Steve Sailer writes: Here’s a photo from 1966 of my father and I trying to recreate the famous poster shot from Mon Oncle on my dad’s new Honda 90:
For decades, this photo and the uncharacteristically carefree expression on my worrywart dad’s face were vaguely associated in my mind with the words “French comedian.”
COMMENTS:
* That’s colossally depressing but largely true. That old Paris is not completely dead, but dies a little more every year.
It is really painful to see photos of great western cities during the West’s long 1880-1970 peak. We’ve got better phones and better TV shows, but living in a safe central city among your own people is something we no longer can do.
Western whites no longer engage in the big building projects we once did. So many grand marble buildings in cities like Detroit, built to last 300 years, had to be abandoned after about 30-40 years. Now we know better, that building houses and schools that will be useful for hundreds of years by our descendants is a waste. They will be nice places for a few decades, then on to the suburb another 8 miles away from the growing underclass dominated city and older suburbs.
My parents certainly could not have sent me to the public schools they went to and their parents paid very good money to build.
I watched a few French language movies recently. Almost all the movies I watch are historical dramas involving war or politics, including all of these:
1. The Battle of Algiers – Great movie, I think this was the third time I watched it.
2. Army of Crime – Good recent movie about a Resistance cell in Paris that engages in some successful terrorist attacks before they are all caught, tortured and executed. Also based on historical events. It had a fairly big budget and has some great sets showing working class Paris in 1940-41, complete with plenty of chicken and horses, as well as portraying the relationship between the public, French collaborators, and the German army in Occupied France. Lots of fun chases, explosions, capers, gunfire, etc.
3. Au revoir les enfants – Great movie too, probably too pro-((())) for many iSteve readers. But hey, you can always just root for the Nazis. I know I was rooting for the French army in the Battle of Algiers against the filmmakers’ intentions! It is interesting to see that an upper-class boarding school’s conditions were pretty primitive compared to a lower class school today.
4. Le Roi Danse – A recent big-budget movie about Louis XIV’s earlier years. I quit watching about 2/3 of the way through. It wasn’t horrible and had some good moments, and lots of expensive and pretty sets, but kind of slow paced and lacking in any action.
5. Danton – Great movie with a young Gérard Depardieu as the lead.
6. The Dreamers – Rated NC-17 for good reason. Partly in English. Not for everyone, but I liked it a lot, nobody makes movies like it in the USA. The basic plot during the near-revolution in 1968 an American student in Paris becomes friends with some weird French twins who may or may not be in an incestuous relationship with each other. The twins’ large and slightly shabby Paris mansion and literary icon father are right out of Wes Anderson’s Royal Tennanbaums and Squid and the Whale.
The next movie I will watch is also foreign, this time Swedish, the big budget multi-part Arn, about some crusaders.