7 Minutos

Siete Minutos

My standards aren’t very high when I go to see a movie in Spanish. It’s basically more of a language exercise than entertainment, but it’s not like I don’t want to be entertained in the process. I go to a little movie house in my neighborhood called Cinestudio d'Or which shows a double feature for 2.50€. Cheap tickets are a definite plus when you are thinking about seeing a movie that you know probably won’t be very good. It’s not like I think American movies are any better and I never pay to see them. I just like sitting in a theater and being forced to listen to Spanish for a couple of hours. Going into a nice, air conditioned movie theater is sort of nice on a very hot afternoon especially if you bring in an ice cold can of beer.

7 Minutes begins with a pretty unoriginal premise and then goes straight to the clichés we all expect from “romantic” “comedies.” I like to put both of those words in separate parenthesis because they are rarely romantic or comic. This movie does little to change my mind on the subject. Why every writer and director wants to be like Woody Allen is a mystery to me seeing how he hasn’t made a good movie in over a generation. At least this movie didn’t have some talentless fuck from the recent cast of Saturday Night Live or one of the other small stable of actors that Hollywood puts into every “romantic” “comedy” they crank out every year like strings of lousy sausages.

I hate being a critic, at least about individual works. I certainly don’t mind slamming the entire movie industry. I enjoyed this movie simply because I liked the fact that I could understand about 93 percent of it. ¿Bastan 7 minutos para encontrar el amor de tu vida? (is 7 minutes enough to find love?) refers to the speed dating session a group of hopefuls attend at the opening of the movie. Like just about all American movies of this genre, it seems that Spanish directors also feel the need to pitch their idea with a silly gimmick. Whatever (lo que sea is how I think that is translated into Spanish), at least I made it to the end, which is more than I can say for the Turkish movie dubbed into Spanish that was the second half of the double feature.

Besides the language lesson, watching Spanish movies—good and bad—strengthens my cultural literacy here in Spain. The cold beer was great after a long bike ride earlier in the afternoon. Besides, I just like going to the movies.