Showing posts with label French Kiss. Show all posts
Showing posts with label French Kiss. Show all posts

Thursday, September 13, 2012

Movies and France

Earl works evenings, so most evenings I'm home alone or chaperoning Tucker and his girlfriend.
On Earl's two evenings off a week, we try to find something fun to do. Tuesday night, we walked down to the library and borrowed a couple of movies then went to a local coffee shop. We sat at tables along the sidewalk and enjoyed the beautiful September night.
When we had walked home, we watched one of the movies. Made in 1995, French Kiss with Meg Ryan and Kevin Kline is a great romantic comedy for anyone who loves France, like I do.
Earl had never seen it before, and I only fell asleep for a small part of the movie. Kevin Kline plays a Frenchman, Luc, who is a thief. I wondered why they had chosen him to play a Frenchman and when I searched it online, I found that the role was originally written for Gerard Depardieu. I like Depardieu, but I can't imagine Meg Ryan falling for him.  Kline has since played other French-speaking parts. The plot is that Meg Ryan is petrified of flying so she doesn't go overseas with her fiance. He meets a French woman and falls in love. She gets up her nerve to fly over and win back the fiance, but meets Luc on the plane. He hides some contraband in her bag and they are thrown together.
Although I love France, I still prefer to watch American movies made in France. The problem is that comedies in France aren't generally  funny. Someone almost always dies. But the other movie we watched on Earl's night off was French, billed as a romantic comedy. We were prepared for bodies to start stacking up as the hilarity ensued.
The movie was called Heartbreaker with Vanessa Paradis and Romain Duris, French actors. The premise is that Duris plays Alex who, with his sister and brother-in-law, runs an elaborate business to break up couples. The examples they gave were a brother who paid them to break up his sister and her lame boyfriend, and a father who hired them to keep his daughter from marrying someone boring.
The beginning was fun as Alex and his crew went to elaborate lengths to convince a woman that she deserved more than the man who preferred to stay by the pool and watch a wet t-shirt contest.
Of course, Alex meets his match when he is asked to stop the marriage of Juliette, an independent woman, to a British philanthropist. Alex takes the job because he needs the money, even though it goes against his principles. He usually only breaks up couples who are unhappy or a bad fit. Juliette puts up quite a fight, which makes Alex fall in love with her. I won't tell you how it ends, but surprisingly, no one dies, which makes it 'ilarious, as the French say.
Both movies were full of lovely French scenes.

Saturday, May 21, 2011

Movie Dilemmas

When Earl has a rare evening off, we like to watch movies set in France or Italy, places we hope to live someday.
Last night, we walked to the library and scoured the foreign film section. We ended up with a handful of movies. First, we tried a 1960s movie Divorce Italian Style with Marcello Mastroianni who fantasized about killing his wife so he could hook up with his high school cousin. We watched for about 20 minutes before moving on to another movie.

The next choice was a 2002 French movie called Va Savoir which can be interpreted as "Go Figure." The dvd case described it as a French romantic comedy. We love romance in Paris, but this one was full of angst and overbearing characters. Frankly, most French comedies are not funny to me. Maybe I just don't have that Gallic sense of humor. Why do people die in French comedies? The funniest thing that usually happens is someone gets locked in the closet, which happened in Va Savoir. Earl says I missed a funny scene at around 2 hours, 10 minutes. I had gone to bed by then.
Don't get me wrong, I have liked some French movies, such as Manon of the Spring or Paris with Juliette Binoche, but overall, French movies fall flat with me.
Here's what I figured out. I like American or British movies with American or British humor or romance set in France or Italy -- like A Room with a View (my all time favorite) or Under the Tuscan Sun or French Kiss.
So, I need your help. Please recommend some movies set in France or Italy that I will like.

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