Here is a comment received via email:

To me, the movie was a broad parody, very tongue in cheek and self-referential, that toyed with the notions of the perfect family and the odd man out. (You know, the All-American White-as-Wonderbread family we're fed to the teeth with in mainstream cinema even to this day). So I thought that Jean Claude being a Frenchman wasn't such an arbitrary designation as the critic claimed it to be, it was more an allusion to our (conservative Americans, that is) tendency to ostracize what we don't understand and therefore label as "foreign" and "dangerous." Pretty much the whole Bush administration in a nutshell, right?

That fact that he didn't have teeth was another quality that set him apart from the rest. I thought it was hilarious and very telling that the words and phrases Jean Claude spoke in the Granny's-Attracted sequences were the most common ones we hear all the time, like Sacre Bleu and Voulez vous coucher avec moi and such. Because that's as deep as most people bother to understand or appreciate another culture or language.

Just some thoughts...it was a great movie, in my book.

Julianne C. Brown
Public Services Librarian
Cuyahoga County Public Library