At the movies

I've watched three (well, two and a fraction) movies in the last four days, which is something of a record for me.

The first was a video I borrowed from school, "Le Diner de Cons" (Dinner of the Idiots, marketed in the U.S. as "The Dinner Game"), a French movie from around 1998, which was infinitely better than I had imagined it would be. Even better, I had no problem understanding it - I estimate I got around 95% of the dialog.

Yesterday night's movie, "Le Gamin au Velo" ("The Boy on the Bicycle"), which I went to see with Karin, a classmate, and some of her friends, was an entirely different matter. It was so treacly (treaclyly?) sentimental that I had to flee after only 30 minutes, for fear of falling into a diabetic coma.




Finally, this afternoon I decided to brave Woody Allen's latest effort, "Midnight in Paris". Despite an over-reliance on the picture-postcard beauty of Paris's most cliched sites, not to mention the groan-inducing "Brigadoon" device, it had its moments of charm. Though Carla Bruni was entirely forgettable in her brief cameo as a tour guide, it was fun to watch Adrien Brody hamming it up as Dali, Kathy Bates having a grand old time as Gertrude Stein, and assorted others vamping it up as part of the lost generation of Paris in the 20s. And at least we were spared the sight of Woody Allen himself slobbering over some attractive female one third his age, though Owen Wilson was severely lacking in the charisma department. All in all, not quite as awful as one might have expected.