Sunday, February 26, 2012

Perfect Men


One of the many upsides to finally acquiring enough Dutch is learning how to swear appropriately, terribly, and awfully in the local tongue. Another is getting a chance to...appreciate the, ah...finer aspects of Dutch cinema.

To be sure, New Kids: Turbo can hardly count as art haus--or, for that matter, bath house. It just might make "out house"...and then only because of the scatological humor that is (mercifully) sometimes employed. Sure, there are actually good Dutch movies about important things (Komt een vrouw bij de doktor), but nobody does self-parody like the Dutch, and if you want to understand that certain segment of the population that's the equivalent of "hillbilly" in the US, look no farther than the New Kids.

Yes, it's a parody, and as such, it's highly exaggerated, full of non-sequiturs that have non-sequiturs of their own. But if you think of it as one long Jeff Foxworthy skit, it starts to make sense. Kind of. As much sense as randomly running over people can make, anyway.

Two things to note: first of all, as a parody, it is grounded in truth. How much of it is true, on the other hand...there are some gags that just aren't that funny because they are, quite sadly, completely true, such as the violence some people degenerate into when appealing (unwisely) to have their uitkering geld limits increased. Secondly, you don't realize how much you lipread until you watch a movie full of mustaches. Apparently my ability to understand the spoken word is more limited than I thought, though that might also be due to the funky accents.

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