Monthly Archives: March 2013

I recently attended a language speed dating session organised by Franglish. http://www.london.franglish.eu/en/home They hold weekly sessions in both French and Spanish. The idea is you pair up with a native French or Spanish speaker (Spanish in my case) and speak for 7 minutes in the foreign language. This can be about anything you and your partner choose. After seven minutes you talk in English for another seven minutes. You then swap partners and the process is repeated another six or seven times.

I found this a great way to improve my conversational Spanish but I wouldn’t recommend it for a beginner; I think it would too overwhelming an experience.

Richard Gere plays a 60 year old hedge fund manager trying to push through a merger that’s forever stalling. He has an affair with a much younger woman and gradually it emerges that he has been fiddling the books on a huge scale. On top of all this he is involved in a car accident from which he escapes. Despite being injured he immediately sets off to cover up his role in the crash.

Although he has some superficial charm and is not immediately unlikeable our anti-hero is always calculating whether in high-finance deals or his car crash cover up. There follows a Columbo-like cat and mouse game between him and a suspicious New York detective. Although I found the film reasonably engaging I found it lacked tension and Gere’s character was not that interesting. In a nice twist at the end the anti-hero’s wife and daughter cynically and calculatingly outwit him. 3 stars.