#I get much more torn about Polanski for eg bc he is demonstrably an awful man but some of his movies are so damn good.

[ruegracieuse]

Why do you think Vicky Cristina Barcelona is annoying?

ehh it’s a problem I have with a lot of Woody Allen films (beyond his many personal problems). I just find that it has pretensions of being a film that has something significant to say about love, and specifically about women’s relationships to (heterosexual, but I don’t think Woody is self-aware or analytical enough to realise this specificity) love. The problem is that I don’t think Woody Allen has enough empathy for/understanding of women as real human beings, so it’s ultimately shallow. I think he’s trying to go for complexity and nuance in VCB, which is more than he does for the women in many of his other films, but for me it falls a bit flat. Maybe I’m biased against him, or maybe it just doesn’t resonate with me in particular, but that’s why it annoys me. I haven’t revisited it for quite a while.

That said, I still watched it when I was younger because I lived in Barcelona for a while and, like Midnight in Paris, it does portray its setting very beautifully.