I’ll admit it: I actually want to see Win a Date with Tad Hamilton. I mean, come on, it’s got Topher Grace in it. And Josh Duhamel. Oh, and I guess there are some girls in it too, I don’t know. Heh. It comes to theaters this Friday, along with an altogether different movie that Thom and I plan to see at some point, a French animated film called The Triplets of Belleville. The new E Street Cinema (and most other Landmark Theatres) will be showing Triplets with Destino, an animated short that began as a collaboration between Walt Disney and Salvador Dalí and has finally come to the big screen. Sounds amazing. And looks amazing, too, from the available stills (or cels, I suppose).
Last weekend I watched Plata quemada (Burnt Money) on DVD. It’s an Argentinean film set in 1965 concerning two gay gangsters (who are also lovers) on a heist gone terribly wrong. It was okay. I mean, the premise is neat, the main characters have some depth and there’s good acting to support it, and the movie is visually interesting. But the plot wears thin and tiresome, and after a while it all just seems needleesly protracted. So it’s a wash.
Linguistic aside: I found it interesting that in Argentina, vos is used rather than tú (the familiar “you”). All the characters in the movie use vos with each other (I didn’t get what they were saying at first), and when they cross the border into Uruguay, one of them meets a local who says she knows he’s not from around there, what with his accent and all his “vos, vos.”
The article I link to above also mentions the corresponding verb forms (e.g., vos tenés instead of tú tienes, “you have”), but I don’t remember if they were prevalent in the movie. My Spanish skills are getting rusty. Is it time again for that PBS language-learning series disguised as telenovela, Destinos? And by the way, anyone remember French in Action? How about Say It with Sign? Oh, what a tangent this is. I swear this was about movies when I started. I’ll stop for now.
You mean you actually noticed that there were girls??? ;-) (No, I haven’t seen it, but that comment was begging for a smart-ass response.)
Remember Destinos and French in Action? ¡Claro! Bien sûr!
In fact, I’ve got a ton of laserdiscs of both series filling a bookcase in my office and all of the storage in the multimedia labs, since we now have networked versions on the lab server and videotape in the library.
I also confess to having had a bit of a crush on Robert, un garçon solide, robuste et très sportif—just what did he see in that little tramp Mireille?
Ahh Destinos! Memories!
Beefcake becomes a study aid when you watch it on DVD with the foreign language soundtrack.
For example, you can repeatedly admire Scott Cann’s naked ass in Varsity Blues under the pretext of improving your French comprehension skills.
God, how I love learning.