I'm So Excited has been cited as a return to the fluffier confections of "early" Almodóvar, such as Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown and Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! Set in the business class of a plane whose landing mechanism is faulty, it centres solely on the interactions between a group of overheated, overblown characters and the airline staff. There is virtually no plot and nothing happens, but the best American sitcoms demonstrate that this needn't be a problem if your dialogue is sharp and, above all, funny, and if your characters are in some way endearing or at least interesting.

On all counts I'm So Excited is a complete non-event. At the screening I attended, there was barely a smile raised, let alone laughter, from an audience which I sensed was otherwise well-disposed to start with. It really is no longer enough to have a group of camp flight-attendants lip-synch a performance of the title song (an Eighties hit by the Pointer Sisters) on the assumption that camping it up alone will have people rolling in the aisles. Maybe there were hilarious double-entendres that were lost in translation, but somehow I doubt it; the attempts at humour were broad and crude, the whole thing having the air of a great in-joke from which heterosexuals are excluded. The women are overdressed and sexed-up, the straight men probably closeted. It is very, very tedious.

It's an odd thing, the postmodern campery of which this movie is just one example. Perhaps it is the gay equivalent of blacks "taking back" the N-word, but the glorying in kitsch and trivia for its own sake seems an odd way of celebrating what is called "gay culture". Until the 1980s the only gay men one saw on TV were the mincing, limp-wristed queens, the Larry Graysons and the John Inmans, and it was taken as read that gays were sensitive, creative types — i.e. they could be relied upon to love musical theatre and interior design. They were, in other words, lightweight. All of this was challenged and thrown out, or at least it seemed that way.

But somehow it has seeped back into popular culture. Graham Norton is no less camp just because his style is more knowing. Shows like Sex and the City enshrined the idea that young urban women have a sort of natural alliance with their gay best friends when it comes to shopping and dancing. Camp — which Susan Sontag famously defined as being "the lie that tells the truth" — is now the label given to anything stylistically over the top. 

Perhaps this is what happens when something goes mainstream. But it is still odd that so many gay men seem happy to go along with it.