This movie stinks
As always, my reasons for not watching this movie are based purely on the trailer. So if I'm totally wrong blame it on whoever is responsible for the marketing of "Volver".
I love Almodovar, but I won't watch his "Volver" because:
- I didn't detect any musical numbers in this one.
- I'm not a fan of Penelope Cruz. She's the very poor man's Sophia Loren, married to the very poor man's version of Tom Cruise, and unlike someone with real star quality like, say, Jack Nicholson, there was never any bad movie that was saved by her presence alone, she simply muddles through.
- Almodovar is always dancing dangerously close to the edge of a precipice as far as tastefulness goes. He's kitsch, he's crude, he's sometimes downright immoral. But a lot of the times that just translates into honesty and it's a shot in the arm of real life and blood into the movie scene. And then when he goes overboard it's just unbearable. In one of his recent movies you could see a trannie singing on stage with a blood stain on her dress over the pelvis area, I suppose to simulate menstrual blood. I imagine the idea was to say she was such a great female impersonator that she even went so far as to fake having her period. That is repulsive.
In "Volver," if I understood the trailer correctly, and unless I am very much mistaken, there is a scene where a woman senses the ghost of her dead mother because she can smell her fart. I will not go watch a movie where family members can identify each other by what their farts smell like, and where people continue to fart long into the after life and beyond, just to upset their off-spring. I'm laughing right now as I write this, it's a juvenile joke, but I won't pay good money to go watch it. That's it, I got to draw the line somewhere, and that's just stupid.
- We watch Penelope enter the bathroom to use the toilet, pull down her knickers and pretend she's doing her business. Another cheap attempt at toilet humour. I'm sure Almodovar somehow made that scene look like it was necessary to tell the story, but to me it just makes watching the movie itself unecessary.
- In another scene Penelope locks and wraps up a fridge with a rope, and asks one of her friends to help her bury it, and to not ask her any questions as to why. Would you help a friend bury something big enough to hide a dead body in, and not ask them any questions?
I was intrigued by the premise that this was a story about how people, women especially, even in today's age and after centuries of Christianity, pass on from generation to generation this whole system of beliefs based on their own irrational superstitions. I find that sort of thing especially natural in women, because of how the Church despizes and discriminates against them. Believing in stuff you know the Church disaproves of is a way of fighting against its comtempt. But none of what I saw made me want to get to know better this particular set of women. If that's how their superstitions drive them to act maybe it's high time they joined the 21st century.
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