Penelope Cruz Making Menses Jokes in Spanish is Pretty Much the Greatest Thing Ever.

3.9 stars.
I am now firmly convinced that Penelope Cruz should never make another English language movie again. It would be a disservice to society at large - particularly to those who have been irreparably damaged from seeing Sahara or Gothika - if Cruz didn't just stay in Spain and make hardcore badass movies, even if it means taxing my diseased eye with subtitles galore. Yes, she is that good, and yes, her performance in Volver is Helen Mirren's worst nightmare. Unless you count when she was running around naked in Calendar Girls, and that was really more my nightmare than hers.

Has there ever been a more unnecessary movie? Not counting [insert name of Sandra Bullock movie].

One of my favorite kinds of movies (if it can be done successfully) is when you have two or three different movies within one that blend together perfectly. I may be the only person who thinks very highly of From Dusk Till Dawn, but it starts out as a typical bank robber movie and then BOOM, it's a vampire movie, and you have George Clooney shooting stakes into vamp hookers for two hours. Random.

Volver is a lot better than From Dusk Till Dawn, but it also has the two different movie concepts working. On one hand, Penelope's deadbeat husband, who looks smellier than Courtney Cox in Kuwait, is murdered by her daughter and Penelope has to figure out what to do with the body. That legit takes up about 30% of the movie. On the other hand, her mother, who was presumed dead as the result of a fire years earlier, shows up, and I seriously spent almost the entire movie trying to figure out if she was a ghost or was the actual mother and had just been hiding or something. Everyone around me knew immediately, weren't as obvious about their confusion, OR deliberately withheld the information from me because they overheard me talking about body hair before the previews with a David Duchovny-lookalike Philosophy professor and Abby and wanted to teach me a lesson. All of these are legitimate possibilities.

M'am, are you dead?

In short, Volver is the best picture of the Oscar season, but because Melissa "Homely Laura Ingalls" Gilbert and her Academy posse have a bias against foreign films, it's probably going to have to settle for the Foreign Language Oscar, just like Life Is Beautiful did in 1998. Dramatic sigh. But it's very funny, very intelligent, and Penelope and I are now official BFFs. The end.

"I hate movies that are not in the same language as Little House on the Prairie."

In other news, Dawn linked to me on her blog because she also thinks Beaches is the best movie of all time. When I met her at the Indian bordello last year, we spent most of our time together recalling plot developments on Dr. Quinn (the only show where people die of rabies) and reciting whole chunks of dialogue from the Bette Midler movie of greatness. Good times.

"The Sammy Pinkers Kiddie Show just happens to be the most popular act in Atlantic City, and I'm the most popular act in it. Along with Iris Myandowski, the handwalking queer."

On Wednesday, I went to this intense shindig of sorts that Karol forced me to go to against my will in Midtown. I don't know what it is with these people and Midtown. At any rate, a guy who looked like a Liam Neeson circa Darkman era/stoner from Clueless hybrid started hitting on Drunk Erin and he looked autistic.
Hybrid: I'm autistic
Emma: You're autistic???
Hybrid: I'm ARTISTIC.
Emma: Heh.
Hybrid goes back to his autistic friends.

In closing, here is a dog that looks like Angelica Huston.