BIFF, Day Eight

Today my film festival was bookend by bad foreign behavior. First off, I went to buy my tickets and there was an American man having a hissy fit over tickets. There are a few things you don't do in Thailand. One of them is yelling in public. This man did it twice. I love movies, and what I really wanted to tell the man was "It's just a movie." He was trying to exchange tickets. He was out roughly four dollars and he wanted to make a scene. I apologized to the woman selling me tickets. That's how odd it felt.

Well then I got to the movies. The first movie I saw was a "sequel" to "Belle de Jour," called "Belle Tojour." Well Belle wasn't forever. She had changed (new actress, couldn't get Catherine Deneuve), but her main foil from the first one hadn't. He had tried to seduce her then but failed. He was still wanting to do that, but she had gotten somewhat spiritual, having gotten her perversions (her word not mine) out of her system. Still it would have been nicer looking at Catherine Deneuve. It was a talking film, with only a bit of Bunuel's magic thrown in (a well placed rooster gets quite a good reaction.


The second film I saw was another one from France (though technically the first of the day was produced in Portugal), called "Inside Paris." It was about two brothers, one with floppy hair who manages to have sex with three different on this one day, and the other one who has too much body hair and is having trouble with his "wife" (this being France). They talk a lot about affairs de couer and eat fish and contemplate suicide. You know, the usual existential stoueffe. I actually thought this was a quite funny film. There was one moment when the floppy haired brother walked up to a woman and said: "May I kiss you? If I don't something terrible might happen."


Then I had the second of my two culturally experiences of the day. I decided to go to Tony Roma's (I was craving meat). A man was there with his Thai girlfriend. She asked him where they were going to eat after leaving there. He said this was her dinner. She didn't understand. Neither did he. How could this be dinner if there was no rice or noodles? He said he was tired of noodles. I could tell this wasn't a relationship built for the ages.


Well that was my day. Cheerio.