As a long-time Tintin fan, I was so excited to learn that Montreal would be the first to screen The Adventures of Tintin (2011) in North America. So I wasted no time, "not a moment to lose" as Tintin would say, in buying the tickets online at my favorite downtown movie theatre, Cinéma Banque Scotia Montréal. I was a little bit concerned because the title of the movie was presented in French, "Les aventures de Tintin", but after 3 years living in the very bilingual city that is Montreal, I have got used to people switching between or mixing English and French all the time. "It's downtown, the heart of anglophone culture", I said to myself, "even if they were so obliged to show Tintin in its absolutely original tongue, French, they would at least show it with English subtitles to be politically correct."
I was dead wrong.
In hindsight, I was in denial that I made a mistake. Even when we walked into the room with a "VF" sign, which means "version française" (French version), I told my wife that "VF" means French voice with English subtitles. Now that is her favorite joke of me.
I was dead wrong.
In hindsight, I was in denial that I made a mistake. Even when we walked into the room with a "VF" sign, which means "version française" (French version), I told my wife that "VF" means French voice with English subtitles. Now that is her favorite joke of me.
As you could image, we watched it without understanding too much of it. Being utterly familiar with the original plot, I was able to figure out the adaptation they made for the movie but couldn't understand how they made them work. This was unacceptable. I knew that I had to watch it again, in English.
It turned out that Cineplex had this rule about the two versions of movies: If the French name of a movie is exactly the same as the English one, then a "(v.f.)" is added to the French name; if the French name is different, in any way, from the English, then the name itself serves as the distinction. For example, the French version of the movie "Hugo" would be listed as "Hugo (v.f.)"; but the French version of the movie "The Adventures of Tintin" would only be listed as "Les aventures des Tintin". How exquisite! (Would a little redundancy kill you, Cineplex?!)
It also turned out that Cineplex had decided to show only the French version in the downtown theatre while both versions in some of the suburban ones. It doesn't make sense but I couldn't care less. So we drove to a suburban Cineplex theatre for the English version.
It was raining hard, very uncharacteristic of December weather in Montreal. I turned on my front lights and forgot to turn them off as we were running into the theatre. Well, you guessed it. When we came out, my car wouldn't start because the battery was dead: Stupid Driving Errors 101. I called the Honda roadside assistance and waited for an hour to get a jumpstart.
"All's well that ends well", as Tintin would say. It was fitting that my watching of "The Adventures of Tintin" had to be a little, well, adventurous.
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