Speak English like a Welshman!

Since I know rollick loves English mangled by reverse translation, here's a treat for her courtesy of Morfablog. Nic has a bone to pick with the Town Council of Barry for putting English text through an atrocious machine translator and slapping the resulting "Scymraeg" (pronounced "scum-rag") on their home page. To give the Welsh-impaired an idea of how awful this sounds, he's corrected the rendering of the first paragraph and fed it in through the Welsh-to-English side. The result:

Among things other, he will be the position this containing knowledge signs opportunities and resources available crookedly the bars, with contain the services that who ‘is heartburn have them prepare with Council the Town.

Mae'n ddigon clir, nag ydy? Sorry--I mean "He 'is being heartburn enough clear, nor he is being?"

The dramas at home

Finally! A NetFlix film that lived up to its rep! Yossi & Jagger was nothing especially brilliant or earth-shattering, but it was utterly competent engrossing storytelling. (I did have a moment of unintentionally hilarity when I discovered that the only sex scene between the leads takes place with them out in the snow bundled up for patrol--it reminds me of the parody of an earnest gay film in Kids in the Hall the features the leads wearing parkas for their climactic embrace.) Also, it was mercifully, almost unbelievably short--64 minutes including end credits. I've got loads of goodwill for filmmakers who realise what their conceit can and can't sustain and don't try to pad and push it at the cost of dissipating tension. As a result, even though you pretty much know what's coming in this movie, you don't have time to get impatient or annoyed before the payoff.

God, if only the makers of Two Women (دو زن) had followed suit. I wish I could remember who recommended this just in case they try to suggest anything else. From the description, I thought it would be a moving study in contrasts between a privileged Iranian woman and a less fortunate one. Instead, the latter gets almost all the screen time, so instead of learning of the problems encountred by even an educated, liberated, urban professional with a supportive husband and the ingenuity with which she overcomes them, I was treated to a one-note emo-porn flick about being an ambitious woman trapped at home by a jealous abusive husband who looks like Timothy Dalton and thinks like a Sudanese judge. (Believe it or not, it sucks big time. You know, I think I'd kinda figured that out already.) On top of that, it comes off like a product of the 70s despite dating only to 1999; the repetitive "dramatic" score with its "haunting" female voices, for instance, could've been lifted from any Hammer horror flick.

Lantana fell kind of in-between. The indie-cliché interwoven storylines worked well enough for the first half, but undermined credibility in the second. It didn't help that Anthony Lapaglia was basically playing the identical character as on Without a Trace only with a semi-convincing Australian accent. (He says he now regrets surrendering his native lingo for success in America and I feel for him.) I have a number of unanswered questions about the characters in what is basically a failing-marriage drama (chiefly why Geoffrey Rush would suddenly open up about his relationship to a cop he only recently--and quite justifiably--called a "prick" rather than getting him suspended for multiple ethics violations), but the only burning one is: WHERE WAS LAPAGLIA'S BUTT? Two humping scenes and I don't even get the gratuitous satisfaction I would from an average episode of NYPD Blue? Blow me, Ray Lawrence!