'I'm So Excited!' & 'Pacific Rim' Reviews

I'm So Excited! is the latest film, this time a surreal comedy, from Pedro Almodovar. After the atrocious and cloying The Skin I Live In this is a breath of fresh air from the Spanish auteur. The film takes place mostly on a plane which circles the air space above Toledo, Spain waiting for a place to make an emergency landing due to defective landing gear.

For the first 15 minutes or so of the film I hated it. Not because of the film itself, which takes some adjusting to, but because of the packed audience in the theater laughing uproariously at every little thing, every innuendo, every flamboyant flourish from the three homosexual stewards. I felt like I was missing something, not getting the joke, or I was in a room full of people who were uncomfortable with the subject matter.

The film jostles and jerks from genre to genre- slapstick to soap opera to porn to thriller to romance. There is no coherent narrative or arc. All the characters are complex and confident and fun and we never find too much about any one of them. Sex, drugs, and drinking are discussed and explored with an inherent casualness and lack of judgement which is refreshing.

The film isn't deep but it is layered. It's not a laugh-out-loud comedy like the audience I went with seemed to think- laughing at perceived homosexual stereotypes. But it is goofy and odd and playful. There are no real stakes but there is no need for them. The film constantly has you guessing what is or will happen but nothing ever does. And that is fun. Your constantly engaged and guessing and new kinks and secrets are revealed and tricks and games are played.

See It.

Pacific Rim is Guillermo Del Toro's robot apocalypse movie. The movie gets into the action fast and spends just enough time on minimal explanation to set up the entire movie for us- Alien creatures are coming through a portal on the ocean floor to take over Earth, we created huge robots to fight them.

The ensemble cast is varied, committed, and obviously having fun through out. What their is of a plot is pretty much what you'd expect from the trailers and exceeds expectation with efficient story tellng as well as personal character touches coupled with the huge CGI action sequences.

The best summer blockbuster I've seen in years. The only action movie I've seen recently that had a justified running time over two hours.

See It.