Just a foreign affair
After a long hot day, what better way to relax than with some rental movies, in your own living room with several fans blowing and a tub of really cold icecream? I know, there are many, but each must choose their poison. I took the suggestion of son #3 to heart and we made the trip up the hill to the video club. Since all the summer blockbusters are still in the multiplexes, we had to settle for an different type of entertainment. In our case, the choice was just a foreign affair.
With the special affinity for France that exists around here, our top draws in rental videos are apt to include Gerard Depardieu or Jean Reno. (Oddly enough, they’ve only worked together twice in their careers, so we must have rented a lot of movies that had just one or the other). Both are good; tonight the tap on the shoulder fell to JR. We picked up something called L’enquête Corse.
I deal with accents all day long. A word of warning here; when the actors are adopting an accent from a region, the task for the listener (me) becomes doubly tricky. Think of Julia Roberts doing Irish. Now that the movie is over I can reveal the plot line – there wasn’t one. In making a film set in Corsica, the director fell under the scenic charms and left the scripts behind, probably in a hotel in Paris. A pretty face covering a dull mind.
Next up on the playlist was a film that had several titles on the cover, revealing its European heritage. The movie Le Train De La Mort or Lasko or Im Auftrag Des Vatikans or Death Train was a TV movie made in Germany, shown at Cannes and probably sent directly to the DVD mill so that a few rental dollars could be used to recoup on the bottom line. Think of a train going nowhere with people that have no names. Add in a soldier doomed to flashbacks of a foreign war in black and white that left him dressed in the brown habit of a monk who has a funny need to practice martial arts on the top of the moving train while helicopters fall out of the sky and the locomotive explodes when the SAM is released from a villain’s launcher after her nun’s habit gets caught on the ventilator hood of the loco and the missile comes back to the hottest thing in sight (no not the nun, who is wearing lipstick and basketball shoes). After that, the satellite videos from the train interior are of little interest to anybody, because the train must be separated….
I was as confused as you must be after reading the synopsis. At least the train exploded nicely, and like in every other action flick of this genre, flames from explosions always chase but never catch the protagonist as he runs pell-mell through the dining car.
Another Saturday night and I ain’t got nobody, I have some money cause I just got paid.
Tomorrow is another day.
