La reina de España

A film nice to see for actors. It is the basic conclusion . An American historical movie with a Spanish subject under Franco regime , mixing humor, fine irony and proposing,in essence, one of French war comedies, Penelope Cruz in her beauty, a chaotic story about the American film star returns in home country and the director punished by circumstances. The real good point - Carlos Areces as Franco. Short , a nice film, great for energy, less for quasi - improvised story.

It's the 1950s, and Arturo Ripstein is producing a movie in Spain with a mix of Hollywood and local talent. Spanish-born but now American flm star Penelope Cruz is the cast's lead. Except on the set, where director Clive Revill (playing a thinly disguised John Ford) doze in an alcoholic stupor, all is chaos, filled with gossip, affairs, and an attempted rescue of one of Miss Cruz' lovers from a political prison.

It's a sort of sequel to 1998's The Girl of Your Dreams, and it's very funny, a movie that looks like Kenneth Anger's fever dreams, and in which the actors think they can do things in reality as they do in the movies, so of course the cast includes Mandy Patinkin among the American cohort.

A second rate flick, made unpalatable by Trueba's childish political obsessions. Not that he is unique in such proclivities. Other countries have film industries, Spain "enjoys" an obscenely subsidized version of the Socorro Rojo.

I loved it! Saw some reviews and thought I wouldn't watch it, but my wife and I decided to give it a try. Wow, glad we did, we enjoyed it to the end.

To those who "didn't get it" all I have to say is, travel abroad, but learn some of those other countries cultures before criticizing their films. Apparently there is a lack of external cultural understanding in the USA, so before you criticize a movie without understanding other countries customs you may want to think twice or more before posting a review.

The movie is mostly subtitled and there's a lot lost in translation, mainly, customs, idioms, traditions, etc., that would clarify much of what non-Spanish speakers did not understand. We're from Central America, and Spanish culture is different from ours, but the advantage of speaking Spanish, and having grown up watching movies from Spain helped us enjoy this film greatly. Maybe I should have rated it a 9, but for those non-Spanish speakers I left it as 8, for their sake.

I was looking forward to seeing The Queen of Spain. I loved the first film and this was very promising, with the same cast and most of the crew. Five minutes after it started, I just wanted to leave the theatre. The main problem is, I believe, the script, which is just very, very poor. The Girl of Your Dreams was pure bliss, and here they try to use the same structure and some of the gags are very similar, but it just does not work. The acting is also quite bad, which is surprising, for the actors are all very good. I did like the settings, even though they could have made more of them. They try to show the bleak Spain of the Franco regime, but this idea is not explored in depth. An unfortunate film.