Pierrot Le Fou is a garishly sumptuous New Wave French film featuring the studly Jean-Paul Belmondo, as Pierrot, and the angel-faced Anna Karina, as Marianne. Pierrot begins in the throngs of a boring bourgeois party and quickly skips out on his wealthy Italian wife to sleep with the gamine babysitter, Marianne. But her apartment is [...]

Personal ads are always intriguing sources of entertainment. Some desperate men living in Paris have posted ads in the local bilingual magazine, and their cultural confusion is only exceeded by the vagueness of their romantic expectations:
“Single, 6 feet, sportsman, Architect-innovator, screenwriter; I’m looking for a bilingual woman: French, English, single pour [...]

When living abroad, one frequently experiences lost in translation moments, especially in the world of dating. My friend is living in Moscow and recently received the following lovely bouquet of text messages from various disgruntled Eastern-European mimbo-creepers:

1. “Hey! How r u? I m planning to go to outside..club or sth..do u wanna join or [...]

Just as I was thinking all about tiny Smart Cars in France and large SUVs in the states, I met a couple of typically American men at an Italian restaurant in Paris. They were admiring a Smart Car in the street and proclaiming vague statements of delight like, “The more I stay here, the more [...]

While attempting to recover from jet-lag, I went out dancing in one of those little Parisian “boîtes” where scruffy-looking “art” and film people drink strawberry champagne cocktails in red glasses. I met a typical French boy who was 27 and still living at home with his parents. It seems he is making a career out [...]

Summertime comes and people resort to meeting strangers on the street and agreeing to go on first dates with them. Unfortunately, the lighting at night on said streets often obscures the person’s true mimbo factor, and a man who at first appears to resemble Jude Law in fact resembles something a bit closer to Jack [...]

A man I know pretends to be a hotel mogul, or at least the child of a hotel mogul, but more often than not, he strikes me as a compulsive liar. He pays exorbitant amounts of money for my friends to flounce about the hot spots of lower Manhattan and at every venue the management [...]

The classic Hollywood theme of the magical makeover is ever present in Sydney Pollack’s oh-so-’90s version of Sabrina. A sojourn in Paris transforms Sabrina from an awkward “ugly duckling” wallflower to a radiant vision of femininity. Her lifetime crush (played by Greg Kinnear) is a shallow trust fund baby and a quintessential mimbo: blondish, boyish, [...]

Let’s just say for the sake of argument that my friend was dating a boy named Dick Inwood. He was a prince with a roving eye and without vertebrae. He was fond of nights out in Shanghai, girls who wear Uggs, SKEX (Sex via Skype), and the law—not necessarily in that order. Dick Inwood makes [...]

A thunderstorm and a marathon of David Lynch’s surreal-sinister TV series, Twin Peaks, devolved into an afternoon receiving wisdom from a psychic named Stacey in the Leather District. When a Parisian pop start receives a tarot card reading at the start of Agnès Varda’s Cléo de 5 à 7, she learns that she is going [...]