My Arts Reporting and Reviewing Class is Reviewing Vicky Cristina Barcelona

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Image by austinevan via Flickr

Which I had not seen until tonight. I was anticipating Girls Gone Wild but instead got Girls Gone to Europe, by which I mean the movie registers with me in the spirit of James "Portrait of a Lady" and Forster's "Room with A View," though in the latter it's really British Girls Gone to Italy.

But whoever said the British were really European?

This is a reductionist and retrograde approach, I'm sure, to reduce Woody Allen's film to that old chestnut, two varieties of American inhibition getting warmed up by the sun and the sun-in-the-blood of Spain and walking away sadder and perhaps wiser, secure not in who they are but in who they aren't.

But it is *a* way of looking at the film, and that's all a reviewer needs.