Here’s are my ticket stubs from our Friday, Saturday & Sunday movies. I think maybe last year I shot them with a tripod so the text would look better – hmm, maybe not <grin>.
Anyways, Friday was Korean gangsters, “The Nameless Gangster”. It wasn’t like the Korean jewel thieves movie we saw at TIFF, that had lots of chase scenes and people climbing up and down buildings and crashing cars. This one was more like the Godfather – a study of power relationships between men. The main character usually won by cunning – appearing weak, and then beating everyone.
Saturday our first movie was “In the House = Dans la maison“ about a French schoolboy and his teacher. The boy starts writing essays about the family of one of his classmates – he insinuates himself into that other family by helping the son with math. The subtitles called them a “perfect” family – but in the French it’s simply “normal“. It’s tempting to say that the student ruined the teacher’s life – but in fact the adults in the movie acted worse than the children – even if they were being manipulated by the children – since presumably they should’ve known better. It was kind of appalling to watch the teacher get sucked in – his initial sensible reaction to the student get replaced with the student’s worldview. It had a great cast, Fabrice Luchini – a French actor I was not familiar with, but who I liked a lot right away – playing the school teacher, M. Germain; Kristin Scott Thomas as his wife, the manager of a gallery – looking so cultured (and a lot like my sister-in-law), with perfectly-formed red lipsticked lips, firm opinions, and hipster glasses; and Emmanuelle Seigner, who I loved as a supernatural being in The Ninth Gate, mystifying and rescuing and seducing Johnny Depp, and who in real life is Roman Polanski’s wife. Because I was an art history major, I like watching movies in French – after a while, I can pretty much ignore the subtitles. And I can appreciate the real French forms of the words, vs. the translations. Because the movie was about high school kids, I was reminded that pizza is still pizza in French, but I learned that the French word for cell phone is le portable (really just portable). I think my favorite was at one point Germain is comforting his wife – she’s afraid the gallery will close and she’ll lose her job – it does and she does – they’re sitting in bed, reading. The subtitle translation was “come here” but the French was literally “come into my arms” viens dans mes bras, as he reached for her.
The second movie on Saturday was Everybody in our family. The IMDB quick synopsis is “On the day Marius (a single dad, whose daughter lives with her mother and grandmother) arrives to take his daughter on their annual holiday, he is told that she is ill but he doesn’t believe it and insists to take her with him. The situation soon gets out of control” and that’s pretty much it – the adults behaving badly as each tries to prove that they are the best parent. I sort of liked it as a day in the life depiction – all the action took place on one day – but Mark felt like it didn’t go anywhere, since none of the characters changed or grew based on their experiences or mistakes.
On Sunday, I got up and Rach and I decided it was too cold and nasty to walk. There was about half an inch of snow on the ground, and cold rain drops. I made biscuit cimmy buns, and they got a little too dark – I think I pressed the wrong button. I checked them decided they needed about 5 more minutes, fussed with email, and when I got back the oven temp was 492°. We ate them anyway – I had the last piece for breakfast on Monday – I just didn’t eat the darkest outer part. I went grocery shopping and mailed my taxes. We had fried potatoes and eggs and fruit and the cimmy buns for breakfast when I got back.
Our first movie was at 4:15, and it was pretty grim – In the fog – occupied Russia near the end of WWII.
We finally got an uplifting movie for the 2nd one on Sunday – Coming of Age, or Anfang 80, about two 80-year-olds who meet and fall in love. The woman has cancer and has just been released from the hospital to find that her niece rented her apartment to someone else. She walks out into the street with her wheelie bag, and meets Bruno, an old man walking with his own wheelie bag. Once they start to chat, he admits it has his dead cat, Kreisky, in it. They bury the cat in a flower bed in the park. Eventually they move into an apartment together and he takes care of her as she gets sicker. The best part about the film was that it made me think that at 57 and 61, Mark and I will still have lots more fun before we die. And it made me want to retire to Vienna, where it was filmed – beautiful, clean – there were street scenes with modern apartments right next to to the old terra cotta and it was all clean and nicely kept. And infrastructure to support the old folks – there was public health, nursing homes, home care nurses, and buses that can accommodate a wheel chairs. Although, on Tuesday, one of my more worldly friends who’s seen more of Europe than I have, said, “oh, no not Vienna – boring, and all the Nazis are there”.
