Dry, Boring, Lifeless, Inept

Rating: 2/10 (18 August 2008)

"Vicky Cristina Barcelona" is yet further proof, if proof were needed, that Woody Allen has no soul. Watch carefully; when he passes mirrors, is there any reflection? Javier Bardem is one of the sexiest men, and best actors, alive. Penelope Cruz's is a living Barbie Doll. How could Allen take these two sexually attractive creatures and build a lifeless, bloodless, dry as dead leaves, utterly boring, inept film around them? How long has Allen been making movies? And yet he commits a cardinal sin that the greenest tyro is warned against: a movie is a *movie*, not a book. Let your movie tell your story. Don't provide voice-over narration. There are exceptions of course; film noir, for stylistic reasons, relies on voice-over narration.
But why, in this pathetic, amateurish exercise, is there a nerdy, dispassionate, uninteresting, flat, white male voice horning in on the action, and narrating almost every scene? Two beautiful young American girls get into a taxi cab at a Spanish airport. The narrator, sounding like an antiseptic-soaked cotton swab, there to remove you from any suspension of disbelief, or involvement, you may have been able to conjure up, announces, flatly, "Vicky and Cristina are two beautiful young American girls. They are getting into a taxicab at a Spanish airport," or some such cloddish, invasive, commentary.
Did Allen do this because he knows he is too old and too marked by his tabloid love life to appear in his own movies? And, so, rather than having to watch Allen on screen, directing everything, including the viewer's emotional response, with the fury of a puppeteer who doesn't much like or respect his own puppets, but, rather, envies them their youth, beauty, and sex appeal, and so makes them as ridiculous and empty as possible, we have to endure this grating voice of voice-over narration? I mean, really. You're a filmmaker. You are blessed enough to have *Javier Bardem* and *Penelope Cruz* in your movie. What degree of arrogance, of cluelessness, would lead you to believe that the audience needs to be *told*, by this nerdy little American male voice, what Bardem and Cruz are thinking, feeling, doing, when these superb performers are on screen, acting everything out with their top notch talent? Anyway, the plot is a bore, and utterly without insight. The movie is all about screwing and it says nothing new or true about love or people or relationships. The viewer is given nothing to care about, to cry over, even to laugh at. Watch the movie Allen was trying to make, "Jules and Jim."