Gloria

Gloria is a movie about a woman living life out loud! Unapologetically! Like a Bossa Nova! Or so the critical reviews would have you believe.

I guess.

Also: Pointlessly, desultorily, and with no small amount of fear.

Also, senior-citizen genitalia got more screen time than I usually like in a film.

Look, the Tomatoes on this are 99% (!) for critics and 68% for audiences. And the audiences are skewed toward the sorts of people who would go see a plotless slice-of-life movie about a 50-something woman.

The story, such as it is, concerns Gloria (the lovely Paulina Garcia), who has a day job, and spends her nights dancing in a club, picking up guys who catch her eye. (Well, we only see one of these guys but the implication is that she's pretty comfortable doing this.) So, she lives like a 20-something, only she has two grown children and an ex-.

Anyway, she picks up a guy who seems great or at least wealthy and accessible and they have a whirlwind romance complicated by the fact that he's a total wuss that is "separated" from his wife and fully-grown daughters, who nonetheless call him all the time.

It turns out about as well as you'd expect.

In the process, though, we get to meet Gloria's somewhat alienated children and her lugubrious ex-husband who laments his absence from the children's lives. We can infer from that that he initiated the split from Gloria, but it's never discussed at all. His kids, especially his daughter, are pissed at him, is all we know, really.

It kind of raises the question of what's going to happen with all the broken families and older parents acting like their kids, but only peripherally. Nothing here struggles to make any sort of statement at all. About anything.

We didn't dig it much. Not a lot of admirable character shown.

Sort of amusingly, the version of Gloria used in the movie was the Spanish love song lyrics, but the American version would probably fit better, if make an acerbic postscript.

I don't know. After this, we saw Last of the Unjust, the 3 hour, 40 minute talkumentary about Benjamin Murmelstein and we squirmed a lot less in our seats than we did during this.