 Starring: Audrey Tatou, Matthieu Kassowitz, Rufus,Dominique Pinon
Director: Jean-Pierre Jeunet
Year Of Release: 2001
Plot: Shy waitress Amelie lives an isolated life where she takes pleasure in little things. After finding a box of hidden childhood toys in her apartment, she returns it to its original owner, and on seeing the joy it bring to him, she resolves to secretly bring happiness to other peoples’ lives. Eventually her games may end up with her finding love with photographer Nino. |
Amelie is the highest-grossing French film ever at the UK box office, making just over £5 million. To put that in context, the last Harry Potter movie made £19 million just on its opening weekend and is now up at over £50 million. Plus, despite Amelie being one of IMDB’s top 50 rated movies, films like the god-awful Katherine Heigl rom-com, The Ugly Truth, have made more money than Amelie did at the British box office. Even the highest grossing foreign language film ever in Britain, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, didn’t break the £10 million barrier.
It should be noted that the gross of both Amelia and Crouching Tiger is exceptional, as the second highest grossing French movie ever, which also stars Audrey Tatou, is the recent Coco Before Chanel, which has made just over £2 million. That means that the second biggest French moneymaker ever at UK cinemas, can’t make as much cash as something like The Final Destination did in its first three days.
So why is this? Well, it could be that other countries just aren’t very good at making movies, but the more likely reason is that people from other countries will insist on making their movies in foreign-languages. Which I’m sure you will agree, is just rude.
After all, just because they come from another part of the world and would like to make entertainment in their own language, why should we be expected put up with it? Isn’t it obvious that their stubborn insistence on making film in foreign-ish is silly?
For example, everyone knows that the Academy Awards always picks the actual best movie of the year without fail, and never make stupid decisions and give the Best Picture statuette to a film that everyone will have forgotten in a couple of years (hence why Shakespeare In Love, Chariots Of Fire and Tom Jones are still at the top of everyone’s favourite movie list). All the people making foreign language movies ought to take note, as in its infinite, almost God-like, wisdom, the Academy has given the Best Picture Oscar to a non-English language movie the grand total of never. Is that not proof that making movies in foreign makes them worse than films in English?
Plus, between the UK, US, Canada, Australia and other English-speaking territories, we make up around half the entire world’s box office. So if we’re going to pay for all this moviemaking, don’t we deserve all movies all movies made in the language we speak, and not some gobbledegook that people in other countries stubbornly cling to?
Why should we be expected to go to the cinema and have to read subtitles? If we wanted to read, we’d go to a library. If we go to the cinema we want pictures and words we understand. Oh, and preferably some explosions and robots too.
And before you say maybe we could just dub the movies. Well, that’s just silly, isn’t it? Then nobody’s lips move correctly. I’ve had foreign friends say that after a while you get so used to it, that you don’t notice that the mouths and the words are different, but if you ask me, that’s not proof we’d get used to things that were dubbed if we tried, it’s that foreign people are silly and should just learn English so they can watch Hollywood movies and TV in its proper language, like civilised people.
There are some places that seem to be slowly realising that foreign is a daft language for a film to be in. In Bollywood, they know that so many Indian and Pakistanis have moves overseas to English-speaking countries – and that many of the children of these emigrants only speak English – that even though Bollywood films probably won’t hit the box office top 10 in Britain or America, many will still make more money in these territories than they will on the Indian subcontinent (largely because of the difference in ticket prices). As a result two versions of quite a few Bollywood movies have been made, one with the stars speaking Hindi, and the other with them speaking English.
There are also plenty of directors who’ve realised that English in the proper language for films. After all, who’s seen Paul Verhoeven’s Soldaat Von Orange or Spetters, but I’ll bet you’ve seen Robocop, Total Recall and Basic Instinct. Likewise, nobody’s seen anything Roman Polanski, Roland Emmerich, Milos Forman or Jan De Bont made in their native tongue, which obviously means it wasn’t as good as what they made in English, as there couldn’t possibly be any other reason.
However the biggest proof that despite what foreign people say, even they don’t like films that aren’t in English, is that Crouching Tiger is the highest grossing foreign-language movie ever (barring a few animated movies which were originally in another language, but then dubbed), but is still only the 354th on the list of the world’s biggest grossers ever. Just think about that – there are more than a billion people who speak Mandarin, and yet put together they can’t make their top film higher than 354th on the box office chart (and even then, most of that money was made by Americans charitably going to watch it).
Nope, it’s obvious that all films should be made in English (in the same way as operas should be in Italian, and the likes of Mozart were being uppity when they started writing them in other languages). After all, it couldn’t be that English speaking countries are so lazy that they would prefer to miss out on some incredible movies, just because they refuse to read subtitles or put up with dubbing, even though that’s what the rest of the world has to do much of the time.
It’s also good that this doesn’t have anything to do with a subconscious cultural imperialism, which allows English-speaking countries, particularly America, to use their economic position to control major entertainment across the globe, while rarely accepting anything that comes from foreign speaking territories and not even realising the disparity that’s been set up (e.g. American culture and values get exported to pretty much every country around the world, while most Yanks barely see a thing that genuinely reflects the ideas of a non-English speaking country).
No, thankfully it’s not arrogance on our part that means stunning films from around the globe will never get a foot in the door in English-speaking countries, it’s that foreign languages are silly and that any movie made in one could never be as good as masterpieces like Rush Hour 2, Van Helsing, and Batman and Robin (all of which made more money than any foreign-language film ever has).
TIM ISAAC
PREVIOUS: Amadeus – Or, the unfairness of life
NEXT: American Beauty - Or, are the British the best at making movies?
CLICK HERE to see the index of 909 films and TV shows the Movie-A-Day Project will be covering
CLICK HERE to find out more about the idea behind The Movie-A-Day Project
CLICK HERE to follow Movie_A_Day on Twitter
