Saturday night standing in the video store two DVDs in my hands. Reign of Fire a sci fi action flick which featured a rag tag bunch of humans battling fire breathing dragons or Italian for Beginners a light hearted romantic comedy. At least that's the impression that I had from a quick perusal of the covers. Knowing which movie my wife would prefer (for some reason sci fi just doesn't do it for her) I decided to put my own selfish interests aside in the interest of domestic tranquility and went with "Italian for Beginners." Plus the picture on the cover featured a nice shot of a pair of sexy gams in a gondola leading me to believe that there might be more where that came from.
Back home I was a bit surprised when the movie began and it was in Danish with English subtitles. And it was shot in video not film, which combined with the quick cut editing made it feel like a porno produced by MTV (don't laugh we're not far away from that). However, I was determined to make the most of the movie and was able to get over these quibbles and soldier on.
Now I'm hardly an expert on the romantic comedy genre of film but I do believe that in order to be described as such a movie should have two elements: romance and comedy. In the nearly two hours that this movie lasted there were only two scenes in which the characters displayed any passion whatsoever and the first such scene was marred by the fact that the couple spent more time discussing whether the desk was clean enough to get busy on than the actual getting busy itself. As to the comedy let's just say that a movie that prominently features death (multiple times), euthanasia, alcoholism, fetal alcohol syndrome, loss of faith among clergy, unemployment, and impotence ain't exactly the feel good smash of the year. Or maybe in Denmark it is. After watching this bleak flick the existentialism of Kirkegaard would seem uplifting and cheery.
And to think I could have had fire breathing dragons, guns, and explosions. Good husband, bad choice.
No comments:
Post a Comment