Category: Movies

‘Django’: Life — And Music — During Wartime

Though overall, a disappointment – I’m glad I finally got to see Django, which just hit my local cable movie offerings. I’ll first ac-cent-uate the positive, and say actor Reta Kateb makes a dashing Django Reinhardt. I’ll add  that close-ups of Ketab’s guitar fingering is as impressive as … well, Sean Penn’s, anyway. I can forgive even the amount of fabrication in the screenplay. But, by the time Django with his gypsy bandmates and family are planning their escape from Nazi-occupied France in 1943, the movie just seems to run out of gas. (I’d say run out of heart, but the movie’s never has much of that to begin with.) The movie did make me pull out my Django recordings and listen to Minor Swing, Nuages, (the unofficial anthem of the French Resistance) and Sweet Georgia Brown. And that’s always a good thing.

Read the LA Times Review below:

In German-occupied France, guitarist Django Reinhardt (Reda Kateb) awakens to the horrors inflicted upon his people in this musically accomplished but “oversimplified, underfed and overburdened” film.

A bar fight breaks out during a pivotal scene in Django, the musically crisp yet mournful new wartime drama by Étienne Comar. As the fracas unfolds, the band keeps playing, with a blithe bemusement that seems to say: This happens all the time. But these are far from normal times.

The leader of the band is Django Reinhardt, the incomparably gifted Romani jazz guitarist, soulfully embodied by the French-Algerian actor Reda Kateb. He’s biding his time in the French Alps during German occupation, hoping for stealth passage across Lake Geneva into Switzerland. One of the men throwing punches is a Nazi solider, which means the inevitable: a lineup, a lockup and the sternest of warnings. Reinhardt is no good, it would seem, at laying low.

Kateb studied the guitar for a year to prepare for this role, and his work is evident: There’s an unstudied naturalism to the flicker of his fingers across the fretboard, and the film perks up whenever music is playing [ . . . ]

Read Full Review at: ‘Django’: Life — And Music — During Wartime

Why Agnes Varda Is the Coolest Oscar Nomineev

This year, director Agnès Varda became the oldest Academy Award nominee in history when her documentary, Face Places, about street artist JR, was nominated in Best Documentary Feature category this year. This is just one of the many reasons that Varda is one of––if not THE––coolest Oscar nominee of all time. More thoughts below [ . . . ]

Source: Why Agnes Varda Is the Coolest Oscar Nominee | French Culture

Vincent Lindon in Xavier Giannoli’s “The Apparition” – illuminated film about faith

[ English translation] The subject of faith refers to “Men and Gods” (2010) Xavier Beauvois, whose Giannoli is not very far in his approach to an ambitious French auteur cinema. If their approach to the faith is different, the first referring to the assassination of the monks of Tibhirin (1996), Giannoli deals with an apparition of the Virgin Mary, as a fact, as it is documented. The starting point is an investigation launched by the Vatican to determine the veracity of a case of “appearance”. The following is realistic, precise. As at Beauvois.

Veracity and faith rarely go hand in hand. The second is not rational, lived as an inner conviction, the first is an accumulation of evidence. Giannoli’s scenario puts both in the balance. The opportunity to project a form of mysticism in the light of a skeptic (Vincent Lindon), facing the clairvoyant (amazing Galatea Bellugi), a priest (excellent Patrick d’Assumçao), a fanatic (disturbing Anatole Daubman) and to a crowd of pilgrims no less exalted.

Earth time and eternity

Beautiful equation, that all the sobriety of Vincent Lindon serves perfectly. Just like the staging of Xavier Giannoli. The subject, the apparition of the virgin to a witness, is rare in cinema (despite some seven biopics of Bernadette Soubirous); Therese of Lisieux, it is something else (The sublime “Thérèse” of Alain Cavalier). We will also mention “Fellini Roma”, with its long sequence of the appearance of the virgin with two children, rather sulphurous … with which “The Apparition” has connivances in the vision of the fanatics around the visionary child.

“The Apparition” finds this acuity of observation and analysis of Xavier Giannoli of “At the origin”. The filmmaker takes his time to account for earthly time in relation to eternity. He finds this crossroads to express doubt, in a scenario written in chapters, with his digressions (the episode of the icon). A war reporter has just lost his best friend in the field and is facing the afterlife. Beautiful subject, perhaps the main one, a film with drawers. A fair vision, ascetic, honest, and ambitious, in a fiction based on an investigation, so the suspense tense, dramatic, until an effective coup de theater. Pure in more than one way, “The Apparition” raises more questions than it answers: the mark of a work.

Source: Vincent Lindon in Xavier Giannoli’s “The Apparition” enlightened film about faith

Comedy genius, Jacques Tati: France’s answer to Mr Bean – in pictures

Jacques Tati became one of France’s best-loved film directors and actors with his bumbling character Monsieur Hulot. Here, we feature stills from some of his best-loved films [ . . . ]

See all pictures at: Comedy genius, Jacques Tati: France’s answer to Mr Bean – in pictures | French Film First | The Guardian