I am a philistine.
After wading knee-deep through the lavish praise being heaped upon Pedro Almodovar's Volver, that's the only conclusion I can draw. Either that, or I saw a completely different movie.
Volver is a movie in which nothing happens. Things are set up and then never paid off. The movie is all backstory and no story. It's a character study in which we're given no reason to care about the characters. It asks us to believe that grown adults, when faced with their mother who they thought had died four years earlier, would actually believe she's a ghost-- despite her physicality.
I spent much of the movie oscillating between abject confusion at the characters' behavior and impatient incredulity that none of the many promising plot threads were getting developed for a payoff.
Naturally, the gf loved it.
Posted by Peter at February 16, 2007 1:15 AM