If it’s Tuesday, this must be Belgium
One of my mom’s patients gave her a movie to watch a while ago… unfortunately our dvd player is rather retarded and couldn’t read the codec (actually somewhat common with our DVD player being that we rent movies all the time and can’t use them). Well recently I moved the DVD player out of my room down here to the basement. Several movies that weren’t working before now work… so I figured that I would take a chance with the movie and see where it lead.
At first I must say that I was somewhat disappointed. Being the title as it was Cody over here was expecting a war time movie. It only made sense! With the movie being a burned DVD well there was no clue from the cover of the disk or anything like that. Here I am expecting Death, Destruction, and Mayhem I wind up watching a movie about 18 tourists who are crammed onto a bus visiting 9 countries in 2 1/2 weeks. Although the movie was funny, that was not the central focus of it all. The main theme being the relationship between the Tour Guide, Charlie (played by Ian McShane) and the young and beautiful tourist on this particular trip, Samantha (played by Suzanne Pleshette). The tale is intriguing, yet it shows distinctly the open and “free spirited” nature of the 60’s. Much goes on between the many characters of the trip but the main plot line is of Charlie falling in love with Samantha whom by the end of the trip he is proposing to. For the first few days Samantha is more of a hindrance to Charlie spoiling several attempts to live it up with some of his lady friends scattered across Europe. Later he falls in love with Samantha and as she is getting ready to board her plane he asks her one last time to stay and marry him. I don’t know if it was the free spirited nature of the movie, or that I didn’t really get much chemistry from the two, but the answer would of been rather easy for me. Charlie earlier on reveals a grand plan of his to one day open a newspaper company that prints papers only for tourists giving them information on sights to see, places to go, bargains to find, and the like. When Samantha asks why he would never do it he says that it’s because he’s not ready to take on responsibility… at which point I would expect her to say SOMETHING about his reply, but she seems fine with it… I don’t know why but it bugs me that she didn’t question such a dodgy attempted at lack of commitment.
Now normally I don’t go in depth about story lines and everything, but if any of you were truly planning on seeing this movie I don’t believe that I have spoiled much of anything. The story line is rather predictable anyways. Not to mention you would be hard pressed to find a copy of this 1969 movie. Even though there was a seeming lack of chemistry, somewhat predictable, and a complete lack for all things moral I still found the movie worth watching. Being the time period the movie came from they were weary about letting any of the scenes get past kissing, which is better than it would of been nowadays… so it was fairly good, tolerable at worst.