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Author Topic: Vicky Cristina Barcelona  (Read 2014 times)

gateway

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Vicky Cristina Barcelona
« on: September 01, 2008, 01:36:24 PM »
Checked this one out based on the decent buzz it's been getting, and I have to say I'm puzzled by the good reception it has received. I will say that I loved the performances of Javier Bardem and Penelope Cruz, as well as Rebecca Hall (who is now my top on-screen crush), but I really don't think they are able to save a movie that seemed stilted and clumsy from the get-go. I appreciate this issue of the artist and the artist's relationship with society that Allen continues to explore, but I feel he has done it much better before and in a way that doesn't sound like a PBS special. Also, I really don't enjoy piling on Scarlett Johansson, but she's just not good here. I don't think she's any better here in an Allen dramedy than she is in a full-out Allen comedy like Scoop. And that narrator... I can't remember the last time I reacted this viscerally to film narration. This is the epitome of unnecessary, not once does the narrator provide you with information that you couldn't figure out yourself or Allen could have clued us in on in an easy, more fluid way. Five minutes into this movie I wanted to stab a scalpel in my eardrums just so I didn't have to hear that voice anymore.

One last comment: nice to see Pablo Schreiber of The Wire fame show up in the film, always loved him on that show.
« Last Edit: September 01, 2008, 01:50:17 PM by gateway »
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FLYmeatwad

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Re: Vicky Cristina Barcelona
« Reply #1 on: September 01, 2008, 09:57:58 PM »
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. 

Kevin Shields

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Re: Vicky Cristina Barcelona
« Reply #2 on: September 01, 2008, 10:40:34 PM »
I like this film.  I thought Woody taking on a different location was a great idea and the story is one of his best.

I do kinda wished the narration was taken away or spoken in Spanish.  On some hand, it advanced the plot yet I felt it was a distraction. 

I love some of the tributes Allen does like the bike scene with Cruz, Bardem, & Johansson in relation to Jules et Jim while I thought Rebecca Hall was far more sexier than Johansson.  Scarlett was way too one-note and she just didn't really do anything to a character that I felt was very interesting.  I think I've said it too many times. 
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gateway

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Re: Vicky Cristina Barcelona
« Reply #3 on: September 02, 2008, 12:05:33 AM »

I do kinda wished the narration was taken away or spoken in Spanish.  On some hand, it advanced the plot yet I felt it was a distraction. 


Doing the narration in Spanish would have been a nice touch. I'm not sure if it would have entirely alleviated my problems with that part of the film, but would have been an interesting twist.
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- Nathan Rabin (echoing my thoughts exactly)

FLYmeatwad

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Re: Vicky Cristina Barcelona
« Reply #4 on: September 02, 2008, 08:31:07 AM »
I wasn't really bothered by the narration too much, at least not until the very last line the narrator had, it ruined the emotion the ending packed.

smirnoff

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Re: Vicky Cristina Barcelona
« Reply #5 on: September 02, 2008, 09:56:26 AM »
Maybe it's because I saw this one before anyone started talking about it, but I had a great time with VCB. I'm not much of a critic when it comes to acting, all I can say is I either believe it or I don't. I had no problem with Johansson's acting, I never have. While at first the narration was a little peculiar, after 5 or 10 minutes it felt right.

Woody's writing is just a breath of fresh air. While I didn't get as many laughs or nifty aphorisms out of VCB as say Anything Else, which I unabashedly love, there was plenty to enjoy. Bardem found the perfect middle ground for his character. Somewhere between gallant and lecherous, genuine and shallow. This movie might've imploded if it wasn't for Bardem.

Clearly though, this movie is not living up to some people's expectations. While I've concluded that Woody's post-millennial movies are his best and have never much enjoyed anything older, there are certainly many people on the other side of that fence. Perhaps that explains some of the difference of opinion.

kizik

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Re: Vicky Cristina Barcelona
« Reply #6 on: September 06, 2008, 07:52:30 PM »
I had a lot of fun with this movie, and I had a smile on my face nearly the whole time. I thought it was incredibly romantic. Perhaps that's just b/c I spent time in Barcelona studying abroad, but I think there's more to it. It is a film that is nothing like real life - how many of us get to go to Spain and end up in steamy love triangles with sexpots like Bardem and Johansson? - and thus we are propelled into a kind of fairy-tale erotic wonderland with an amazing setting surrounding us.

Though I had problems with Rebecca Hall's acting at first, I warmed up to her as soon as she warmed up to Bardem. Though her fiance was a douche, and shorter than her, I still felt bad for him - he didn't deserve to be cast aside for Vicky's fleeting, juvenile crush on Bardem.

Ultimately, I drank this movie up completely. I took it exactly as it came - wistfully, romantically, almost like a modern-day fairy tale.

gateway

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Re: Vicky Cristina Barcelona
« Reply #7 on: September 07, 2008, 05:10:38 PM »

Though I had problems with Rebecca Hall's acting at first, I warmed up to her as soon as she warmed up to Bardem. Though her fiance was a douche, and shorter than her, I still felt bad for him - he didn't deserve to be cast aside for Vicky's fleeting, juvenile crush on Bardem.


That was a bright spot for me in a film I otherwise had a tepid response to. I really liked how Allen depicted the Vicky-Doug relationship. You can see it from both ways and really identify with both the quagmire that Vicky is in, yet you still feel a lot of sympathy for Doug. I didn't even think he was much of a douche, I thought he was a nice guy who reacted like most people would in that situation. He seemed to genuinely be in love with Vicky and his annoyance with Cristina I felt was completely understandable, since I thought she was a pretty insufferable person.

I might be biased though, since I'm actually pretty similar to Doug (though fortunately, I'm taller than him).
"I hope someday to be rich enough to smoke giant cigars while cackling maniacally."
- Nathan Rabin (echoing my thoughts exactly)

 

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