Word: chateau
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...Yanks are, in their way, a family. They have a deserted chateau for a home. They have a designated Father (Frank Whaley), a sometime seminarian whose priestly aspirations have gone awry; a designated Mother (Gary Sinise), a fussbudget teetering on the brink of mental breakdown; and a favored son, Will Knott (Ethan Hawke), sergeant in command as well as the film's narrator and controlling sensibility...
...child's smile, lighting up as he enters Euro Disneyland, knows no language barrier. Nor does the thrill of fear scooting up a young French spine at the sight of Monstro the Whale at Les Voyages de Pinocchio or the dragon in Le Chateau de la Belle au Bois Dormant (Sleeping Beauty's Castle). When a kid alights from the Big Thunder Mountain railway and exclaims "Genial!" everyone nearby can tell he means "Awesome!" You need no French diploma to read a gamine's serene exhaustion when she staggers out on penguin legs at the end of a 12-hour...
...rooms upstairs, though, aren't much bigger than the ones in the Hilton outside the old city. The price reflects the lobby--the Chateau Frontenac is famous but its also inordinately expensive...
Surrounding the Chateau Frontenac are the standards of the pre-fab family vacation: the park, the boardwalk, the coin-slot telescopes, the street musicians, the toddlers stumbling around looking cute, the proud parents snapping picture after picture...
There's also an alleyway teeming with self-proclaimed artists who peddle their creations, mostly pictures of the hotel, for $5 to $10 apiece. From a distance, the paintings are elaborate, detailed depictions of the Chateau Frontenac. Up close, they are xereoxed pieces of paper marked with black-and-white ink sketches of the hotel. Like pages from coloring books, their spaces are filled with watercolor paint. The "artists" must not use small-enough brushes--the don't always stay in the lines...