Interiors
I'm looking for something in a stainless steel toilet.
Friday, March 05, 2004
Thursday, March 04, 2004
Bait and switch
At a screening of The Triplets of Belleville last night, two previews made me feel surprised and grateful. Each was for a foreign language film: Monsieur Ibrahim, in French (duh), and Good Bye Lenin!, in German. Good Bye Lenin! I've been curious about for some time, and I'm glad it's coming to Madison; Monsieur Ibrahim, starring Omar Sharif, looks OK, but I wouldn't go out of my way to see it. Mostly it reminded me of the time I bummed a smoke off a Korean chum in graduate school and noticed it had on it a tiny picture of Sharif.
But what struck me about these previews is that they were subtitled. Whole, long stretches of dialog from both films appeared, with titles. I mention this because I have a pet peeve about many trailers for foreign films: watching them, you might suspect the films they promote have no dialog at all. These trailers explain the plot in an English voiceover ("In a world...where love triumphs"), and if you hear the actors' voices at all, they are exclusively: laughing, crying, speaking a character's name ("Am�lie!"), or saying one of the handful of foreign words everybody knows ("Bonjour!"). It's as though the trailers' producers hope to trick us into believing the movies are not, in fact, furn.
At a screening of The Triplets of Belleville last night, two previews made me feel surprised and grateful. Each was for a foreign language film: Monsieur Ibrahim, in French (duh), and Good Bye Lenin!, in German. Good Bye Lenin! I've been curious about for some time, and I'm glad it's coming to Madison; Monsieur Ibrahim, starring Omar Sharif, looks OK, but I wouldn't go out of my way to see it. Mostly it reminded me of the time I bummed a smoke off a Korean chum in graduate school and noticed it had on it a tiny picture of Sharif.
But what struck me about these previews is that they were subtitled. Whole, long stretches of dialog from both films appeared, with titles. I mention this because I have a pet peeve about many trailers for foreign films: watching them, you might suspect the films they promote have no dialog at all. These trailers explain the plot in an English voiceover ("In a world...where love triumphs"), and if you hear the actors' voices at all, they are exclusively: laughing, crying, speaking a character's name ("Am�lie!"), or saying one of the handful of foreign words everybody knows ("Bonjour!"). It's as though the trailers' producers hope to trick us into believing the movies are not, in fact, furn.
Monday, March 01, 2004
Checking in
Hi, friends! I know it's been a long time since I rapped at ya, etc. I started to blog about the Oscars, then realized that I didn't need to put any more prose about the Oscars into the world. So vive Bill Murray, and I'll leave it at that.
I've been busy the last few days, and that has been nice. The busyness also is the reason I haven't blogged. Something had to give: I have been in these alarming winter doldrums--alarming because they didn't relent, and I wasn't willing for the longest time even to acknowledge there was a problem. But there was a big problem. So I resolved Saturday to get out more, and work more, and I had busy days Saturday, Sunday and today, so hurrah me.
I think I also was getting obsessive about blogging, which has this way of feeling like productive work even though, really, it isn't. So although I have been making a point of blogging daily, that may change.
Now, as you were.
Hi, friends! I know it's been a long time since I rapped at ya, etc. I started to blog about the Oscars, then realized that I didn't need to put any more prose about the Oscars into the world. So vive Bill Murray, and I'll leave it at that.
I've been busy the last few days, and that has been nice. The busyness also is the reason I haven't blogged. Something had to give: I have been in these alarming winter doldrums--alarming because they didn't relent, and I wasn't willing for the longest time even to acknowledge there was a problem. But there was a big problem. So I resolved Saturday to get out more, and work more, and I had busy days Saturday, Sunday and today, so hurrah me.
I think I also was getting obsessive about blogging, which has this way of feeling like productive work even though, really, it isn't. So although I have been making a point of blogging daily, that may change.
Now, as you were.
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