Wes Anderson
2004
119 minutes
More fun with Wes Anderson! This of course is the one where Bill Murray plays a fake, sad version of Jacques Cousteau. As with most Wes Anderson, the main thing you remember when this came out was that Bill Murray was in it in a distinctive outfit that people were bound to be copying the next Halloween, and that everyone you know who had seen it was telling you that it had an attractive woman in it who was topless for most of the duration as though that were going to sweeten the pot enough to make you want to see it. You never went to see it.
The other thing you remember clearly, since you were a music host and a sound engineer at the radio station at the time, was that it had a soundtrack that everyone was talking about. In particular, most of the music hosts you knew were quite excited about the David Bowie songs that were performed by the "safety expert" character in the film, played by actual Brazilian musician Seu Jorge. An album featuring all his covers from the soundtrack plus a few more Bowie covers was later released, which ended up being a total beloved hit at the station on multiple radio shows.
Seu Jorge ended up touring in support of this, naturally coming to Madison and promoted by a music promoter close to the station, so you were called upon to engineer a promo to let people know about this music event. (For legal purposes, this was not allowed to be strictly an "advertisement", so all such promotions had to be carefully worded so that there was no call to action.) You and the other Promos crew got together and wrote and engineered a promo for this event, but there was one problem: none of you were Portuguese speakers and you had no idea how to pronounce Seu Jorge's name. The promotional materials you were sent provided no clues, and in those days there were few good ways to look such things up. The woman reading the promo, who spoke some Spanish, did the best she could at guessing the pronunciation, "Say-ooh Hor-hay", which was close but no cigar. You were quickly called back in a few days later to re-record the promo with the correct pronunciation, which was closer to "SAY-oo ZHORZHe". It was a minor nuisance, of course, but it stuck with you and drove home for you the difference between Portuguese and Spanish, neither of which you speak.
To this day when you hear someone speaking a foreign language and you hear a lot of obviously Spanish words but with a lot of SH and ZH sounds frequently thrown in, you assume that they are speaking some manner of Portuguese.
Time to choose something different: