Movie Monday

I had planned to do a trailer review of Changeling today but I'm sitting at a different computer and I have no idea how to turn on the speakers. Or rather, the speakers are turned on, the volume is up to the blasting setting, but the green "I"m On" light is off so all I'm seeing are pictures, no words.

So, I thought I would change the pace a little and discuss European vs. American films - on a very cursory level, of course, because I have only seen two foreign (French) films over the weekend.

One is the 1991 film, Tous Les Matins du Monde, about a master musician who doesn't share his works and his pupil who becomes famous but is without a musical soul. The other is the 2006 film, Avenue Montaigne, about a young country girl's adventures as a waitress in Paris and how she affects other people. (Thematically similar to Browning's Pippa Passes.) Both of which were big hits in Europe.

Watching them both, one in late afternoon, the other in the middle of the night, I kept thinking: No way could these movies be made by an American director and/or be popular outside of the American art-movie crowd. For these reasons alone: they were talky; they were slow.

People talked and looked or sat silent and looked. You, the audience, looked at things. People walked at normal speeds.

An ending was sweetly optimistic in one and accepting of a melancholy world in the other.

In both you used your brain and not REM. Pathetically, not the American way.

Which got me thinking about the news story that if the rest of the world could have voted in the 11/4 U.S. presidential election, it would have been 94% for Barack Obama and 6% for John McCain. Here, Obama won 52% to 48%.

We seem to be different than the rest of the world. Should we be examining if this is always a positive attribute?