Little cream houses for you and me

Yesterday we took an afternoon walk, both to get out of the house for a bit and to drop by our local Renault place and see if we'd won a new Clio in a local contest. Sadly, we have no new car, but we did have a nice long trek around the perimeter of the village. On the other side of town is the new development of Kerdebleu, but "instant explosion" seems more accurate than "new development". When we moved here three years ago, none of this existed, but today there seem to be around 50-80 new houses dropped from the sky, all painted in lookalike cream or tan. The French build differently than we do in the US - one rarely sees brick houses here, and virtually never wooden houses or houses with siding. Most of the construction seems to be either stone (in older homes like ours) or concrete block (like these newer homes). The new homes are covered in stucco texture, and seemingly are all painted in eerily similar hues of cream, tan, occasionally pale orange or pale yellow, but always colors from the pastel family. It makes the new neighborhoods look a bit artificial, like you've wandered into the set from the old Prisoner TV show, and I expect the front doors to whish open on their own. I don't know why they all look so similar - maybe it's unconscious cultural conformity, or more likely (this being France) there is probably some elaborate set of laws restricting the colors possible on new houses. The other odd thing about French houses is their strange lack of shutters - most of the new ones just have a few undecorated rectangles for windows, giving them a prison look. American thinking tends to put windows on every wall but here it is common to see three windows on a house, all on one side and with monolithic solid walls the rest of the way round. The reason we snapped the accompanying photo was because the house in the foreground is going to be made of wood - quite an unusual sight here! It's going to stand out a good bit from the rest of the street, since the other fifty houses surrounding it all look like the solid peach-colored things seen in the background.
The October fright flick of the day is Constantine, the movie spun from the DC comic. As a longtime fan of the comic, I was dead-set against paying any money for this movie, either in theater or rental, but we had the chance to watch it free last night and curiosity got the better of me. Why the hostility, one might ask? The original character was British, the story was set in Liverpool, Constantine was a character of great cleverness and fast wit, cutting with tongue and able to think himself out of nearly any tight spot. Scripts were submitted to Hollywood and ignored for years until, on a whim, the scriptwriters changed the character's origin to American and it was immediately snapped up and turned into a vehicle for Keanu Reeves... who is not the snappiest, wittiest, most vibrant actor around (he's more of a "Poke him and see if he's still alive" type). My personal favorite choices would have been James Marsters of Buffy fame, or a fellow on the excellent BBC series Hustle. So, the movie had one huge cross to bear in its lead, and more in the transformation of the comic's witty hustler into a dour, grim-faced ass-kicking toughguy who blasted away demons with a holy-powered golden shotgun (Yes, you read that right...). How was it? As a Constantine movie, fairly bad, though in all fairness it was not as eye-bleedingly wretched as I expected. It was not good either, and in fact I've already forgotten half the film - the plot concerned something or other that involved lots of exploding windows and CGI. My verdict - If you've never read the original comic and come in with blank expectations, you'll be as entertained as you were watching Van Helsing. If you're a fan of the comic, go watch some of the James Marsters-centered Buffy episodes and think what might have been....