So recently we watched the film Le Week-End, in which a very English and very bickering couple played by Jim Broadbent and Lindsay Duncan decide the take the train down to Paris for the weekend, as one is able to do when one lives in Europe, apparently.
Partway through the film they bump into Ian Malcolm Jeff Goldblum—forever known to my wife as “The Jurassic Park Guy“—who plays an old college friend of Jim Broadbent’s character who has now become a successful author. Jeff Goldblum invites the other two to a book launch party, or something, at his apartment, various things happen, and then, as Jim Broadbent and Lindsay Duncan were leaving the apartment at the end of the evening, I suddenly had to pause the video and back it up a little.
Wife: “What are you doing?”
Me: “I think I spotted something.”
So what was it that I spotted? Well, it was a little statue on the shelf behind Jeff Goldblum’s character. But on a big television, even a little statue can catch your eye. Especially when it seems to be a statue of something you recognize.
Me: “Is it just me or are those vizslas?”
Wife: “They sure look like vizslas. Especially the head of the one on the right.”
I in fact have a picture of Dennis that I excised from its background and for years used as one of his cutouts over on the animals’ blog in which he is standing in almost exactly the same pose as the statue on the right, except of course that Dennis isn’t carrying a bird in his mouth, because Birds Are Scary.
I posted the screen shot I took of Le Week-End to the international vizsla group on Facebook to see what they thought, and it was pretty much universally agreed that the dogs probably were vizslas. One person found an artist who makes bronze statues which are very much like the ones in the movie and which, sadly, are rather too pricey for us:
Another posted information about a sculptor who does up to life-sized sculptures of vizslas, mostly, which are way too pricey for us:
And another person went so far as to look into Jeff Goldblum’s family history (information which is freely available on Wikipedia, but which it hadn’t occurred to me to check) and discovered that he is of Russian and Austro-Hungarian descent, and seeing as vizslas are of course Hungarian dogs, well, our little investigative committee decided that yes, those must be little vizsla statues. Maybe they even belong to Jeff Goldblum and he brought them along to use on the set. Hey, Jeff Goldblum, if you’re reading this … Were those by any chance your own personal vizsla statues in Le Week-End?
Oh, by the way, in case anyone was wondering, Le Week-End took about 45 minutes or so to put my wife to sleep, not least because of all the Parisian architecture and sightseeing.
But all the bickering was fairly amusing too.
Viscosity 