Saturday, March 6, 2010

Nine

I didn't really do anything interesting today - at least, nothing that would be interesting to write about in a blog entry. Teaching English: I've written about it before, and writing about the two and a half hours I taught today would be boring. I saw a movie, finally at the cinema right across the street (next to the national library): Nine.

The movie theater is great! It's much cleaner than American movie theaters, but the portion sizes aren't smaller like you'd expect. I ordered a medium popcorn, figuring that a medium here would be the size of a small in the US, but the medium was huge! It may have even been the size of a large in the US - it was a bucket! The popcorn wasn't as good, though - they don't put much salt and butter on it. But, you have the choice of sweet or salty, just like with crepes! The theater was huge and the seats were comfortable and spacious. They were like long red sofas with arm rests, but no cup holders. Good thing I didn't get a drink. I don't know what I would have done with it. Now, the previews were too long. There were literally twenty minutes of previews, all of which had nothing to do with the movie I was going to see. I kind of like how, in American movies, they match the previews to the type of movie you're seeing (usually). But, I suppose the reason is that they don't seem to have half as many movies coming out in France as we do in the United States. Their previews also aren't as good as American ones - which is nice because then you can really tell which movies to see and which to skip. I mean, in the United States, advertisers are really good at making bad movies look fantastic in the previews. Example: Nine. That trailer was great. The movie was a mediocre mix of songs tying together something that didn't even resemble a story. The entire mess was decorated and filmed in a glitzy way, but even all the great actresses couldn't save it. I hope that's not the message French people are going to take about American movies: that they're all just lavishly decorated fluff. The strangest part about the movie, for me, was that it was a film about film making, sort of metafictional; at least, it would have been had the movie not looked like a musical. The whole direction kept redirecting itself to a set on a stage. I know it was a musical to begin with, but shouldn't a movie about film making not look like it's being performed on a stage? That "Be Italian" song will be stuck in my head for a while, though - just not any of the others, which I had forgotten before I left the theater. Oh, that's another difference. You leave through a different door than the entrance. The exit led through a chilly, creepy looking stairwell right out of the theater. There wasn't a garbage can on the way out either, at least, not that I saw.

No comments:

Post a Comment