Zone 52 - Examen 7 de contes de Southland de 52... L’examen Complet Des Français

At least that’s what the online translator came up with.

Apparently… I didn’t pick up on all the French that I need in the four hours and thirty-eight minutes following my second viewing of Southland Tales in French.

I’m thinking that if I want to actually learn French via this movie I’ll need to watch it in French with English subtitles a couple times, and then watch it in English with French subtitles a couple times.

I don’t know if I’m going to try that and probably doubt that I will learn any French by watching this movie. I did however learn something very interesting during this week’s viewing.

The date Tuesday… April 2… 2013…at 6:30 in the pm.

There seriously couldn’t be a better movie for this experiment right now. It seems that the timing of everything that is going on right now is happening for some weird reason. I had a brief moment of feeling that it was all a part of tapping into the collective consciousness or something. Whatever it is it seems kind of magical.

Then I realized I have spent the last several months intentionally isolated even more than usual, working through some kind of spiritual awakening, or soul searching, a mid-life crisis at the bare minimum. The biggest reason is for me to work through all my writing issues. This is what I want to do when I grow up and now I need to figure out how to stop going with the flow and get my work out there.

The past two features that I’ve written deal a lot with questioning reality. I’ve become fascinated by the concept that each and every person on this planet has a different outlook on how we got to this moment right now.

Depending on where you were born, when you were born, the stories your friends and family share with you, stories shared to you by whatever form education system you are a part of, all of these outside sources and then throw in your own personal experience. Your reality seems to be based on the pieces of all these stories that you grasp onto for this world to make sense.

Southland Tales is basically a fake wrestler turned actor, acting in a movie as an actor who has written a script to act in that turns out to be the script of what is going on in the reality of this movie, may have actually landed in my hands as the movie for this experiment in a magical timing kind of way.

Last week I watched this movie super late and in French. I actually had more to say, but 1) I loved the quick joke, and 2) I wanted to watch it again in French before I pointed out my findings.

One of the things I found was that this movie kind of makes more sense in a foreign language. The reality that I was taught about the world is that America can do no wrong; our president is the leader of the free world and the rest of the planet is kind of third-worldy at best.

I’m aware that this is a false reality and don’t truly believe it, but it’s still a knee jerk reaction when put on the spot as to what it means to be an American. Taking the English out of the movie seemed to make the… over the top… satire feel less over the top and more of a Tale about how the rest of the world sees us.

The fact that it’s in French doesn’t mean anything. It could have been any language, but the fact that I don’t understand the language made it feel like these characters are a bunch of American assholes in some occupied territory trying to continue to live their frivolous lives in this land filled with horrible policies that we’ve created.

Though it seems like we are heading toward this Big Brother type government, it turns out that I am not fully willing to accept that when it is represented on the screen so the foreign language helped me get over that hurdle (again this is the reality that I have created by the news that I follow and the logic that makes sense to me.)

I also found my favorite scene and character. (Watch the bald guy with the beard in the back.)

At one point he’s sitting there and then gets either a bill or a menu, then immediately eats a French fry, then he disappears, then he is seated and is given tea and a menu or bill, then you just see his head and can’t tell what else he is up to. That guy is the best!

Now I’m excited to watch next week in English again to see if I can keep this same distance while understanding what everyone is talking about.