I should do this every week: went to The Movies today to watch a French movie with Dutch subtitles. French is not totally ununderstandable to me, and therefore not totally ignorable as if it were Hungarian or Finnish. So between understanding 15% of the spoken French, understanding 85% of the Dutch subtitles, and trying to find time to enjoy the actors' faces and other cinematic kinds of things: it was exhausting, the degree of difficulty magnified by the fact that the film was a very talky meta-movie about writing.
But it was mostly great, go see it. The first half especially spins out an inescapable and very suspenseful Rear Window-style Viewer Implication Trap for you to fall into. It kind of overreaches and can't make up its mind a bit in the 2nd half, and I think the ending is a bit of a letdown, but I can't say for sure because the audio disappeared very distractingly with about 15 minutes to go. Because it's a François Ozon movie, I wondered for a second if this was on purpose, some kind of a Haneke-style trick, but when the subtitles kept going it became clear there was a malfunction somewhere.
But everyone kept watching and reading subtitles, and after a few minutes you could hear someone in the rafters or behind the screen doing some troubleshooting. They popped in and apologized for the nuisance and went back to trying to fix it.
Five minutes later the sound came back and we watched the remaining 8 minutes or so of the movie, and I couldn't help imagining what would've happened next in an American movie theater in this situation: people storming the ticket counter to demand their money back, etc.
What happened instead was that, as the credits started to roll, a The Movies employee came into the theater and offered to "replay" the last 15 minutes of the movie for anyone that wanted to see it again with sound. Nobody did.
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And then we came home and I made those ol'chile-orange mussels and some sweet potato fries that were actually fried, in a skillet, fried in an expensive amount of coconut oil (roughly 3 minutes per side) with some fresh rosemary and sage leaves thrown in for aromatherapy and then the whole mess sprinkled with salt and smoked paprika. Then dipped in sriracha ketchup. Worth repeating.
And then finally, a boozy and tart €0.75 reklame dessert from De Avondmarkt that I enjoyed so much, I now want to taste the real thing.
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schwarzwälder kirschtorte (black forest cake).
cake
1 and 2/3 cups all-purpose flour
2/3 cup cocoa powder
1 and 1/2 tsp baking soda
1 tsp salt
1/2 cup shortening
1 and 1/2 cups sugar
2 eggs
1 tsp vanilla
1 and 1/2 cups buttermilk ´
filling
1/2 cup kirsch
1/2 cup unsalted butter
3 cups icing sugar
1 pinch salt
1/4 cup espresso
1 and 1/2 lbs fresh black cherries
icing
2 cups heavy whipping cream
1/2 tsp vanilla
1/8 cup kirsch
°°°
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