Have you seen this movie? (it's good)

I just came home from my first cinema experience in France.  It's not all that much different than going to see a movie in the States.  Except in France the theatre is still faintly perfumed with body odor and old-cheese smell, as Mark so eloquently pointed out. (My dates were Mark & Laila)  So, we saw the movie, Vicky Christina Barcelona, a Woody Allen film and here is my mini review:

I was entertained the whole time; at no point was I annoyed with the film.  I loved the development of the characters, two recently graduated college students, who decide to travel together to Spain to stay with relatives for the summer.  Scarlette Johansson plays the passionate and naive dreamer who falls in lust quickly with a Spanish abstract painter, played by Javier Bardem.  He is a persuasive, smooth talking, lover-taking divorced artist and upon his first meeting with the two women proposes a 'rendezvous a tois', if you catch me here.  The girls end up agreeing to travel with him to his home village of Olviedo.  'Sensible' Vivky, played by Rebecca Hall, is engaged to a man in NYC and is reluctant to go on this mini-journey, but does end up going to keep on eye on her friend, Christina.  

Affairs begin left and right, engagements are nearly called off, hearts ache.  It's a typical Woody Allen exploration into LOVE.  The idea of what love really is, what are the rules of a relationship, what does it mean to stay in a realtionship when the fire of passion has died.  It examines the possibility of being in love with one person and in lust with another at the same time.  It also touches on some necessary emotions if you are making a film about love, which Allen was: jealously, revenge, and forgiveness.  

Enter into the story my favorite, Penelope Cruz, who plays Maria Elena, Bardem's unstable and manic ex-wife, an artist herself, who enters into the movie about half way through.  Penelope makes this movie.  I mean, I know that like Scarlette J. is Woody Allen's muse or something, but really I can't see why.  If you're a person looking for a muse why look to anyone but Penelope Cruz?  She is so beautiful in this movie (as she is in all her movies) and she brings the rage into her arguing scenes.  It must be that hot Spanish blood...(ps: Have you all seen Volver with Penelope Cruz, that came out in 2006? OMG; if you haven't please go out and rent it this weekend, great movie.)  Anyways,  I won't give away too much of her role in Vicky Christina Barcelona.  

A summary= great movie. It was funny, sexy, serious, but not too serious.  Filmed in a beautiful location (in & around Barcelona) and it incorporated Gaudi's architecture into the story so you get to see a lot of that.  The characters in the movie were constantly eating food and drinking tons of good looking wine.  The dialogue was, thankfully, a toned down version of a usual Woody Allen script.  You got the biggest hint of 'typical' Allen in the character Vicky, who plays an uptight-ish college graduate with a dull fiance in New York, whom she is really not sure she is in love with.  Every decision she makes is belabored by lots of groveling and bantering back and forth.  She never seems to work things out and just ends up frustrated.  She can't ever be content with a choice and ends up looking like a person who lives life filled with regrets.   

I assume, Woody Allen's muses are happy to see he's changed his normal routine of filming in NYC, and switching it up to Espana.  Go see it, hope you enjoy it too and I hope you were somewhat amused with my first little attempt at playing a "film critic".

Bon Weekend!