I'm So Excited! (2013)

Pedro Almodovar's 2013 flight comedy is a curious artifact in the social consciousness ledger. It arrives with a cabin full of gay and bisexual men, a coming-out dilemma, and enough explicit same-sex activity to make the in-flight safety card blush. That central queerness is not subtext; it is the engine, the punchline, and the weather system. On the representation front, the cast remains uniformly Spanish, and the film shows no interest in assembling a multicultural ensemble as a virtue signal. The LGBTQ material is the one area where the film scores with real force. It treats gay desire as ordinary, messy, and worth organizing an entire plot around. The rest of the progressive checklist is left largely untouched.

The feminist account is less flattering. Women here have moments of agency, including a furious complainant and a psychic virgin, but the film stages sexual assault and drug-induced arousal as farce. Consent is a punchline, and the camera rarely pauses to consider the cost. Race, climate, body positivity, and neurodivergence are absent. There is a mild swipe at airline incompetence and a corrupt airport boondoggle, which gives the film a faint anti-capitalist hum. It is not a systemic critique. It is a joke about Spanish infrastructure and bureaucratic vanity. The film's lecture energy is minimal. Almodovar wants to amuse, not instruct, and any social comment arrives sideways.

As a piece of cultural classification, the film sits in an odd pocket. It is sexually progressive in a specifically pre-2015, campy Spanish mode, but it lacks the modern markers of representation casting, racial consciousness, or environmental sermonizing. The result is a comedy that can be read as gay-affirming and misogynist in the same breath. It is not a film that lectures. It is a film that drinks tequila, dances badly, and lets the landing gear scrape the runway. For the serious cataloguer, that makes it a fascinating specimen: high in one column, near zero in most others, and entirely unbothered by the imbalance.