Spanish Fly: Almodóvar's Airplane Sex Romp

In 1990's Atame! Almodóvar took a typically tasteless premise about a deranged rapist holding a beautiful woman hostage and somehow made it a delightful farce that said something serious about male-female relations and also managed to critique, while perverting, typical screwball plotlines in which opposites attract. As it happens, his first comedy in the 23 years since then, Los Amantes Pasajeros / I'm So Exited, begins with a cameo from that movie's psycho, sexual star, Antonio Banderas, whose Hollywood success and overall decline might be a signal for the audience to lower their expectations for the movie at hand. It's slack, bright, enjoyable, and forgettable. A damaged plane circles endlessly (ahem) waiting for clearance to attempt a crash landing. The crew drugs economy class to sleep while seven familiar types in business class reveal themselves: the 40 year-old virgin (Lola Dueñas from Talk To Her), the corrupt banker, the lying lover, the hot newlyweds, the mysterious hit man, and the diva dominatrix (Cecilila Roth from All About My Mother) who looks and dresses like Anna Wintour. If there's anything new it's Almodóvar's belated openness with his gay characters. Always camp, he has put surprisingly few male-male relationships front and center in his films. Both of the pilots are bi, with each other and with two of the three gay stewards, who, like the three fairy godmothers in Sleeping Beauty, are the catalysts for all the action. Especially after they dose everyone's cocktails with mescaline and unleash a sonic boom of horny. You'll see loads of sucking and screwing but nothing as penetrating as gorgeous Paz Vega's face when the movie cuts back to Madrid, where she is about to throw herself off the viaduct. But her lying lover calls! But she drops her iPhone! And, of course, it falls in slow-motion into the bicycle basket of the lying lover's other lover, who immediately starts yelling at him. For one blessed moment I was so excited.