Let’s not have another turgid discussion about categorical imperatives.  Let’s not have another turgid discussion about categorical imperatives – It’s a sentence that kept echoing in my mind long after I’d finished watching Vicky Cristina Barcelona.  Woody Allen’s tale of two girlfriends (Scarlett Johansson and Rebecca Hall) and their trysts with a charming painter (Javier Bardem) over the course of a summer holiday in Spain is reasonably entertaining, features a solid performance by Penelope Cruz as Bardem’s delightfully batshit ex-wife, and beautiful footage of the Spanish countryside; but it never escapes the fact that at its heart, it’s still a story about bourgeois assholes intellectually masturbating their way across Europe.  The relationships between the characters are somewhat interesting, but not interesting enough to make up for the fact that they all seem to speak only in pretentious soliloquy.  Everyone lives to make great art, questions societal conventions, and Javier Bardem’s father writes beautiful poems that he refuses to publish, “in order to punish society for its inability to love.”  Which is to say that if these phony, self-absorbed beatniks want to sit around smelling each other’s farts all day, bully for them, but I’ve got better things to do.

Grade: C

Available on DVD January 27th.