Movie Night
Update:
This was one of the funniest movies that I have seen, and so worth going to. We will even take it out when it comes out on DVD! So if you want to laugh even when you leave the theatre, and not want the movie to end... this one is for you...
Mark and I am off to see the new movie... Kiddies are going to granny, and it is our night out. Jippie!!! Following is a review for those who would want to go and see why there is such a buzz about it! Cheerio!
Welcome to the Sticks (Bienvenue chez les Ch'tis)
DANNY BOON'S comedy Welcome To The Sticks is France's most successful film to date, so it comes as no surprise to learn that it has already inspired plans for a Hollywood remake. Or should that be a reinvention?
Its theme will survive transplantation but you can be assured that its specifics will not, for it is about class prejudice, French-style.
Its hapless hero is a post office manager transferred from the sunny and civilised south to a town in the industrialised north, where the weather is notoriously grim and the natives are said to be barbarians.
Kad Merad, a balding, big-nosed and baggy-eyed character, with a certain hangdog charm, plays the part and you'll get my point about reinvention if I tell you that the Hollywood version is likely to star Will Smith.
Wildly popular in France as a stand-up comic, Boon was last seen on screen here trying to cheer up a misanthropic Daniel Auteuil in Patrice Leconte's My Best Friend but he was nurturing the idea for this film long before that.
Boon comes from northern France and he has cast himself as Antoine, the friendly postman who helps ease Merad's Philippe into his new life. Philippe has been banished to the outer limits of the French postal service because of his efforts to please his habitually picky wife.
After promising her a move to the Riviera, he discovers that the company's policy of positive discrimination has earmarked the job he wants for an employee with a disability. Undaunted, he applies.
Then he has to deal with the consequences, a surprise visit by the company's personnel inspector. Some expertly choreographed bumbling, involving a hastily bought wheelchair, ends in disaster and he is punished for his deceit by being sent north.
His new home town of Bergues is near the Belgian border in a region famous as the setting for Germinal, Emile Zola's classic tale about the horrors of life down the coalmines. The mines closed long ago but the region's reputation for adversity lives on and prevailing mythology says its natives are so alienated from the rest of French society they have their own dialect.
Boon lovingly dramatises these calumnies on his home province.
By the time Philippe is ready to leave for Bergues, he's so unnerved by the hardships ahead that he feels unable to subject his family to the ordeal.
Heroically deciding to go it alone, he rugs himself up in thermals and a sheepskin hat with earflaps and readies himself for the journey. Even wife Julie (Zoe Felix) is impressed, farewelling him with a fondness she hasn't shown in years.
The script prolongs his misery until the morning after his arrival, which is as traumatic as he feared. Blinded by rain, he knocks down a pedestrian who, luckily for him, turns out to be the irrepressible Antoine. Boon is so open-faced and so incurably good-natured that he ought to set your teeth on edge but there's something anarchic there as well.
In the pursuit of a good time, he is willing to risk all sorts of trouble and once Philippe is adopted as his new playmate, the rain stops and all the usual attractions of French filmmaking come into play.
Philippe's new routine includes long lunches in the sun with Antoine and his fellow workers, Fabrice (Philippe Duquesne), Yann (Guy Lecluyse) and Annabelle (Anne Marivin) who, far from being barbarians, are kindness itself. But the mythology was right in one respect. They do talk funny, which means Philippe has to be tutored in the intricacies of their dialect that is called "ch'timi" because "c'est toi" and "c'est moi" are pronounced "ch'ti" and "ch'mi".
The film is rife with comic opportunities that must be much funnier in French. Even so, these verbal confusions work pretty well via the subtitles, thanks to the mixture of guilelessness and geniality that Antoine and Philippe bring to the game of trying to understand one another.
Language lessons aside, the film's finer points translate into other cultures, after all (well, one culture, anyway). After a while the comic style of the piece started to seem strangely Australian. It's not just the locals' taste for beer and barbecues, it's their artless affability, sharpened by a casual pride in their status as rugged individualists. It's as if The Dish were being served up with a Gallic shrug and a flair for slapstick a little more frenetic than our own.
The script falters towards the end as contrivance piles on contrivance, climaxing in a twist that obliges Philippe's new friends to live up to their oafish stereotypes.
At this point, The Dish segues into Dimboola, yet even when the burps and belches are resounding around the barbecue table, there is still enough insouciance at work to be disarming.
It's that Gallic shrug again.
Sacre bleur!
Daddy and son with Daddy's catch of the day!
Die maatjies by ons swaaie. 
Rachel in die tuin.
Rachel on the platform, about to go... the camera did not take a pic of her in action!
