Critic's Grade: B-

"An artist is a person who starts out by promising to show you the stars and ends up charging you 10c to see his ass". Henrik Ibsen,The Wild Duck

Ridley Scott has the good sense to show the more attractive asses of French girls and charging you $20 in" A Good Year."

Every wealthy American and Briton wants to retire in the French Riviera or at least Provence.Peter Mayle has made an industry out of explaining the fine points."A Good Year "is the Ridley Scott Version of the Anglo- moving- to -province,based on a Peter Mayle book commissioned by Scott.

"A Good Year" is a $30 million home movie.Scott and Mayle own homes in the area where this was filmed.They hired friends and neighbors to sit around eating drinking and staring at pretty young French girls.

As soon as they could get away with it,every famous Italian director made a self-indulgent home movie about his own life with a cast of his friends.Fellini starting with" 8 1/2,"Luchino Visconti with" Il Gioppardo,"Bertolucci with "1900" and de Laurentis from the beginning.Scott seems to have joined their company.

The quality of life in Provence and Tuscany is the highest in the world,which is why we have" Under the Tuscan Sun" for women and" A Good Year" for men.The quality of life in the US is lower than in any European country,lower than any industrialized nation,and in most independent studies the US ranks 40 (out of 200 countries rated).

The Peter Mayle industry began with" A Year in Provence" which is how you might pick up a fixer upper in rural France,and by book 11 became pure voyourism."A Good Year" is Book 11.

Here is a much better version of the Briton moves to Provence story,which is not only true,but something that might work for those who do not expect to inherited a French Chateaux.

About 10 years ago the cash-strapped French Gov started selling off unused properties.An ordinary English office worker sees that he can buy an entire abandoned French town for the value of his crummy London flat.
Next thing his family in now living in sunny Provence and Daddy is commuting to London on Ryanair.Next,he contracts with Swathmore College to have their students pay him to spend the Summer fixing up his Roman ruins.This is better than Tom Sawyer and the whitewashed fence.He next quits his London job,opens a hotel,and lives off tourists as well as the nubile American coeds of Summer.

The biggest problem with Ridley Scott's home movie is he makes no distinction between the behavior of the local French and new-rich Anglos when dining.

The French Burgeoise meal: three generations,3 hours,6 courses.If anyone arrives late,they have to kiss all 20 people on the cheek before sitting down.This is something they have been doing as a family their entire lives.French dinner conversation is like Brazilian soccer,the ball is always in the air.

Anglos:they get drunk and loud very fast.They yell on cellphones to finish a real estate deal or a movie deal .Russell Crowe is exactly the lout to play this role.

All Reviews by Fred Landis
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