Joe Queenan: Foreign Duty

Here I'd gone and told all my friends that I was through with gigaplex entertainment. That I'd had it up to here with the rank productions of Jerry Bruckheimer and Joel Silver. That I was going to limit my cinematic fare to exquisitely crafted, intensely moving foreign movies. Inadvertently, I had condemned myself to a steady diet of films about sexually repressed Chinese park cops and lovable yak herders.

The enormity of my error became clear to me when I queued up for a ticket to see Gadjo Dilo, the next film on my list. In this militantly charming motion picture, a young Frenchman attempts to assimilate himself into a Gypsy community in rural Romania. According to the San Francisco Chronicle blurb on the ad, the film was "Wonderful. A buoyant, raw look at Gypsy culture." That was enough to put the fear of God into me. I only needed to look at those stills outside the theater and study the colorfully attired Gypsy women dancing in unison while middle-aged men in natty fedoras sawed away on their ancient violins in the background to recognize that I couldn't walk another step down this particular road, that my pathetic little experiment was over. Sadly, I drifted away from the queue and made my way back home.

Though the newspapers were now trumpeting the merits of The Chambermaid on the Titanic, a thoughtful, heartwarming romance recently imported from Europe, I no longer had the stomach for heart-warming foreign romances. My spirit had been broken. It was time to admit my mistake. I bathed and shaved, then hauled myself off to a local theater, queued up in what proved to be a very short line, and meekly said, "One ticket for The Avengers." Then I went inside. As I'd expected, the film was atrocious. Ralph Fiennes was horrible. Sean Connery was ridiculous beyond belief. Uma Thurman was absent without leave. But the film was 100 percent yak-free, and the soundtrack did not sound like Jim Croce alchemically fused with the Gipsy Kings. Most important, Uma Thurman looked terrific in that catsuit. So I was happy to be back in the saddle. Some men look at a glass and say that it is half empty. Others say that it is half filled. That's exactly the way I look at things. Some men look at the current lineup of foreign films and say, "Viva Gadjo Dilo!" I look at the current lineup of foreign films and say, 'No mas." Pardon my French.

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Joe Queenan wrote about bad wigs for the September 98 issue of Movieline.

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