Aux Armes Citoyens is a 1940's period piece about two Americans who meet by chance and discuss freedom and politics at a cafe in Saint-Gilles, Vichy France. It was around this time that James and Robert's parents started to suspect they weren't like the other kids at their school. Certainly, there would be no need to set an extra place at the dinner table for any football scouts. But of course, I don't mean that in a negative way.

I think the conversation the two characters have is well-written, if maybe a bit one-dimensional on the part of James' character. The main thing I didn't get was the ending, which is quickly becoming a fucking tradition in my reviews. The page for this movie says that the young man rethinks his decision to leave for America, but when exactly does he rethink it? Before or after the train blows up? Doesn't that kinda narrow his travel plans anyway? Did Charley Vandergrift do that? And what were those papers at the end? I think this movie needs one of those endings where a paragraph comes on screen, except instead of the characters' fate, it simply tells us what we just saw.

Here is what the Dastolis have to say about Aux Armes Citoyens:

ROBERT:

"While we had taken French for five years prior to making Aux Armes Citoyens (that's why we were so obsessed with sticking lines of French into the movie), Charley Vandergrift didn't know how to say any of the French lines. We did ADR for every single line anyway so we worked with him as much as we could, but there was that safety built into the script that made it more believable that the two were not fluent French speakers."

JAMES:

"I can't believe he had highlights in his hair. That and a few other things prevent people from being able to take this seriously. The train station had a lot of work done to it to make it look like it could have been 1940s France, but a lot more effort should have really gone into the cafe."

The highlights in Vandergrift's hair never took me out of it, James. If anything made me doubt the reality of this movie, it's the fact that the two of you were sucking on unlit cigarettes that produced CGI smoke after being lit by CGI fire. You crazy fuckin bastards.