Friday, September 25, 2009
awful movie
When I first got to France and had watched a few of the movies my father gave me, with English subtitles, I asked him to rip some DVDs from Netflix that had French subtitles, since I thought it would make it easier to focus on the audio, while still giving me some help. As it turns out, the best way I've found to watch French movies is by using the English subtitles, but putting them on delay (pressing 'h' in VLC). With a delay of a second and a half, I get a chance to hear the French and try to understand it, but the subtitle comes up afterward in case I didn't. However, in addition to the many excellent films he gave me, I now still have a random assortment of French movies that were released in the U.S. with French subtitles available, and I watched one of them, "Crimson Rivers."
It has to rank as one of the worst films I've ever seen in my life. Spoiler alert: I feel no compunction about recounting the "plot" because it's nonsense. The dialogue, situations, etc., are abominable (there's a random fight scene with video game sound affects "A new challenger enters!"; the two main cops, both of whom "play by their own rules" have habits of randomly attacking people for no reason), but the biggest issue is that the plot makes no sense whatsoever. A prestigious university in the French Alps, which also has a hospital, has been switching the babies of professors with those of people in the village, to avoid the inbreeding problems the professors have had. When a mother delivers identical twins, they take one of them, apparently believing themselves safe because the mother lives up the mountain somewhere. However, she later moves to the village of the university, and the identical faces of her child and the stolen twin, brought up as the child of professors, is a threat to the university. They hunt her, and she fakes the death of her daughter, cutting off the daughter's finger as evidence of her death (are all children in France fingerprinted?). Later, she starts gruesomely torturing and murdering various people who were involved in this baby-switching plan. The police are dumbfounded when they learn that the killer, whom they almost catch at the scene of a murder, has the same fingerprint as the "dead" girl's finger (which was preserved, with no decay, in a plastic bag for 15 years). They are especially puzzled because the lead cop saw clearly that the killer had 10 fingers. Of course, everything is resolved when they discover that the killers are identical twins, and it was the 10-fingered one that they saw. Except that identical twins don't have identical fingerprints. And how dumb are you to steal one identical twin in your master-race breeding plan?
I watched a documentary on the DVD afterward, since the plot made no sense and I was hoping for some explanation. I learned that the director cut out all exposition, one main actor had no idea what was going on, an Arab main character in the book was replaced by a white one, and the editor said not to "over-intellectualize" the movie. But the writer of the book the movie was based on gave the nice, clear explanation above, that still doesn't make any sense. Nevertheless, "Crimson Rivers II: Angels of the Apocalypse" was made and is available for your viewing enjoyment.
It has to rank as one of the worst films I've ever seen in my life. Spoiler alert: I feel no compunction about recounting the "plot" because it's nonsense. The dialogue, situations, etc., are abominable (there's a random fight scene with video game sound affects "A new challenger enters!"; the two main cops, both of whom "play by their own rules" have habits of randomly attacking people for no reason), but the biggest issue is that the plot makes no sense whatsoever. A prestigious university in the French Alps, which also has a hospital, has been switching the babies of professors with those of people in the village, to avoid the inbreeding problems the professors have had. When a mother delivers identical twins, they take one of them, apparently believing themselves safe because the mother lives up the mountain somewhere. However, she later moves to the village of the university, and the identical faces of her child and the stolen twin, brought up as the child of professors, is a threat to the university. They hunt her, and she fakes the death of her daughter, cutting off the daughter's finger as evidence of her death (are all children in France fingerprinted?). Later, she starts gruesomely torturing and murdering various people who were involved in this baby-switching plan. The police are dumbfounded when they learn that the killer, whom they almost catch at the scene of a murder, has the same fingerprint as the "dead" girl's finger (which was preserved, with no decay, in a plastic bag for 15 years). They are especially puzzled because the lead cop saw clearly that the killer had 10 fingers. Of course, everything is resolved when they discover that the killers are identical twins, and it was the 10-fingered one that they saw. Except that identical twins don't have identical fingerprints. And how dumb are you to steal one identical twin in your master-race breeding plan?
I watched a documentary on the DVD afterward, since the plot made no sense and I was hoping for some explanation. I learned that the director cut out all exposition, one main actor had no idea what was going on, an Arab main character in the book was replaced by a white one, and the editor said not to "over-intellectualize" the movie. But the writer of the book the movie was based on gave the nice, clear explanation above, that still doesn't make any sense. Nevertheless, "Crimson Rivers II: Angels of the Apocalypse" was made and is available for your viewing enjoyment.
Friday, September 11, 2009
representation
I learned at some point that Andorra was jointly ruled by France and Spain. The truth is weirder. It's been a real democracy since 1993, but the titular heads (that's right, heads) are the President of France and the Bishop of Urgell in Spain. So it has co-princes, one of whom is an elected leader of another country, and the other a religious official.
Monday, September 7, 2009
censorship
I'm listening to Lily Allen's "Fuck You" on French radio right now. I don't know how I feel about this. Guess I'm really a conservative American at heart.
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