Moment of pedantic happiness. I will confess that I saw A Bridge Too Far earlier today solely for the cast list—Sean Connery, Michael Caine, Edward Fox, Anthony Hopkins, Elliott Gould, Maximilian Schell, Gene Hackman, Hardy Krüger, Robert Redford, Laurence Olivier, to name some—but I was rather pleased to discover not only an episode in World War II history about which I'd known absolutely zero before this afternoon, but a film in which the characters speaking foreign languages are . . . actually speaking foreign languages. I know this sounds like a small thing. But how many films have you seen where, I don't know, the French characters are speaking among themselves, and they're actually speaking English with French accents? (That may have been a bad choice of example. Mel Brooks' History of the World: Part I comes to mind: "We are so poor, we don't even have a real language! Just this stupid accent . . . We all talk like Maurice Chevalier!" Erm.) Here there's English, German, Dutch, Polish, if not French—and interpreters, when language barriers cannot be overcome in straightforward conversation. People who dislike subtitles will probably hate this movie. But I was delighted. Oh, and I think it was a good movie on its own merits, too.
And while we're talking about movies . . .
(Cut for—look, you can probably guess it's a silly quiz from the LJ-cut, right? Right. So just click the link already.)
( Read more... )
And while we're talking about movies . . .
(Cut for—look, you can probably guess it's a silly quiz from the LJ-cut, right? Right. So just click the link already.)
( Read more... )