Dear France,

You lost the language war.  

Yes, I didn’t have Montaigne or Molière, and I pronounce ‘one’ and ‘won’ the same way.  It’s not fair, but suck it up.  Despite my lack of poets (oh, sorry, that’s irony; that’s a whole other letter), I must insist that I do have a way with concision.  We’ve both got our share of nutjobs that are convinced languages, having changed continuously for one thousand years, should now stop changing.   Elitist assholes will always want it to be 1967, or whatever equivalent 1967 is for that time.  However, my elitist assholes don’t work for the government.

Well, not in language anyway.

“Ça depend duquel sens du mot ‘être’…être.”

I would now point to your inability to express complete and contradictory ideas in three words or less as evidence that you must cease and desist from the act of retitling my films.  Hangover is not the same as A Very Bad Trip, especially if you do it in English.  Do not add Memoires Programmées to Total Recall, giving away what small plot that film has, especially if the phrase exists in French (‘Souvenir parfait’).  And yes, I, or rather the marketing morons that claim to speak me, do come up with the occasional Horrible Bosses or A Simple Plan clunker.  But Brave should not be retitled Rebelle, as if to indicate that French audiences could not handle the idea of a girl…with courage!  This isn’t 1967.

It seems you also lost the culture war. Suck it up.

Sincerely,

English