I'm going to drop by here later with my take on the film, but first I'm going to give you, and anyone else interested, a story about my worst movie going experience of the year and, largely, in recent memory.
So this theater by me closed down today and I was home from college for the weekend. I had a free pass to any film because the power cut out during Dark Knight and everyone was sent home. This is a theater that probably hasn't seen an 'artistic' film in years and I was shocked to see that in their last weekend ever that they were getting VCB. Naturally I jumped on the chance to go out on top, the buzz and Filmspotting review sold it for me, so I'm hyped up to see this. I go with two friends at the 7:25 showing and, as expected, the room showing it is barren, with only two older women in the very back. We sit in the middle, after coming in ten minutes or so late because of mislabeled times, and I'm enjoying myself. Not laughing hysterically, but there are laughs scattered throughout and the use of irony, or at the very least contradiction, was much appreciated. All of a sudden I'm smacked across the face with Spanish. Now I'm not one of those Americans who can't deal with subtitles, in fact some of my favorite films in recent memory have been subtitled, but guess what, the bottom of the screen is completely cut off, showing only the very tip-top of each letter and the occasional word or two when the film needed two lines. So all that Bardem, Cruz, and father stuff was nonexistent for me. My one friend was fine because it seemed like mostly basic Spanish and he took about 4 years in high school, but my limited knowledge of Italian didn't help at all and I lost out on all of the dialogue because the theater wasn't prepared to show a film that needed subtitles. Hell, the subs in Hellboy 2, or whatever other film I saw there with limited subs, were fine. On top of that, for about the last 30 minutes a greenish-yellow line just appeared out of nowhere about an eighth of the way in to the screen, stage right. Thankfully it didn't cut off an eighth of the screen, just the couple of inches the vertical line ran, but it still resulted in a big green/yellow line cutting into the beautiful Barcelona surroundings or whichever character was on screen. Thankfully the line went away, the second the screen cut to black and started rolling the credits. Simply untolerable.