Back Again With A Brand New Rant

If I were a researcher in the mysteries of the human brain, I would dedicate my life's efforts to investigating (and perhaps reducing) the very selective memory of the female of the species.

I have always wondered, and many times have been miffed at, the fact that a woman can't remember where she has left the car keys, which she had in her hand a moment before, yet she can remember the look you gave a woman (whose dress was so low cut one could see her navel) several years before!

Every time my wife and I leave the house, we have to do a house-wide search for my wife's hand bag, her hat, sunglasses, the things we are taking with us (her luggage if we are going on a trip, the gift if we are going to someone's dinner party, etc). Yet, if someone mentions Madam X, my wife will rejoin, "You remember her. She was the one in the blue dress you much admired at that party five years ago!"

All of this serves as introduction to my most recent rant. My wife has helped me with my novels, not only in proofreading them, translating them into French, and generally helping to knock them into shape, but he has also given me constructive (that is, if you consider getting banged in the head constructive) criticism. Said criticism ofter develops into an argument.

Our latest disagreement (for those uncultured in the language of relationships among couples, a disagreement means you get the "ice" treatment, i. e. a glacial silence and generally being ignored, and that you have to eat frozen food or leftovers for a month) was over the name I gave one of my characters.

I will spare my three loyal readers the gory details of the spat (suffice it to mention that neighbors a block away were alarmed), but I will give you the gist of the argument: I named a character "Madame LePoint" and my wife thought that a rather uncouth (to use the polite form of the word) choice of spelling. She insisted it should be "Madame LaPoint". 

She would not hear my arguments that to change a character's name in a final draft, one has to change it in the list of characters for the proofreader to check, etc. Nor would she consent to look at a web page where it was clearly explained that the spelling of a name is up to the person that fills out the registration form at birth, and arguments of that nature. To all of these she replied as she usually does in every argument: NOT in France!

I argued that throughout history names change, deteriorate, are misspelled, and so on, therefore changing and evolving. "NOT in France!" was the answer to this and other arguments.

OK - flash forward three moths or so.

We were invited to lunch with my wife's former colleague and her husband. The conversation as well as the delicious lunch was moving right along when all of a sudden, out of the blue, like the proverbial thunderbolt, comes the question from my wife:

"What do you think, Clarisa (name changed to protect the innocent) is the proper spelling for a name: LaPoint? L-a-p-o-i-n-t or LePoint? L-EEE-p-o-i-n-t?"

Our hostess was taken aback. What did it mean, this question, and why did it pop up like a weasel out of its hole in the middle of a conversation.

"Well, I suppose..."

But, before she could answer, my wife jumped in to add, "HE says it does not matter and I say it is ridiculous to..."

"That is not true," I said, "I only argued that there is no "proper" spelling one's name and..."

Like a cinder that remains unquenched and flares up again into a roaring fire, the argument was on again.

Our host and hostess sat back and watched with amazement as we argued our old and much flogged points again.

Now back to my original question:

Why is it that something like that would remain embedded in a woman's brain, and would be as tightly held on to as a woman clenches in her fist a particularly good find in a Going-Out-Of-Business Sale?

Why can't women remember where they left the top of the jam jar but can remember a derisive word you said five years ago when she didn't understand your explanation of how the Stock Exchange works?

I have only one explanation and it can be summed up in one word: GRUDGE. For millions of years, women sat around the cave, grinding into paste the berries they picked, or whatever it is cave women did, and conversations included ruminating about how Ugh's wife had dissed the skin Mugh's wife had tanned or similar important issues. These millions of years of millions of similar squabbles developed a part of the brain where grudges are kept. In fact, it has been scientifically proven that a woman's grudge bearing part of the brain is three times as large as that of a man's! (At least that is what was stated in the very scientific magazine, General Auto Mechanics). This, of course, impinged on the growth of that part of the brain called the "Practicalis Olvidatus" or something like that, that stores practical information.

Hence, a woman can't remember something as simple as the Wave Equation, but she will remember to her dying day the fact that Rosie thought her Apple Crumble was "a bit too sweet".

We men cannot change that (although I am in favor of generalizing electric shock treatment as a possible cure). So, we should be careful around such "grudge bearing" creatures and watch carefully what we say and do. Next time Madam X comes along and her generosity is bursting out of her dress, do what I do, raise your glass as if inspecting the bottom of your drink for unwanted content: the thick bottom produces a usable reflection!

Seventh Reason I Came To France

It was the weather! Where I lived, northeastern Mexico, a nice day of summer was that in which the temperature did not go over 40 degrees Celsius. You can fry an egg on top of a bald man's head during some of the days of late July or August.

Here in southern France the weather is perfect...during 30 non-consecutive days of the year. The rest of the time, the days vary: some are like the weather in the movie "The Perfect Storm", others are like another movie: Kurozawa's "Dersu Uzala" (about a peasant living in Siberia, in case you missed it).

During the ENTIRE month of April, it rained! And it rained, and it rained, and it rained. I think there was a day when the sun came out...for an hour or two.

May was what nice people here call "unsettled". I call it a mess: one day of sun followed by three days of storms; then, two days of wind blowing the leaves off of our palm trees, followed by a day of hail and rain. But then one day of sun. And so forth.

June has started off well. Cool breeze and sunny outside right now. One is tempted to go to the beach but if you sit in the shade you feel cold and if you sit in the sun you get roasted. We'd better wait until July.

Perhaps the people in northeastern Mexico wish they could have some of our cool air. I wish I could bottle it and send it to them. We've had enough "cool air" to last us for a while.

I am turning this blog into a book!

Dear Blog Readers,

Both of you might have noticed that my blog entries have been less and less frequent. Well, the reason for that is two fold: I have had (some) translation work (i. e. my day job), and I am writing a book. As of today, my posts on this blog will be extracts or perhaps partial amounts of the material I plan to include in the book. As for previous posts, I am going to revise, expand, and renew them so that I can include them in my book. The title will be the same "I Married a French Woman and Other Horror Stories", and I plan to include some illustrations drawn by your truly.

Further information regarding where and when the book will be available so one or perhaps both of you can buy it, will be forthcoming once my publisher "Untreed Reads" has put it into Ebook form.

BTW, my second detective fiction, "The Minister's Secret", featuring the fearless Guillermo Lombardo, is due to be published this month. It will be available in my publisher¿s web site www.untreedreads.com as well as in Amazon and a gazillion other outlets. (Note to reader number one: if you do buy my book, be sure to buy it from my publisher's web site because they give me more royalties than those pirates at Amazon!).

Another bit of news is that "An Inconsequential Murder" was published in Spanish last month. "Un Asesinato Inconsecuente" is also out there via the same outlets. And, I am in negotiations with a French publisher (Oh, la, la, la, la! Ces cours m'errerdent! (Those things bore me stiff-)) and will soon be published in French as well.

In conclusion, I will soon post "Le Vide Grenier" (Literally Empty Barn but loosely translated as garage sale or yard sale). It is about my experiences and impressions of the recent attempt we made to rid ourselves of some of the thousands of useless, old items we have in various rooms and the garage of the house.

Right, so stay tuned. I will soon post it.

The 8th Reason I came to France

If the two of you who read my blog have been paying attention, you will know that I am counting down the reasons I came to France.

Reason number eight (8), is because of the Peace and Quiet, and the generally Civilized Behavior. Well, quoting the great Rolling Stones, "that is all over now".

You will remember that we, live in a street that is like a retirement community. Every other house seems to be occupied by (although time and illness have made it less and less so) a little old lady living alone. The loneliness that permeates the street like a fog in and of itself would be tragic enough but it is compounded by the fact that these ladies are, by definition, old, and hence give the street that feeling!

This, in and of itself, is not a bad thing: it keeps the "Saturday Night Fever" noise down to graveyard levels, which is something I like.

But, Nature is cruel and as in any other species, age, illness, and weather take their toll. In the last two or three years, we have lost four of our deal ladies: our next door neighbor, and three just across the road from us.

To compound the sadness of this decimation, their homes have been inherited by--ugh, you guessed it--out-of-towners! Sons and daughters, foreign to our fair city, uncaring of our customs, and most appallingly, indifferent to my need for Peace and Quiet!

Lest you think me a "grouchy old man" (I am admittedly a grouchy middle-aged man, not yet qualifying as old), I will justify my grievances with ample examples of the uncivilized behavior the inheritors have demonstrated:

Firstly, are our next door neighbors: the mother of the person who inherited the house next door was a lovely woman. She liked to invite us over for an aperitif, talk about books and the ballet, and discuss the latest painting exhibition we had attended in Paris. She was as quiet as a mouse wearing slippers as she went about her daily chores: never a fuss, never a bother. Alas, one day, as we returned from vacation, we found a policeman at her doorstep. He informed us she had passed away during the night, in her sleep, as quietly as she had lived.

Then (sigh), the inheritors got it into their head, since they live in Paris, to rent out the place to other Parisians, all of which are eager to come and crowd our beaches in the summer. Also, unfortunately, we live near a golf course, one of the oldest in France, so when the house is not let out in summer it is let out during autumn, spring, and even winter to avid golfers who will play a round even in the middle of a rain storm. Of course, all of the above love to carry on at night, either telling surfing stories or lying about how great a golf round they had. All this amply "arrosé" as they say here, with beer and/or liquor.

And so it goes now. In summer we have had a succession of eclectic tenants: surfers who play guitars (badly tuned and badly played) all night and barbecued questionable meat (they said it was rabbit, I say it was cat) in the front garden so the smoke could come into our open windows; in winter it is wealthy golfers who own gigantic SUVs that crowded the street and who drink and laugh all night. As an extra added attraction, in summer we get ladies who go off every day to the near-by beach dragging behind huge beach bags on wheels that sound as if a Sherman tank were passing by. Just to make sure we hear they going by, they yell at the gaggle of kids that run ahead of them shouting and arguing.

The next change in our street came via the death of a lady who lived directly in front of us. Her inheritors promptly sold the house to a sour faced fellow who decided to remodel the place and rent it out. As a token of his neighborly charm, he proceeded to rip out the front garden of the house and replace it with a slab of concrete. The remodeling was left to workmen who in the course of redoing the walls, replacing the windows and so forth, greeted us each morning with a cloud of dust and paint particles.

We had a couple of weeks of peace and quiet...until the next lady died. Her sons decided they were going to remodel the house (which is just two houses over from the lady described above), and they have been at it for months. I mean, this is a BIG remodeling job with workers there all day, using heavy equipment, and the street full of lorries, and huge dump trucks. The noise and dust is unbearable.

I amuse myself by fighting with the foreman, a sneaky fellow who refuses to be responsible for anything that happens. (I had a running argument with him about the scratches that some truck made to our car. The workers were very amused that I called him an irresponsible jackass and used all of the insulting words in French that I know to tell him off.)

The problem is that everyone in the country loves the south of France. That is not a surprise since we have lovely beaches, great weather, and beautiful country side. Not to mention the closeness of Spain!

I remember that when I came to France to look for a place to live, I stayed in Brittany, in western France, with a friend and his wife. Their house was nowhere near the popular seaside places or historical towns, such as Quimper. It was in Upper Brittany, where the woods are thick and stories of witches, goblins, and elves abound. Not the Romans, or the Germans, or anyone else has been able to dominate these descendants of Celts. And, modern life has not done much better either! Hence, the countryside is (sparsely) populated by hard working farmers and artist. These folks keep much to themselves. So, at night the quiet and the dark are impressive. If you like peace and quiet, that is the place to be.

(Sigh!) But, since we do not live in Brittany, we will have to grin and bear it until the work is done on all the houses, and some sort of peace returns to our street, that is, until the summer crowd arrives. But, this year we will get ours back: we plan to rent the house out to the Parisians, and leave town. We plan to enjoy a better sort of noise, or I should say sounds: Jazz in Marciac!

Of Socks and Bad Memory

I hope my three or four readers will forgive my lapses in posting but I have been quite busy writing a novel. I will post some of it here one of these days. But in the mean time, here is my rant about lost socks.

What is it with women and socks? They can't seem to get along, as pairs anyway. I have a box full of unmatched socks. If there is ever a fashion trend where men wear different colored socks on each foot, I am ready.

Since I was tired of wearing pairs of socks of almost matching colors (gray and somewhat gray, dark blue and black, and so on), we decided to stock up on socks when we were in Paris.

Up into the swirling commercial maelstrom of La Defense we went, and into a clothing store that had hundreds of socks (of my size, too!) for sale. We bought three packages of three pairs of socks each.

"That should last me the year," I said optimistically,

"At least the winter," said my wife ominously.

Back home, I proudly filled my socks hamper with my new pairs and rid myself of the unmatched fellows which I marched into the trash bin as if they were prisoners condemned to the firing squad.

Soon there was an occasion for me to wear formal shoes (most of the time I wander around the house in a pair of clogs), and in celebration of my newly acquired hosiery, I donned a fresh pair of dark blue socks to match my jeans.

Another occasion came up, a lunch at a friend's house, and again I whipped out a spanking new pair of dark brown socks to match my pants.

Having no further engagements, I reverted back to my clogs and entrusted my two pairs of sock to the wash bin.

A couple of days later, I was quietly reading in bed, waiting peacefully for Mr. Sandman to come and sprinkle its magic on me so I could have my afternoon siesta, when into the room came my wife bearing (Oh, horror of horrors!) two unmatched socks: a brown one and a dark blue one.

"Now it starts," exclaimed she showing me the unpaired hosiery.

"Oh, no it doesn't," I said springing out of bed like a la fireman upon hearing the alarm bell.

"Where are you going?" she asked, as if it were a mystery what my intentions were upon seeing the sadness of the uncoupled socks.

"I will not let this stand! It is an outrage that upon the first wash these socks should already have lost their partner. I will find the other socks even if I have to take your washing machine, your dryer and your washroom apart!"

Off I went to the washroom to inspect the suspect machinery. I looked in the washing machine: nothing! I looked in the dryer: nothing! I inspected every bit of the washroom's floor, the clothes line, the table, the baskets: nothing!Remembering I had once found a lonely sock cowering under the garden bench, I retraced my steps from the washroom to the house, inspecting bushes, pathway, the garden bench, the rose bush, the outside clothes line: nothing! It was a mystery where the two missing socks could have gone.

Frustrated and fuming I went back into the house.

"I can't believe it. I simply cannot believe it!"

"What can't you believe, dear?" asked my nonplussed wife.

"Those socks have been out of my possession for less than a week and already they are unmatched. How can that happen?"

"Oh, don't worry about them. They'll show up," she said.

She spoke about the socks as if they were wayward dogs or cats that had fled the house and wandered out into the street.

"There is nothing for it," I threatened, "I am going back to my scheme of not putting socks into the bin to be washed and putting them into a bag in my closet to be washed by hand by me under close supervision and if necessary, armed guard."

"Tu exagére," she said. "Look, these things happen."

"I know they happen. The problem is in this house they happen too often!"

"But, you have plenty of socks. Why do you worry?"

"I worry because I will soon have plenty of socks...that do not match!"

"Look, I have three pairs of gloves, rather, three gloves from different pairs, and I do not worry about it."

"Well, perhaps we can go about with unmatched socks and gloves and we can start a trend. Maybe we can go to a store and ask for one each of a pair of socks and thus ask for a 50% discount."

And on and on it went. I will not keep you, dear reader, in suspense and tell you that days later one of the socks appeared. It was ragged and shriveled and looked like one of those fellows that have been on a multiple day drinking binge. Perhaps it had. Jerry Seinfeld had a routine in which he said that perhaps socks conspired with each other to "break out" of a washer or dryer much like convicts break out of prison. Not my socks. I think mine just wander off for no apparent reason.

Anyway, all of the above is to explain a strange phenomena I have observed not only in our household but in other households as well. I call it the "Let's Loose As Many Objects As We Can In One Day Syndrome"; not a very scientific name but very descriptive of the symptoms.

Now, before any of you of my three readers start calling me a chauvinist pig or misogynist or some such, let me say that my reasoning is supported scientifically, especially by a recent book with a spectacularly long title: "Welcome to Your Brain: Why You Lose Your Car Keys but Never Forget How to Drive and Other Puzzles of Everyday Life".

The authors, one Sandra Aamodt and a man with an unfortunate name, Sam Wang, tell us something we already know (that the brains of men and women are different) and a lot of funny stuff that we suspected but did not know if it had any scientific basis.

This is not a book review so I will just comment on the thing I have been ranting about: why women constantly loose the car keys, their bag, their glasses, pens, earrings, and many other things, AMONG THEM MY SOCKS!

It seems that women have very poor short term memory (Dear, where is my mobile phone?) and very good long-term memory (The woman: "Augh! That's the woman you were flirting with at the wedding reception for Joe and Janet!" The man: "What? Joe and Janet got married ten years ago!").

While men are the opposite: we have great short term memory (that's why we can put back together the car exhaust manifold in reverse order of how we took it apart) and very poor long term memory (that is why we can never remember anniversaries, birthdays, or other dates for that matter).

Women store things in memory based on sentiment, men store things based on facts. To me, this clearly explains why I have a drawer full of unmatched socks. My wife throws things in the washer and dryer and forgets to double check for pairs of socks because she can't be bothered to remember what it is she put in the machines in the first place. AND, she certainly has no emotional attachment to my socks, at least not as much as I do.

Perhaps if I ask her to darn our initials on my socks she will become fond of them and will not let them go astray. Although I would look rather silly and pretentious with monogrammed socks.

The Ninth Reason I Came To France

After a long hiatus due to the Christmas and New Year's holidays, and a visit to my son in Madrid, I am back in the saddle again, to mix an old metaphor, and ready to continue my countdown to the reasons I came to France.

Right, so, reason number 9: The Patrimony.

The French are very proud of what they call “Le Patrimoine” and what we in the New World would call “a mountain of old rocks”.

Now, I don't mean this to sound disparaging. The fact of the matter is that those old stones are piled together in very interesting ways: castles, public buildings, churches, uh, castles, bridges, and, uh, castles.

Here in southern France, you can find more old castles than new buildings, and they are amply supplemented by old mansions, and even old private homes.

It seems that every Thomas, Richard, et Herold (Tom, Dick, and Harry to the rest of us) who had a “titre de noblesse” found it compulsory to build a castle, and everyone who came into wealth, be it by his or her wits or, most commonly, by inheritance, found it necessary to build a HUGE house of 50 rooms of which only 10 were lived in.

All of these wealthy people and nobles rapidly found they could not keep up the maintenance of their follies, so they gave them up to the state. This is how the French came to own so much patrimony.

Of course, the state—notably cities such as Paris—have found that said piles of rocks can be turned into gold by the machinery of tourism. The french quickly discovered that people who have much less patrimony in their own countries, or who have a different kind of patrimony, love to come here and take pictures of french patrimony. Witness the mobs of the latest “nouveaux riches” of the world, the Chinese, who come to take photos of everything that even hints at being old: buildings, paintings, people. It's as if they have forgotten they have their own pile of old stones, the Great Wall. Or maybe they have tired of taking pictures of that.

In our neck of the woods, we have oodles of patrimony, mainly of the graceless castle and huge mansion variety. My wife has dragged me to two notable examples of each: the Chateau d'Uturbie,

and the house (if you can call it that) where Edmond Rostand lived, he of Cyrano de Bergerac fame.

The first is an old castle owned by the same family since the 14th Century, according to the slick website of the place.

http://www.chateaudurtubie.fr/urtubie/

It has had to suffer the indignity of hundreds of tourist tramping through its wooden floors as well as it being decked out with a pool and other “fun facilities” so that people can stay there and say they have stayed in a castle rather than in an old run-down hotel. Most of these old places are turned into reception halls for weddings and for business men to pretend to have meetings but who are really there to get drunk and have a good time.

We visited the castle on a summer day and we tramped through it following the woman who is a descendant of the family but who does not live there. She is smart enough to live in Biarritz in a comfortable apartment with all the modern facilities.

The mansion where Edmond Rostand lived has also followed suit. Although he made a pile of money from the play that depicted the long-nosed cavalier, he did not make enough to allow his heirs to keep up the place.

We dutifully tramped through those wooden staircases and teak-wood floors, my wife wondering what it must have been like to live in such a marvelous house and I wondering how in the hell they had kept the place warm in winter—answer: they didn't. The house was eventually “donated” to the city and is kept up by (you guessed it) paid visits by tourist and renting it out as a hotel and meeting place.

France, like the rest of Europe, has days when it celebrates its Patrimony, but even as the Minister of Culture admits, it is a hard sale: “Patrimoine : le mot renvoie vers l'immobilité apparente, l'hiératisme des vieilles pierres.” (Patrimony: the word refers to the apparent immobility, the hieratic of old stones.) In other words, when they talk about patrimony, what comes to mind is old stones: my feeling exactly.

The problem is, Patrimony is a good thing but when there is too much of it, it can become a problem. The French government has been quietly dumping some of the old castles and buildings mainly by selling them off to hotel chains. There is just so many old buildings you can turn into governmental offices. Just think of the cost of putting in central heating! Not to mention building maintenance.

But, if castles and old mansions are a problem, so is the patrimony on the other end of the scale: private houses. Here in France, few new houses are built. Most people live in homes that are passed on from generation to generation. Refurbished and repurposed but they are still old and frail.

The house we live in, for example, is 150 years old. The wooden timbers that make up the roof structure were being eaten into sawdust by wood worms. The town has a department that helps you economically to care for such buildings. They subsidised the treatment and reflooring of the upper stage of the house. Across the street, the children of an old lady inherited their mother's house. Instead of knocking it down and building something new (which is what would have happened in the US or in Mexico), they have gutted the inside to modernize it, but have kept the shell of the house they remember living in as kids. There is something to be said for keeping the traces of tradition and the memory of what was, but one wonders if everything and everyone should do it.

Anyway, that sense of history and love of the traditional is one reason one comes to France. If you come here, be sure to take plenty of pictures because with this crisis who know how much longer things will be around.

The biased film critic

I have to admit that I would rather see "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre" for the umpteenth time rather than any of the modern "masterpieces" that rely on ever more numerous car crashes, explosions, and bloody violent deaths for content than any sort of interesting dialog or story line.

Computer generated wizardry such as "The Lord of the Rings" the Harry Potter series, Star Wars, etc. leave me cold because instead of Charlton Heston urging literally a cast of thousands to cross with him the parted waters, we have a cast of millions generated by computer which look so fakey that make me laugh. (It must be hard for a modern actor to look into a green wall and pretend he is seeing an army of invaders or something!)

But the worst purveyors of nonsense in modern films are those directors and writers that try to jerk a tear from our eye (hence, tear-jerkers). These are the type of films that try to evoke or provoke emotion by having a (child, dog, aged mother, favorite pet monkey, or lovable old coot) die of (an incurable disease, a car accident, medical negligence, a meteor shower or other ridiculous circumstance).

Now, I do confess that I have never been very susceptible to horror films, suspense flicks, or tear-jerkers. I was once escorted out of a movie theater because I couldn't stop laughing at Alfred Hitchcock's "The Birds". I thought that those birds pecking at the running kids was the most hilarious thing I had ever seen and people got annoyed at my loud laughter (of course I was 14 and I was a rowdy teenager).

And, I was also asked to leave (this time by my own friends) when I cheered for the monsters and skeletons in that marvelous classic "Jason and the Argonauts".

Nevertheless, when a tear-jerker is well written, the acting good, and the direction impeccable, I find it hard to keep the waterworks from starting to drip. (I often wonder at why some of these women who go to see these movies and who go through a box of tissues in the theater do not succumb to dehydration.)

My favorite tear-jerker of all time is "An Affair to Remember" with Cary Grant and Doborah Kerr.

How can one avoid a tear when Cary Grant finally figures out that Deborah did not show up for their rendezvous because she was crippled in an accident? Oh, I get misty just thinking about it.

All of this is to comment that we went to see a modern tear-jerker last night. It tried valiantly to combine all of the elements of old films, including the fact that it was in black and white and there was no dialog (except at the end). I am talking about "The Artist", a french film that has been getting rave reviews even from crusty old film critics such as Anthony Lane in "The New Yorker".

The film had all of the elements in place: good acting (Dujardin got a best actor award in Cannes), great music, a sentimental plot line, a love story, very good direction, excellent photography, and even a cute, intelligent dog! Yet, it moved me not! What is worse, my wife was as dried eyed as a Tuareg in the Sahara.

As we left the theater we had this conversation:

Me: So, how did you like the film?

My wife: Oh, it was OK. Entertaining but a bit sentimental. (This from a woman who will burst into tears at the sight of a limping dog.)

Me: (Surprised) Well, yes I found it entertaining too but strangely lacking in real emotion. Although I did feel sorry for the dog who seems to have had to carry the whole picture on its miniscule legs.

My wife: Yes, he was very cute and so smart.

Me: That proves the old adage attributed to W. C. Fields, "Never work with dogs or children." They steal the show.

My wife: Yes, but I find the movie a bit too, uh, sweet.

Me: Wow! You finding a movie too sweet is like Martin Scorsese saying he finds a scene a bit too violent.

My wife: What does that mean?

Me: I don't know but I am sure it means something.

I think that the problem with this and most present day movies is that actors have forgotten or have not learned how to evoke true emotion, not only in the public but in themselves. I can't recall what actor it was who said that when he needed to cry in a scene, he always remembered his mother dying! Well, that is a bit much but "chacun son métier".

In "The Artist", a young actress criticizes the older, silent movie actors for grimacing and gesturing too much in order to convey emotion. Well, that might be but at least they knew their "métier". Some of the present day actors have the emotional range of a telephone post. It they are killing someone or making love, they put on the same face: that is, stiff and dull.

Humphrey Bogart's face could cycle through ten emotions (convincingly) in a twenty second scene. Just download "The Petrified Forrest" and you'll see what I mean.

The other day I had the displeasure of seeing something about Alexander the Great, as portrayed by one of these present day wonders; that was an insult to history, to Alexander, to movie making, and even to old-fashioned costume dramas. Worse was that stupid "adaptation" of the Iliad called "Troy".

I wish Achilles was still around. He'd take his sword to the lot of them.

I guess it is the privilege, when reaching a certain age, of older folk to consider the things of yesteryear better than those of the present day. But, I can't really reconcile myself to thinking that only because I am older I do not understand that putting a shark into a tank of formaldehyde is great art, or that clothes that have tears and look like old rags are beautiful fashions, or that a mannequin dressed like the Pope and which has a rock on top of it is a great sculpture, or that having every car on our block painted the same gray color is a step forward in car design. And I just can't convince myself that second rate actors like that Brad Pitt who John Huston would have doubts about casting him as a shoeshine boy in one of his movies, is anywhere near in acting ability of say James Cagney in "White Heat".

No, if movies such as "The Artist" want to make me cry, they have to have something more than just a gimmick and a cute dog saving his master. Although I do have to admit that "Troy" made me cry but for a different reason.