'Magick'
mp3 Gone now.
You can buy it from Amazon UK
Francoise Hardy and Blur - To the End
This was the French version. Tough to find but I got it at 7digital.com
The French New Wave [La Nouvelle Vague] gets talked about more than any other film movement in the history of film. Frankly, it sometimes seems a bit overhyped. Yet there is no doubt that it's influence on film is significant. What I find remarkable, though, is the staying power of not only the films like Breathess, The 400 Blows and Hiroshima mon amour [as well as many others] but the staying power of the major directors of the movement as well.
Six of them started making films in the late 1950's early 1960's and are still making films today. There is no other country [much less film movement] I can think of that has this many great filmmakers still making films after almost 60 years in the business.
The directors are:
Claude Chabrol
Born: 1930
First Feature Film: Le Beau Serge [1958]
# of Films - Over 60
Best Film [opinion]: This Man Must Die [1969]
Most Recent Film - The Girl Cut in Two [2007]
Jean-Luc Godard
Born: 1930
First Feature Film: Breathless [1960]
# of Films - Over 60
Best Film [opinion]: Week-End [1967]
Most Recent Film - Notre Musique [2004]
Alain Resnais
Born: 1922
First Feature Film: Hiroshima mon amour [1959]
# of Films - About 20
Best Film [opinion]: Hiroshima mon amour [1959]
Most Recent Film - Private Fears in Public Places [2007]
Jacques Rivette
Born: 1928
First Film: Paris Belongs to Us [1960]
# of Films - About 30
Best Film [opinion]: La belle noiseuse [1991]
Most Recent Film - The Duchess of Langeais [2007]
Eric Rohmer
Born: 1920
First Film: The Sign of Leo [1959]
# of Films - Over 40
Best Film [opinion]: My Night at Mauds [1969]
Most Recent Film - Romance of Astree and Celadon [2007]
Agnes Varda
Born: 1928
First Film: LaPointe Courte [1956]
# of Films - About 40
Best Film [opinion]: La Bonheur [1965]
Most Recent Film - Quelques veuves de Noirmourtier [2006]
A little Drum & Bass from Spring Heal Jack.
Good track. Easy to find although mainly from used places.
Amazon is good place to find it.
Track from Tattoo You. Easy to find.
Easy to find.
I saw eight programs at Telluride this year.
I'm Not There - A film in which many actors portray Bob Dylan at various times in his career. Really original idea and a film that has an experimental concept but one that wears out its welcome after a while. The music is great and any Bob Dylan fan will want to see it.
Persepolis - Animated feature based on the best selling graphic novel about a young middle class Iranian girl growing up in post revolution Iran. Pretty good film if not a bit underwhelming.
Secret Sunshine - This Korean film has a lot to say about the human condition. A woman loses her husband and then later her son. She attempts to deal with the tragedy by becoming a born again Christian but it is merely a small band-aid for such a large wound. She must learn to deal with the tragedy and her life on her own terms. Very well acted and engaging if not tough to watch at times.
Blind Mountain - Young woman is kidnapped and forced to live as a wife in a peasant community in China. No hope for escape she tries again and again. The film's basic message is that everyone lives in a prison under the thumb of some authority somewhere. Especially in China where the corruption is so bad that even law abiding citizens cannot escape.
The Band's Visit - Really enjoyable Israeli film about an Egyptian marching band that ends up in the wrong town in the middle of nowhere. They stay the night and befriend some of the locals. At the center is a lonely woman who takes a liking to the band leader and later to one of the band members. The deadpan humor and funny situations are very much in the vain of Jim Jarmusch and Aki Kaurismaki.
Steep - A ski documentary about skiers who have pushed the envelope on skiing the steep and deep. Good but unremarkable.
A silent film:
People on Sunday
And then some Vitaphone short films from the late 20's early 30's hosted by Leonard Maltin
Before George the Cyclists bikes off across Europe he has one last wrap-up review of the Cannes Film Festival.
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With all the good films this year there weren't enough awards to go around to recognize them all. As expected, the Palm d'Or went to the Romanian abortion film "Four months, Three Weeks and Two Days."
Also expected, Do-Yeon Jeon from the South Korean film "Secret Sunshine" won best actress. The early favorite from the Russian film "Alexandra" dropped off the map after this film screened. And it was no surprise that Fatih Akin won best screenplay for his intricately plotted German/Turkish film "The Edge of Heaven."
The rest of the awards were not exactly what was anticipated. The biggest shocker of all was the lead from the Russian film "The Banishment" winning the best actor award. Few expected that film to receive any recognition from the jury. Best director going to Julian Schnabel for "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" was a surprise, even to him.
Of the 19 films I've seen, not a one was a dud.
Not all were universally embraced, but even those that were reviled by some had others calling them masterpieces, as with the Bela Tarr, Ulrich Seidl and Tarantino films. Half the films in Competition were by veteran, established directors, none of whom stumbled, each delivering another work in their distinctive styles that will at least please their devotees.
Do-Yeon Jeon in "Secret Sunshine" plays a recently widowed 25-year old who moves to the city where her husband was raised with their five year old son. The city is small enough that everyone seems to know who she is, but think it odd that she would move to a city she had never been to. As one woman says, "She looks fine, but I don't think she's normal." She gives piano lessons and is pursued by a nerdy, never-married, semi-repugnant 39-year old. She suffers a traumatic event that leads to her embracing Christianity. She becomes supremely devoted and seems saved, but she suffers another traumatic event giving her doubts. As with the other film in competition, this movie has a prison scene that is the crux of the story. The range and depth of her performance was profoundly moving.
"Promise Me This," by Serbian Emir Kusturica, two-time Palm d'Or winner. This rollicking, frenzied, sometimes farcical story of a teen-aged peasant who is sent to the city to find a wife for himself by his grandfather will delight all of Kusturica's fans and others as well. Kusturica's exuberant imagination shows no signs of diminishing. Guys are clobbered left and right by falling and flying and flung objects. A guy fired from a cannon is glimpsed throughout the duration of the movie above the mayhem below. When he lands he wants to know what's happened in the Italian soccer league.
The Japanese "The Mourning Forest" put us back on the "film as art" track. Panoromic and aeriel shots of lush green forests and precisely trimmed rows of hedges that made for good hiding complemented the story of an elderly Japanese man approaching death and his relationship with a young woman. They go off into the forest for a couple day trek that has moments sweet and poignant.
George the Cyclist has just a few days left in Cannes before the festival wraps up. Here are two more reviews.
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Russian master Alexander Sokurov’s film "Alexandra" is a fully comprehensible and accessible film of universal appeal that leaps right up there with "Four Months, Three Weeks and Two Days" as a front-runner for the Palm d'Or. Its lead, opera legend Galina Vishnevskaya, as Alexandra, an elderly woman who goes to visit her officer grandson at his isolated outpost in , is a shoe-in for best actress.
The incongruity of a doddering grandmother among a small corps of weary, hardened soldiers at a rustic encampment of tents provides a captivating premise for a commentary on the insanity and inhumanity of armed conflict where "good guys collude with bad guys and saints become devils," as she says.
Though her grandson is a veteran soldier, who kills matter-of-factly as a job, there isn't a single shot or act of violence in this film. He has moments of astounding tenderness with his grandmother, hugging her as if she is the most valuable thing in the world, braiding her hair, speaking from the heart. This is a movie that speaks to our times and all times--a truly remarkable movie-going experience. One poignant scene follows another. It could go down as one of the most powerful anti-war movies ever.
"You, the Living" by Swedish director Roy Andersson, whose "Songs from the Second Floor" won an award here a few years ago, was a lark of a movie whose host of characters might have been caffeinated escapees from a Kaurasmaki film. Many start out mopish and droll but explode into unexpected acts of zaniness in this series of hardly connected vignettes. A suicidal woman on a park bench suddenly breaks into song, a barber sheers a strip down the middle of the head of a customer who makes a disrespectful comment, a guy is sentenced to the electric chair by a trio of beer-guzzling judges for ruining a two hundred year old tea set when his table cloth pulling stunt fails, a naked guy on his back complains about his investments as his wife in a Viking helmet….
