REVIEW - I'M SO EXCITED!

I've never quite got along with Pedro Almodovar's movies, and here's why: his films are like cinematic moodboards, all ideas and motifs jumbled up, waiting, needing to be coalesced. Almodovar evidently sees no such need. He is content for melodrama to exist alongside farce (as it so often does, to be fair), for varying levels of absurdity to take command at one point or another, even the utter absence thereof, for arbitrary scenes of brazen sauciness, for interludes of one form or another to carry the film off for a duration, with no regard for plot nor pace. It is argued, by most, that this is all part of the fabric of Almodovar's style. To me, it comes across as patches of many different fabrics, loosely stitched together, liable to fall apart at any moment. Much of the fabric is of high quality (or affably low quality), and this rough conglomeration of elements can be very entertaining, but the plain fact is that much of the fabric is also ill-conceived and ineffective. I'm So Excited bursts into life with every jolt of colour in the dazzling visual palette (this being an Almodovar film, everyone is dressed in various degrees of fab-u-lous), with every bawdy one-liner, and with the musical number that has given it its English title. But it lapses into a coma with every awkward joke that Almodovar prolongs way past its welcome, every stereotype he seems too busy to fully deconstruct or to fully exploit, and a tedious sojourn into Madrid which is almost as long as it is irrelevant. But that's just me, I suppose. And I did laugh, as I often do at Almodovar movies. I'm So Excited has its ups and downs - others may encourage me to embrace the downs, but I have tried and I have failed. I'm not trying any more. We just don't quite get along.