J. Geils Band – "(Ain't Nothin' But a) House Party" (1973)

It ain’t nothin’ but a party, baby

It ain’t nothin’ but a house party

My plan was to post today about Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles – the 1975 movie that the British Film Institute’s members recently voted to the #1 spot on their “100 Greatest Movies of All Time” list.

But my public library has yet to cough up the DVD of Jeanne Dielman that I put on hold a couple of weeks ago, so you’re going to have to wait a little longer for the definitive take on that movie from little ol’ 2 or 3 lines himself.   

In the meantime, we’ll talk about a film that didn’t make the BFI top 100 list – Woody Allen’s 2008 movie, Vicky Cristina Barcelona – which I recently watched on Netflix.

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Vicky Cristina Barcelona stars Javier Bardem, Scarlett Johansson, Penélope Cruz, and Rebecca Hall.

Don’t feel bad if you’re not familiar with Rebecca Hall.  Neither was I – or so I thought.  It turns out I’ve seen a number of movies and TV series that she’s appeared in – most notably the 2012 BBC series Parade’s End, which was based on Ford Madox Ford’s World War I tetralogy.  (Both the Parade’s End novels and the TV series are remarkable – I recommend them both.)

Rebecca Hall

Hall’s rich socialite character in Parade’s End is a real piece of work.  When she learns she is pregnant as a result of an affair with a married man, she quickly seduces the rather dour character played by Benedict Cumberbatch while they are on a train.  She knows that the Cumberbatch character – who is honorable to a fault – will do the right thing and marry her after their encounter.  After he does just that, she continues sleeping with half the upper-class men in London, knowing that her husband will never divorce her for their son’s sake.

Back to Vicky Cristina Barcelona . . .

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Woody Allen seems to have had sex on the brain his whole life.  (Let he who is without sin cast the first stone, and all that – but Woody is a much bigger perv than the typical guy.)

In Manhattan, Allen’s character is a 42-year-old writer who is “dating” a 17-year-old high school girl.  (At least two women later claimed that the movie was inspired by Allen’s sexual relationship with her when she was a teenager.)

He later initiated a sexual relationship with his inamorata Mia Farrow’s adopted daughter when he was 56 and she was 21, and eventually married her.

If you’re a Generation Z’er, you’re probably wondering how Woody Allen avoided going to jail.  All I can tell you is that times were very different when Manhattan was made in 1979.

Having said that, I think Manhattan is his best movie.  Of course, I haven’t watched it in years – maybe I would find it creepy today, but I certainly didn’t in 1979 . . . and no one else did either.

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Vicky Cristina Barcelona really isn’t all that different from Manhattan.

Instead of gushing over Manhattan, it gushes over Barcelona – its food, its architecture, its general je ne sais quoi.

Woody Allen was born to wear a hat

Each movie is at heart a sex fantasy for males of a certain age.  In Manhattan, of course, that male was portrayed by Allen himself.  In Vicky Cristina Barcelona, the primary male character – an artist, naturally – is played by Javier Bardem.  

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In Vicky Cristina Barcelona, the artist portrayed by Bardem (Juan Antonio) approaches two twenty-something American friends – Johannson (Cristina) and Hall (Vicky) – who are spending the summer in Barcelona.  He coolly offers to fly them to Orvieto, Spain in his small plane, where they will spend a weekend being wined, dined, shown around the town, and thoroughly (and jointly) rogered.

Cristina quickly succumbs to the artist’s charms, and moves in with him before you can say Jack Robinson.  The happy couple are later joined by the Penélope Cruz character (María Elena) – Juan Antonio’s ex-wife and fellow artist, who has fallen on hard times.  Pretty soon the two women are the best of friends, and Juan Antonio is having his way with both of them.  (It ain’t nothin’ but a house party for Juan Antonio.)

Juan Antonio gets Vicky into bed as well.  She goes ahead and marries her American fiancé – a rather conventional sort who is into golf and making money – but she’s fallen hard for Juan Antonio, and contemplates walking away from her husband and shacking up with the artist.

Woody seems to think that its only fair that Juan Antonio – who is clearly Allen’s alter ego – isn’t limited to having just one woman.  Woody’s a man with highly evolved ideas about sex and love, especially compared to the narrow-minded types who make up most of the world.  Why shouldn’t someone as special as he is be allowed to have his ménage à quatre  and eat it, too?

Vicky and Cristina eventually come to their senses and say sayonara to Juan Antonio and to Barcelona.  We don’t know what happens to the artist and his muy crazy (but muy hot) ex-wife after Vicky and Cristina return to the U.S.  But I’m betting the rest of his life is a Catalan Groundhog Day – repeated reunions and breakups with his ex-wife plus serial relationships with gullible young female travelers from all over the world.

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Allen pitches his movies to college-educated urbanites who see themselves as smart and sophisticated.  But if you’re looking for intellectual nutrition in your movies, look elsewhere – Vicky Cristina Barcelona is just empty calories.

Vicky Cristina Barcelona is easy on the eyes, and even easier on the brain – at least the aging male brain.  It has no nudity – if it did, we’d recognize that it is essentially soft-core porn, albeit soft-core porn with a heapin’ helpin’ of intellectual pretensions.  

I’m surprised that so many critics loved it – it was included on a number of top-ten-movies-of-the-year lists.  One reviewer called it “a witty and ambiguous film that's simultaneously intoxicating and suffused with sadness and doubt.”  Another review praised it as “the work of a confident and mature artist.”

I’m not buying it, boys and girls.

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“It Ain’t Nothin’ But a House Party” was originally recorded by the Showstoppers, a Philadelphia-based soul group whose members included two of the legendary soul singer Solomon Burke’s younger brothers.

The record failed to crack the Billboard “Hot 100” when it was first released in 1967.  It was a #11 hit in the UK in 1968, and did a little better when it was subsequently re-released in the U.S.

The song has been covered by numerous groups, including the J. Geils Band.

Click here to listen to the J. Geils Band’s 1973 cover, which was titled “(Ain’t Nothin’ But a) House Party.”

Click here to buy the song from Amazon.