Very well executed

The greatest movie ever made..!

Watch something else. There are very few redeeming qualities to this film.

The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

IMDb's intro to this movie starts "Ted, a stuffy white guy from Illinois working in sales", and there, right away, we have the problem. If you're an arrested child, who thinks that the idea of working in sales equals death, and that considering the consequences of your actions equals "stuffy", then I expect you will hate this film. But for the rest of us, it's a breath of fresh air. Other people have said what's appealing about it --- the unexpected zigs and zags of the story, the amusing (though not laugh-out-loud funny) dialog, the portrayal of a dynamic between two guys that's touching without ever being cloying. But for me what I enjoyed was the (depressingly rare) chance to see people acting as adults. It is nice to see someone who takes their job seriously and tries hard to do well at it, rather than concentrating all his energy on goofing off and avoiding the boss. (This goes for both Fred and Ted.) It's nice to see people thinking seriously about what is and is not working in their romantic lives and how to fix it. It's nice to see people not relying on ridiculous clichés about fate and destiny as the solutions to all their problems. Meanwhile, on the other side, it's nice to see all this seriousness but in a movie populated by basically decent people, people you don't hate, in a movie that isn't ramming some sort of absurdly non-subtle message down your throat ala most indie cinema. I'm pretty impatient with movies. I'd say 70% of the movies I watch, after 10 minutes I switch it off because the movie has in no way captured my interest. I haven't laughed, I haven't been surprised, all I've seen is the same old **** I've seen a million times before. Maybe it's the husband and wife fighting with each other. Maybe it's the "those were the days" kids playing. Maybe it's the nerdish guy being belittled by other people at work. You know what I mean --- five minutes into the movie and you know the stereotypes every character fits, and exactly how it will all play out. What so appealed to me about this movie is how (without "twists" or gimmicks) it doesn't follow that path. The primary characters kept growing and revealing new aspects to their characters throughout the movie in a way that's all too rare. Give it a chance!

During the 1980s, at the height of the Cold War, two American cousins and childhood friends, who are now a businessman and a naval officer (played by Taylor Nichols and Chris Eigeman) get to live some time in Barcelona, where they face (but finally overcome) the political distrust of many Spaniards. Director Whit Stillman lived some time in Spain and he surely based part of the movie on his own experiences. The movie is fine skewing the unthinking Antiamericanism of Europe's intellectual class (though Stillman is too much of a gentleman to be too biting in his criticism). Sometimes the dialogue is foolish when it tries to be witty (as when the Americans try to explain to some Spaniards the greatness of Hamburgers) but mostly the screenplay is quite fine. Stillman is an interesting filmmaker if only because his preppy conservative point of view is not often showed on movies. Mira Sorvino plays one of the Spanish girls in one of her earlier roles.

A great joy in a life with film is to discover a film that is competent and coherent, that exists cinematic ally but which on reflection has dynamics worth rejecting. After all, you build your life not so much on absorption but on paring. A great sorrow in film is to encounter a film that isn't quite competent and therefore doesn't project a coherent world. This is the latter.Its mildly interesting in that we can see the writer's sketchbook: he started with three pairs: men and women; two differing and sometimes competing cultures and two "odd couple" cousins. Each of these pairs has some inner dynamics: now triangulate among them all and shake out a story.Spanish passion, falling in love with a dancing woman, a death, another in a coma who recovers. Sounds a lot like "Talk to Her," and in fact you might even find this film interesting if you see it together with Almodovar's gem. But otherwise, all you'll see is a writer's exercise gone awry. There's even a paucity of jokes: only the one about the AFL-CIA.I viewed this only because of the promise of the setting in Barcelona. Like the three dualities of the story, the city is bicameral. It is half African and half European; nominally Spanish, it has its own culture and language half French half Spanish. But its architecture is the thing. There are some Gaudi masterpieces which have influenced a unique approach which is half socialist architecture (yes, there is such a thing) and half wan decorative attempts at Gaudi's space jazz. This all adds to create a special ambiance; one is rarely happy about leaving Barcelona, and I hoped to get some of that environmental joy here.Nope. This could as easily been set in some dreary place like Madrid.Ted's Evaluation -- 1 of 3: You can find something better to do with this part of your life.

Whit Stillman is in solid territory when making movies about upper middle class and wealthy American WASPs. But I think he does an injustice in this movie to Barcelona, one of the most wonderful cities in the world. Naming the movie "Barcelona" is almost like it's the definitive movie on Barcelona. But the movie is about two bozos from the US who come to Barcelona and find much of it alien and hostile. This would be fine from their subjective standpoint, as it might seem that way for fish out of water, but the movie makes it seem as if people in Barcelona are objectively the way they're portrayed, which is quite silly. The "Spanish" people in the movie aren't even Spanish, the blonde girl is English, and Mira Sorvino is American of Italian descent.If you want to see a Whit Stillman movie that's better, and where he's on more familiar territory, I suggest you see something like "The Last Days of Disco".