Powerful

Good , But It Is Overrated By Some

Unshakable, witty and deeply felt, the film will be paying emotional dividends for a long, long time.

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

While nowhere near as great as the last Whit Stillman film I saw ("Last Days of Disco"), I cannot deny "Barcelona" is a pretty impressive achievement for one reason above all that is largely personal to me and me alone. I found the first half hour of the film to be pretty great; it's funny, witty, always entertaining and fun to watch. But then, for the next twenty five minutes or so the film just kind of lost a lot of its flare. It's hard to really explain, but the film was really starting to get on my nerves. I am one for unlikable characters, but many of the characters and many of their conversations weren't really only unlikable, but kind of annoying. There were many great little comical moments here, and Chris Eigeman's character was great and, to me, extremely likable as always, despite his sometimes obnoxious behavior, but, overall, this is where the movie fell flat for me, and I was ready to give it a bad review but THEN the last half hour rolls along and the film becomes absolutely brilliant and fixes all the problems I was having with it. It becomes much more dramatic, but still hilarious, and really helps one understand the characters and their relationships to that which surrounds them. The dialogue gets even better, and there is genuine heart placed perfectly within each scene. Even when the characters are not being exactly likable, there is a much less obnoxious flavor to them, and they are much more understandable and easy for me to get behind and (more importantly) actually enjoy watching. So, "Barcelona" is a really rare movie for me. It starts off great, becomes (at best) kind of irritating but still semi-entertaining, and then ends masterfully. If only that mid-section could at all match that which proceeds and follows it, then this film would be a true masterpiece and perhaps even superior to "The Last Days of Disco", a film that I feel is infinitely more rewatchable for the sole purpose of it never having a dull or "irritating" moment, no matter how likable or unlikable the characters' behavior may be.

Ted, a stuffy white guy from Illinois working in sales for the Barcelona office of a US corporation, is paid an unexpected visit by his somewhat less stuffy cousin Fred, who is an officer in the US Navy. Over the next few months, both their lives are irrevocably altered by the events which follow Fred's arrival, events which are the trivial stuff of a comedy of manners at first but which gradually grow increasingly dramatic.I am not familiar with films directed by Whit Stillman, but going through my list of things to see, I am sure he will pop up a bit. Barcelona, his first studio-financed film, was inspired by his own experiences in Spain during the early 1980s. Stillman has described the film as "An Officer and a Gentleman", but with the title referring to two men rather than one. The men, Ted and Fred, experience the awkwardness of being in love in a foreign country culturally and politically opposed to their own.Studio-financed or not, this has the feel of a 1990s indie film. Very much in the vein of Richard Linklater and early Kevin Smith. He seems to have come up at about that same time when overly-talky scripts were the rage, sort of taking the Jim Jarmusch backbone and fleshing it out with witty dialogue. I mean this as a compliment, because I really enjoy this sort of film, but they also seem to blend together... maybe after I see a few more, I will recognize what makes a "Stillman film".

Barecelona is a vastly underrated movie that achieved little success outside of art-house theatres on its release. This is a shame because the movie is both intelligent, funny and has broad appeal.It concerns the adventures of two Americans who find themselves in Barcelona in the early Eighties at the height of the cold war. Ted is an uptight and repressed businessman while Fred is his airforce cousin who's a great deal more relaxed. The film starts with Fred forcing himself on his reluctant cousin's hospitality having just arrived in Barcelona.Yet this isn't a buddy movie. In fact, it's very hard to classify and is by no means typical of an American movie. It's far more European in style.The movie is about clashes of cultures and it's here that the humour is generated. Fred and Ted's differing attitudes and intelligence levels rub up against each other, and the old debate about the differences between male and female outlooks get a look in too. But the largest culture clash is that of urban left-wing Northern Spain versus the naturally conservative and bullish Americanism. This sounds heavy and intellectual but it isn't - the film makes fun of the American culture of living according self-help guides, for example, but also makes fun of a Spanish journalist-cum-philosopher who turns out to be equally shallow.The strongest elements of the movie are the script, which is as tight as any top-notch sitcom, and also the cast. There are some excellent performances all around from some very strong actors. Fans or Mira Sorvino won't get to see a great deal of her, however, as she has a relatively minor supporting role.The film is effectively a celebration of Barcelona and also of the situations that arise when different cultures meet. This might make it hard for some Americans to warm to but, ironically, that merely underlines the movie's main theme - that the world is bigger than the American continent and infinitely wider in its cultural scope.

An American sales representative in Spain (Taylor Nichols) gets a visit from his wacky cousin (U.S. Navy officer Chris Eigeman) and the unlikely duo falls in love with a pair of anti-American Spaniards (Tushka Bergen and the highly erotic Mira Sorvino). Woody Allen-styled script is hilarious with sharp and tight dialog, but the uneven tone starts to wear thin during the film's final act when the production takes a dementedly dramatic turn. None of the performers are really that great (Sorvino is an exception of course), but the screenplay is so smart (most of the time) that you cannot see any other performers in the key roles. Unique film that is worth a look. Not for all audiences, but still a slight success with me. 4 stars out of 5.