Mel Brooks, alive and well in 2023

I mean, Mel Brooks is literally alive. He's 96. But it's his sensibilities I'm talking about here.

I watched Asterix & Obelix: The Middle Kingdom on Netflix last night. I didn't actually know a lot about these characters, but I recognized them from comic book stores and other places from my youth. Obelix's braided long hair and weird nipple-bearing outfit -- which always seemed a bit like an old-fashioned bathing suit to me -- were very recognizable. 

For a while in this movie it felt like I had walked into someone else's nostalgia. Possibly my wife's. She walked into the room about 20 minutes in and with only a passing glance at the screen was able to glean what the movie was, even though, to my knowledge, these characters have never been created in live action form before.* "Asterix!" said the noted Francophile, who actually lived in France for three years in her early 20s.

(*This is actually the fifth film in the live-action series. Who knew. And yes, it's appropriate I have to use an asterisk on Asterix.)

I had, again, gone for a run earlier in the day -- I say "again" because I vowed not to challenge myself too much on those sorts of nights, having had trouble staying awake in a movie I very much liked, that being Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Memoria. So even though this story isn't very demanding and goes down easy enough, I was having to read subtitles (even though I understand French pretty well) in addition to fighting through the gap in my own cultural history in grokking these characters.

I eventually went with the middle-of-the-road three-star rating for the film, knowing it was pleasant enough and clever enough even though I never really laughed. A fun enough time at the movies to be sure.

I had hoped to laugh more, though, considering that Philippe Mechelen and Julien Herve's script is downright Brooksian in its funny names.

If you've seen much of Mel Brooks' oeuvre, you know that he loved giving silly names to characters that were in conversation with the linguistic conventions of whatever language he was spoofing. A notable example from History of the World Part I being, of course, the character Biggus Dickus*. (*Oh crap, that's from Monty Python's Life of Brian. *quickly checks Wikipedia*.) A notable example from History of the World Part I being, of course, the character Marcus Vindictus. Then of course you also have Empress Nympho and Count de Monet.

That's Asterix & Obelix all over, and it may date back to the comics, only I don't have that as a point of reference.

In this movie we meet characters named Bankruptix, Antivirus, Sil Lee, Sa See, Getafix and Vitalstatistix, and they are traveling toward a Chinese kingdom called Ku Koo.

The interesting thing is that it appears, from Wikipedia, that some of these names are adjusted in the various subtitle translations. For example, "Sil Lee" means something in English, but not much in French, and I thought I heard the character's name as some variation of "fou" -- or, "crazy." 

It occurred to me at this moment how much work goes into keeping the wordplay humor intact in a movie that has to be translated into other languages. I noticed one particular linguistic exchange where they make a play on the double meaning of the English word "date," which can refer to either a fruit or the calendar, and both usages are present in this exchange. However in French, dates are called "dattes" while a date on a calendar is * (*it's also called "date," so I guess bad example).

I think I need to abandon this post on Asterix before it requires any more asterisks.