When in Rome.... as they say.

With English-language TV here limited to Bloomberg and CNBC, we grabbed a few movies at a local used DVD store to watch in our spare time, the first being the biggest box office success in French history, Bienvenue chez les Ch'tis ('08). We've got a copy of this at both stores but hadn't got around it watching back at home.

It's a little hard to figure out why this film became so popular in France. It's pleasant enough but not much else. The story revolves around a postal manager from the south transferred to the north of France, a kind of Franco-Newfoundland where everyone lisps and says “Schticks” instead of “Sticks”.

It's a a somewhat cliched fish-out-of-water tale that doesn't translate all that well to other languages because the running joke is tied to the strange dialect of the region. You manage to get the drift well enough but there just isn't enough meat on the rest of the movie to sustain interest. It's sweet, a little bland and a lot sentimental.

Because I'm a giant loser, I spent a little time scanning DVD's at a couple of shops, including the huge Virgin Mega-Store on the Champ Elysees and couldn't find much that wasn't available at home. Those titles that were new to me didn't have subtitles so it would have been a little pointless getting them. I find this lack of subtitling a real head-scratcher considering the size of the German/English/Spanish language market. How hard would it have been to add a few subtitle tracks? A poser.

Sporgey