women.

These conversational scenes have worked extremely well in his other films, but the dizzyingly high proportion of women in Death Proof mean that these scenes usually take place within a group of 3 to 5 females. When you’re a person who views that half of the population as giant pairs of feet with assess attached to them, it becomes difficult to craft compelling characters, which he fails to do ten times over, at one point literally forgetting about the existence of a girl who had – until that moment – held a major role.

Some of the dialogue itself is still fun taken on its own (although the single best line is beaten to within an inch of its life with ceaseless repetition), but these scenes drag the film’s already wonky pacing down like an anchor. And it’s not like the sole major male character, Kurt Russell’s Stuntman Mike, fares much better. He’s given way too much to say, babbling like an infant in a way that completely undercuts his eventual menace. Russell does a great job of course, hamming it up to a pitch perfect degree in the gonzo grindhouse finale, but across the board this is probably the worst script Tarantino has ever written.

The feeling I’m left with after Death Proof is frustration, and I wish that wasn’t true. But after being pummeled with yet another of his overwritten black characters, endless conversation essentially using foot massages as a currency, and a scene with a cell phone that pointlessly derails its period authenticity for a subplot that never comes to fruition, who can blame me? There is good here, mainly in the kinetic sequences of violence that close out the film’s two distinct chapters, and a car chase that will have you biting your nails until your cuticles bleed, but just like everything else, they go on for waaaay too long.

Death Proof saps the energy out of itself at every turn, and as dearly as I want to like it, it’s its own fault that I can’t.

Rating: 6/10

Kristy

Year: 2014

Director: Oliver Blackburn

Cast: Haley Bennett, Ashley Greene, Lucas Till 

Run Time: 1 hour 26 minutes

MPAA Rating: N/A

A college student alone in the dorms over Thanksgiving break is targeted by a bloodthirsty cult.

Kristy is a Netflix horror movie if I’ve ever seen one. And I assure you, I most definitely have. Not quite a slasher, not quire a cultist film, not quite good, it is a film that clings to its own sorry existence by the skin of its teeth. But it’s reasonably entertaining and it’s free, so you might as well watch it.

By far the most interesting thing about Kristy is that it seems to genuinely still believe it’s the 90’s. There’s no winking throwback involved here, just a bunch of crop tops and an addiction to the wonders of modern gadgetry that seems to have missed the last decade or so of Apple press conferences. It’s odd that a movie that includes a crane shot clearly recorded by a drone (an exquisitely beautiful one, I might add, if a bit wobbly) should also insist that people still text like this: “U kil Kristy? ☺”

Its fabulously ill-conceived technobabble doesn’t stop there. Nor does it start there, as the entire opening is an exhausting slog through pixelated Darkweb nonsense that makes the webcam footage in Halloween: Resurrection look like 4K. Alright, after that brief detour to film nerd town, let’s get down to brass tacks. Kristy is a heaping helping of nonsense (apparently, by knowing Kristy’s phone number, the cult can hack 911?) but that has the unintended side effect of making it a pretty fun watch.

Kristy gets the job done in record time, never showing a full scene when a quick montage will do, and not overstaying its welcome by indulging in anything as ostentatious as a “theme” beyond the most superficial level. The crumpled tinfoil masks worn by the killers are pretty creepy, and although the film’s girl power finale is ruthlessly half-baked, it’s enough to have you rooting for her, even though her name isn’t even f**king Kristy.

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 1469

North Of The Border

Year: 2016

Director: Jonás Cuarón

Cast: Gael García Bernal, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Alondra Hidalgo

Run Time: 1 hour 34 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

I was so excited to see Desierto. A thriller from Alfonso Cuarón’s son Jonás about the racial tension at the U.S.-Mexican border reaching a violent extreme, it couldn’t have been a more timely project. I couldn’t wait to see how the immigration debate that has fueled this election cycle would be tackled from the Mexican perspective, lending even more evidence to the idea that genre films are far more political than mainstream Hollywood. Enter 2016. Every time I find myself excited about something this year, it has to at least mildly thwart my expectations.

Wheee…

In the Badlands, aging American cowboy Sam (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) is out hunting rabbits when he spots a group of illegal immigrants making their way across the desert. Because the cops won’t do anything, he takes it upon himself to eliminate them with his rifle and his trusty dog, Tracker. Thus begins a long fight for survival through the cactus, boulder, and snake-strewn terrain. There are a good dozen Mexican characters, but the only ones we care about are Adela (Alondra Hidalgo), a  young woman who is crossing with her lecherous caretaker Ramiro (Oscar Flores), Mechas (Diego Cataño), the right-hand-man of the leader of the expedition, and our main character and all-around good guy Moises (Gael García Bernal), who is crossing so he can be united with his wife and son.

And don’t think the hamhanded symbolism of that name has slipped past me, I’m just glad it wasn’t actually spoken aloud in the movie.

Desierto kicks things off well enough. The sun slowly rises from behind a rocky mountain as a faraway truck pootles across a vast expanse of sand, crawling across the empty frame as the title fades in. This indicates that, even as a tight, 90-minute thriller, Desierto has patience and a willingness to let a moment or mood breathe. And then, ten or fifteen minutes in, the action flares up with a sublimely horrifying massacre as Sam mows down a whole crop of immigrants in one fell swoop. It’s a dynamic, visceral moment that emphasizes his menace and the fact that, in the flat, barren desert, there’s nowhere to hide.

It’s horrifying stuff, made even worse by the thought that, in certain states where Desierto plays, audiences might just be cheering Sam on. But what the film does best is to humanize both sides. Sam shows what might even be a flicker of Last House on the Left-style remorse, but he is too warped and vengeful to know what to do with it. And the immigrants are never given much personality, but they have enough to prove a point: some of them are good people and some of them aren’t. But none of them deserve the fate delivered upon them.

This first act promises a smart, breakneck thriller that we only partially get. After the tremendous setup, Desierto just unspools with an endless procession of scenes of people running through the desert, completely failing to escalate the situation to any meaningful degree. A lot of elements it sets up don’t come into play again, which I guess defies the strict conventions of the thriller genre and avoids cliché, but in the process it also avoids having a particularly satisfying arc.

Gravity it ain’t.

Probably my biggest beef with Desierto is that its weakest point is at the exact moment we should be most keyed up: the climax. It’s a one-on-one battle around a giant rocky outcropping that… features two sweaty men inching around a boulder for twenty minutes. It’s exhaustingly tedious and converts a decently engaging thriller into an adrenaline-ectomy. I wanted so much to like Desierto, but it just falls short of being genuinely good

I do like the presentation of the villain here, giving him plenty of all-American cowboy shots that juxtapose against his inhuman evil (which is underlined by the fact that we never seem him take a single drink of water – in 120 degree weather!). But his victims only get two scenes in which to flesh out their personalities, and they squander it on a pile of cliché backstories and fumbled emotional manipulation.

By the third act, even before the tour de boredom that is the final 20 minutes, the cracks begin to show. We get to get up close and personal with some truly silly special effects and a tossed-off moralistic finale that would work if we had any sense of what kind of person Moises actually is. Desierto’s thriller elements don’t present enough of a challenge, drastically minimizing the terror after the opening setpiece an just kind of plateauing until that major nosedive. It’s still a largely enjoyable film, it just lacks the tightness and energy it could very easily have had.

TL;DR: Desierto is a solid thriller for exactly half its run time.

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 825

Popcorn Kernels: All Modovar

In our continuing quest to watch every Pedro Almodóvar movie ever made, we have spanned his filmography from his very first movie to his most personal, autobiographical work, to his most recent attempt to return to his roots, all of which are getting mini-reviews right here.

Pepi, Luci, Bom and Other Girls on the Heap (Pepi, Luci, Bom y otras chicas del montón)

Year: 1980

Director: Pedro Almodóvar

Cast:  Carmen Maura, Eva Siva, Alaska

Run Time: 1 hour 22 minutes

MPAA Rating: N/A

A fast-talking heiress, a submissive housewife, and a 16-year-old punk rocker come together to explore their desires, their individuality, and the anarchist lifestyle of Spain’s Movida movement.

So, it has come to this. When I found the disc for Pepi, Luci, Bom and Other Girls on the Heap hidden in my school library’s treasure vault, I knew I had to leap on the opportunity to rent it. It’s hard to find (in fact, I had to crack through a Region 2, subtitle-less DVD to get to this screening like I was in a National Treasure movie). But I knew there was a reason it’s hard to find. As Pedro Almodóvar’s first movie, it has certain… challenges. By his own admission, the continuity is a complex puzzle with pieces missing. And he never had a lick of film school, so he was flying by the seat of his pants. However, this was also going to be a treat. I was going t see what an Almodóvar movie looked like when stripped of its directorial polish. What raw core components does he possess?

Well, the first thing I’ll say is that Pepi, Luci, Bom is unmistakably an Almodóvar movie. It has the circuitous storytelling, the twisted 50’s pop art style, and the unbreakable bedrock of humor. Hell, it has Carmen Maura, his preferred lead actress for almost a decade. But this Almodóvar isn’t the quietly kinky artiste we’ve come to know and love. This is a young Almodóvar bristling with contempt for post-Franco Spanish culture, and he has made a messy loud, delirious, radically queer anarchist text. It’s unprofessional, but it makes up for that in volume, like all the best punk rock idols.

I’m used to queer, S&M, antiestablishment subtext in the director’s work, but here it’s just plain text. Hell, it’s supertext, leaping out of the frame and splattering all over your face, much like the scene where a submissive housewife receives a golden shower from a teen punk while giving a knitting lesson. It’s sublimely kinky (the Golden Shower scene is treated like Marilyn Monroe’s famous skirt updraft in Seven Year Itch), frequently funny, disconcertingly erotic work that – if it doesn’t quite function as a narrative – at least makes a distinct impression.

The key here is Almodóvar’s casual presentation. He’s not trying to shock you, he’s just showing how these people’s lives are different from ours in shocking ways. It’s a wonderfully out-there sexual and political statement.

Now, I’ll be frank. This movie’s narrative is a shattered disaster. There is such irreparable damage to its hull that Almodóvar must resort to title cards to make any semblance of sense. Continuity is an idea this movie has heard of, but long ago or maybe in a dream. The movie slams the brakes for several full musical performances from a punk band. But it also numbers among his funniest works, building big, blaring laughs out of incredulous, frequently perverse situations. This is a sex farce that doesn’t care if you’re gay, straight, masochistic, or whatever. It will throw you full force into the midst of this incredible, memorable, irreverent, wonderfully amusing heap.

Rating: 6/10

Bad Education (La Mala Educación)

Year: 2006

Director: Pedro Almodóvar

Cast: Gael García Bernal, Fele Martínez, Javier Cámara 

Run Time: 1 hour 46 minutes

MPAA Rating: NC-17

A movie director meets an old flame from boys’ school who wants to star in a movie he wrote, fictionalizing his own life. He discovers not all is exactly as it seems, and he must untangle the web of fiction and reality to discover the truth.

So, it’s time to skip forward from 1980 to 2006. With a couple odd decades to ruminate on what it means to be a film director, Almodóvar releases Bad Education, a film so clearly autobiographical that this title card fades directly to the title card of one of his protagonist’s films. Obfuscating this true to life material, which is also a scathing attack on the Catholic school system, are several layers of fictionalization that are perhaps the most frustrating of his career, and this is a man who does not shy away from circuitous narratives.

Although the narrative is difficult, I’s also supremely rewarding, providing a piano wire tension for the thriller elements that dress up this quasi-memoir. It’s telling that his film that most blends fiction and reality on the thematic level is also the one that literally folds in stark, horrifying truths from his own life. Almodóvar has always been obsessed with depicting the act of filmmaking and film viewing, but Bad Education combines them here, both within the narrative and the very structure of the film, which he uses to give him some distance from his past so he can really examine it properly.

It’s a fascinatingly complex journey, bolstered at every turn by the extraordinarily vivacious Gael García Bernal, who utterly transforms at every narrative juncture, playing a variety of different characters in various layers of the movie. His performance is a tour de force, layering broad comedy over a deeply tragic figure, then combining an object of lust with an unsettling threat, and always maintaining exactly what tone the script demands. He is key to understanding how the disparate portions of the film function, as well as how they all fit together.

With all this going on, Almodóvar isn’t up to as many visual tricks as usual, though one stunning, bloody transition is both shocking and profoundly thematic. It’s possibly the best cut of his entire career, so he’s not exactly coasting. Although my least favorite Almodóvar movies have all been his attempts at thrillers, which he is too warm and gooey to really pull off properly, Bad Education is a terrific, valuable piece of cinema packed with raw emotion and sensuality. This is certainly the director’s most personal work, and it shows by cutting straight to the bone.

Rating: 7/10

I'm So Excited! (Los amantes pasajeros)

Year: 2013

Director: Pedro Almodóvar

Cast: Javier Cámara, Pepa Charro, Cecilia Roth 

Run Time: 1 hour 30 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Three harried flight attendants attempt to distract the business class passengers from the fact that the plane is about to make a highly dangerous emergency landing.

At the time of this writing, I’m So Excited! is the most recent Almodóvar movie available in America (Julieta has already been released in Spain, but is taking its sweet time to make its way across the pond), which competes this slate of mini reviews’ span from the beginning of his career to the present. Some 36 years down the road from Pepi Luci, Bom (33 at the time of I’m So Excited!’s release), things have certainly changed. Two Academy Awards grace his shelf (Best Foreign Language Film for All About My Mother, Best Original Screenplay for Talk to Her) and a whole host of actors and actresses have returned time and time again, had fights and vanished for decades, then resurfaced with newfound vitality.

One of the strengths of Almodóvar’s work is his massive pool of performers, which he draws from pretty much constantly. Every movie he makes is graced with familiar faces and future celebrities, because he knows who’s good to work with and has an eye for recognizing raw talent. I’m So Excited! has a lousy reputation among fans of his work, but one thing nobody can argue against is his casting: Almodóvar stalwarts Penélope Cruz and Antonio Banderas cameoing as hapless airline employees, Volver standout Lola Dueñas as a psychic virgin, Cecilia Roth (who’s worked with Almodóvar since Pepi, Luci, Bom) as an aging dominatrix, and future Sense8 hottie Miguel Ángel Silvestre as a drug mule on his honeymoon. And that’s just some choice cuts from the jam-packed cast.

As you can see from those character descriptions, I’m So Excited! is very much a  return to the wacky ensemble comedy format that  defined the first decade of Almodóvar’s career. It’s a fast-moving, casually filthy romp with queer overtones, undertones, and everywheretones. The reason it has such a foul reputation is that it’s a stark departure form his recent works, which have been more prestigious dramatic fare like your Volvers and your Bad Educations. There is no such desire for cinematic respect in I’m So Excited!, which is leagues more shallows than his masterpiece Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, but as uproariously funny as anything he’s put out. This is the first film in a long time where he’s not putting on airs, and it’s mighty refreshing to see him let his freak comedy flag fly.

That said, there are some major, perhaps film-breaking flaws in I’m So Excited! A less-than brief interlude where we abruptly leave the perspective of the plane completely disembowels the film. Although this sequence is just as funny as everything else, the hysterical midair farce slowly building its momentum comes to a screeching halt that it never fully recovers from. And the rigorously classical comedic structure loses its timelessness with a funny, but extremely forced joke about Twitter. It’s odd that a reference to social media should feel anachronistic in 2013, but Almodóvar has built such a 50’s-esque pastiche universe in his filmography that it just feels like a violation.

But so it goes. I’m So Excited! is a spectacularly lopsided, shallow film that limps across the finish line, but it never stops being a hilarious, raunchy good time. Pitch perfect comic performances bounce around the confined, pressurized tube like pinballs, creating a raucous, glittering chaos that’s part Airplane!-esque mania, part Women on the Verge battle of the sexes, and part gay pride parade, with a dash of Beavis and Butthead scatological humor. It’s a blast, so it doesn’t need to be a masterpiece. Almodóvar has made enough of those to last a lifetime, so let’s just let him have fun.

Rating: 7/10

Word Count: 1724