I'm So Excited

So this was a completely random choice of film, in my bid to have seen every main feature in the cinema I currently work at I decided to see a subtitled Spanish film which I had no knowledge of beforehand. Actually, I tell a lie, Pedro Almodovar had directed Volver, a film starring Penelope Cruz which I found made so little sense I couldn't even begin to worry about the language barrier, her mother or some old lady faked her own death or something... It was years ago... But it was odd. I know that Almodovar is well respected in the industry and got a whole boat load of awards for Volver and his most recent (before this) feature, The Skin I Live In. Those were films about serious subject matter but were quirky and well crafted, I did not expect what occurred in I'm So Excited to happen.

The best thing about this film is how blatant it is, it's a massively soapy smutty sequence of events taking place on a plane which needs to make an emergency landing because of a problem with the... I want to say wheels... But anyways, there aren't any free landing strips which would accommodate such a tricky landing, so they are all flying about in the sky waiting to make a perilous landing. To keep the plebs happy the whole economy class are basically drugged into comas while the business class are left to their own devices, this largely involves drinking and being incredibly randy.

So there are three gay stewards managing the madness, the two captains, and the selection of passengers up front who all take part in some form of drunken sexual acts. It's about as ridiculous as any Spanish soap opera, or in the words of Seth Cohen, a telenovela. To be honest, my memory of Volver was that, although Penelope Cruz was fantastic in it, the story was a bit silly, so I wasn't expecting a serious film, but this was beyond that, it was ridiculous. The consensus seems to be that Almodovar wanted to cheer up people, because Spain is in the shitter lately, and his aim was just for a bit of fun entertainment for the grown-ups to escape from the depressing realities of existence, and as telenovelas are very much a popular thing in Spain, we all love a bit of a soap opera, we all love a bit of smuttiness, he achieves what he set out to do, it was fun!

So many reviews have been negative about this film, that even though all the smuttiness is occurring, it's not funny, it's not witty, it's just not up Almodovar's standard; I think people are being far to hard on the film. I enjoyed the stupidity, the salacious tales, the fact that it was all beyond stupid, the characters were two dimensional and facile, the set looked like a completely stationary and not once did I believe we were actually on a plane, the whole getting drunk and randy was just stupid but to be perfectly honest, I thought it was fun. Also, the extremely cynical people out there were totally impressed by the dance routine the gay stewards decide to do mid-way through the film to 'I'm So Excited' (get it?), well I have not laughed so loudly or repeatedly in a cinema in ages and that was just what I needed, a bloody good laugh.

Two things that irked me slightly were the sequences in which the soap opera star calls his girlfriend and his ex magically comes across the phone (the girl is beyond beautiful). So we have a whole sequence in which we're not on the plane and following her story, but it lends nothing to the tale as a whole (we just get to spend time with that beautiful girl) and non of the other characters get such a back story - as far as decisions go it made no sense and added nothing to the film apart from we were away from the plane for a short period of time. The other thing I felt slightly uncomfortable about was the virgin woman sneaking into economy class and basically performing sexual acts on an unconscious passenger, it's done for laughs but to be perfectly honest if it was a man doing that to a woman it would be pretty rapey... Actually it was pretty rapey... Apart from that!... I've just realised how bloody odd this film is...Well, a bunch of stereotypes having sex on a plane is fine by me.

To be perfectly honest, watching three blatantly gay spanish men dance cabaret around an aeroplane cabin to 'I'm So Excited' was about enough to keep me happy for the rest of my week. Of course there are bigger films coming out soon, Star Trek - Into the Darkness, The Great Gatsby, Man of Steel and Hangover Part III, all of which I intend to watch...