I Found Cool Stuff - Chapter 20: DISTRICT B13

[voiceofisaac]

Strangely enough, I have Ong Bak 2 to thank for this one. In the previews for OB2, there was an ad for "District 13: Ultimatum", which looked pretty neat. Curt did a little research, found out that it was a sequel to a movie from 2004, and looked up the movie on Netflix

Comments

[zigguratbuilder]

The chick in that movie is a French porn star.

And very, very hot.

[voiceofisaac]

...Is that so?

I was more impressed with her character and her ability to steal a scene than her sex appeal, but that is an amusing and interesting factoid to know. Huh.

[bitpig]

Isaac -- and I mean this with all respect -- don't the French have the right to keep France French? France is not America, a non-nation made up of many different cultures. France is a nation -- a distinct cultural and ethnic entity. Do the people of France not have the right to insist that their distinct culture and ethnicity be respected?

French President Nicolas Sarkozy thinks so. He once famously referred to the banlieusards as "rabble", and is a staunch foe of those Muslims in France who refuse to assimilate. For example, he sponsored legislation making it illegal for women to wear the niqāb ( = the face-covering veil ) in public in France, saying that "In our country, we cannot accept that women be prisoners behind a screen, cut off from all social life, deprived of all identity". This is no far-Right Jean le Pen taking -- Sarkozy is very much a mainstream politician. (And an assimilated étranger himself; M. Sarkozy is not ethnically French. He is a Hungarian Jew by ethnicity and a baptized Catholic by religion

[voiceofisaac]

Well, without getting into too deep of an arguement here, I'll just say that I suspect that those expressing the "Keeping France French" might be going a little further with that sentiment than I (and many in France, from what I understand) feel comfortable with. The key problem comes in deciding what the true definition of "French" is -- do folks living in the south of France, who have some different cultural values than Parisians qualify? Where's the line drawn? There's no easy answer.

You don't offend me, Bruce. But on delicate political topics like these, we're probably best off agreeing to disagree, and leave it at that.

But back to the original topic at hand; even if the political message isn't to your taste, you might get a nice kick out of the fight choreography. Luc Besson's fingerprints are all over the movie, and for the most part, that's a good thing.

[drnuncheon]

I'd seen the preview for the sequel while trolling through trailers on the Apple site, and I was pretty curious about the original. And hey, now that I know it's on Netflix Watch Now maybe I'll watch it this weekend…

[voiceofisaac]

I really think you and M. would love it. It makes for a great d20 Modern game, if you look at it through the Gaming lens. :)