languages.

I must learn Italian. Faster than I currently am, anyway. It's sounds so beautiful. I also must learn French, because it rolls off the tongue. I also must learn Hindi - I can't explain why, but that's okay. Finally, I want to learn Sign Language. Just for fun.

I love to watch foreign films, because I love not understanding how they can look and act and smile and eat and smoke and pick flowers and run like me, but sound like they are from a different planet. 

One of my favorite foreign films is Bread & Tulips, which is a ridiculous film about an Italian woman who gets left behind on a family vacation in Greece, and on the way home she decides to stop in Venice for the night but ends up staying there a bit longer than she expected. It's terribly romantic and silly, but completely motivates me to learn the language of the run-down housewife, her new hippy friend, and her older gentleman love interest.

I also love Jules & Jim, the French film about two friends who fall in love with the same woman. It moves like water - rushing by, waiting for no one, twisting and churning and forcing the audience to become involved, no matter whether you want to be interested or not. But it's also calming in a way, to see that other people, even people on the other side of the planet, are also crazy. And the language - oh my god. French is perfect. Beautiful is not a good enough word for it. It's like silky cotton candy - soft beyond belief, pleasing to the senses, but still complicated and sticky if you get too involved.

This is slightly unrelated, because it's not a foreign production, but the film The Namesake is amazing. It's about a young American man born to Indian parents, and his struggles to live with a ridiculous sounding but meaningful name. It's sad and endearing and powerful, and there's a bit of Hindi spoken. It's just great.

(Also, Inglorious Bastards. Enough said.)

Anyway, I guess I've been feeling sheltered lately, and traveling to a distant place would help shock me out of that. But it would be convenient if I could speak the language...