Professor Popinjay's Compendium of Perspicacity

A Non-review by Professor Popinjay

(2019)

I have to hand it to director Alex Zamm. It takes an amazing amount of Bijoux de famille to do a film about Paris, wine and Oregon without doing a shred of research. An even more amazing feat is only hiring actors and crew who purposefully refuse to learn anything about the singular product they’re all working as a team to create.

But hey, this is Hallmark we’re talking about. They’re not catering to the ACTUAL wine connoisseurs of Paris and Oregon. They’re catering to people who like formulaic predictable plots and contrived drama culminating in superficial romance. If that’s your jam, no judgement here. Woody Allen said “sex without love is a meaningless experience but as far as meaningless experiences go, it’s pretty damn good.” I’m sure the same is true for a movie without substance.

Unfortunately for the makers of this film, I DO live in Oregon AND speak French AND I’ve had a lot of wine. That’s how I know I hate most of it; most wine, I mean. Between you and me, I’m not overly fond of the French language either.

I’m not by any means a wine connoisseur, although I might be considered the pickiest sommelier in the history of mankind. You could give me a 1945 Domaine de la Romanée-Conti served in the actual holy grail and I’d be like “Ew”. And yet, even I knew enough to be able to tell this wine-centric film was a train wreck, metaphorically speaking, and I know plenty about metaphorical train wrecks!

The previous paragraph took me 1 minute of research to compose. Would it have killed the filmmakers to figure out how to properly pronounce “Noir”?

But hey, I get it. French is hard. All those silent letters and every word is spelled differently but sounds the same! Take for instance the phrase “In your tent your aunt is waiting for you.” Which in French reads “Dans ta tente ta tante t’attend.” and sounds like “Tontatontatatantataton”.

By the time you finally figure out what was being said, your weird tent-invading aunt probably got bored and left. I count that as a win. Yay French! Protecting nephews from awkward tent-enclosed situations since 5th century AD.

It’s hard to be critical when in English we have the grammatically correct phrase “Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.”

This is further complicated by the fact that the American buffalo is actually a bison, but I digress. This is a romance film. Under normal circumstances Buffalo should not be involved.

Let’s skip by the fact that NONE of the supposed vintners depicted in this film (some multi-generational descendants of French winemakers) have a clue as to how to properly hold a wine glass. It has a stem for a reason folks! Or were they taught to warm the wine with their hand while they drink it?

I don’t even want to talk about the lack of the Oxford comma in the title plus the use of the ampersand thus dictating that the comma they DID use should really be a colon. This would imply the film is about Paris with a focus on wine and romance. By rights it should have been called “Paris & Oregon:(colon) Wine, Romance, and Childish Knee-Jerk Reactions to Dialogue Obviously Taken Out of Context and then Inexplicably not Addressed until the Runtime Progresses Significantly thus Constituting a Full-Length Film in which a Thing Happens”. But I guess they actually want to fool people into buying and watching (butmostlybuying) this dvd so I suppose some level of deception is merited.

What we’re not going to overlook however is the main character’s mispronunciation of their supposed home. They get credit for pronouncing “Oregon” with virtually no vowels. For those of you calling it “AR-ee-GON” you can just get right out. It’s pronounced “Rgn”. If you can’t construe that into something pronounceable, you’re not allowed into the state.

I’m just jerking your chain though. We’ll teach you right and then you can ride on our log flume rides with us. It’s fun! They’re our primary mode of travel here!

No, our main character supposedly comes from a particular American Viticultural Area in Oregon known as the Willamette Valley, a lovely little valley in which I personally reside. The early settlers who traveled here, via popular 1971 text-based education computer game, adopted the Chinook Clackamas word for the area “Wa’lúmt”, meaning “Spill Water” and anglicized it into Willamette with the emphasis on the LAM. 

One popular local memetic tool to help people remember is “Willamette, it rhymes with Dammit.”

I’d love to tell you more about this film but after my wife heard the main character refer to their home as the Willa-MET valley, she was done. So done, in fact, when I mentioned I was writing this article, she asked incredulously if I had actually finished this film.

Apparently the film setting eventually changes to Oregon, a place that offers very few, if any, tax breaks for filmmakers. I confess I am curious to see what their version of Oregon looks like if they filmed elsewhere. Even Without a Paddle (2005), a comedy film centered around the mystery of D.B. Cooper and his disappearance with 5,800 dollars into the Oregon wilderness, was filmed in New Zealand because it’s too expensive to film here.

Quel dommage. Ç’est la vie.

Oh, and that Without a Paddle movie? 100% accurate depiction of the Oregon wilderness and its denizens from start to finish.

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