A truce has been reached to bring an end to the Camembert wars that have plagued one of France’s most pungent cheese for a decade, but some say the quality of the famous fromage will never be as good [ . . . ]
Read more at: Fears in France that Camembert truce will lead to cheese ruin – The Local
After the progressive Mayor Anne Hidalgo converted a busy auto road into a park, city residents have reveled in the new public space–except for the car lobby, which is threatening to undo her work [ . . .]
More at source: Paris Goes To Court To Protect Its Pedestrian Spaces
Back on France Culture with ‘By Les Temps qui cour’ (which replaces ‘Les Nouvelles Vagues’ since the beginning of the school year), the passionate and thoughtful Marie Richeux also released at the end of August her third book, Climats de France, a rich exploration and poetic of Franco-Algerian relations taking as a point of departure his childhood in a city of Meudon-la-Forêt. We wanted to know which films water this great thirsty for culture.
Three Favorite Films of All Time
King of the Wind and Electric Queens (2014) by Cédric Dupire and Gaspard Kuentz, a so-called “documentary” experience about a fair in India that never clearly reveals its stake and is so powerful in the electricity of this moment. The Lesser Mantra (1997) by Fernand Deligny, Josée Manenti and Jean-Pierre Daniel. His film shows, like his books, how to question the way we look at others, and to make this interrogation the very subject of a link (therefore a cinema) is fertile. The Wonders (2014) Alice Rohrwacher. It is so beautiful. Amongst other things, there is this scene where the two sisters look with concentration at the way the sun settles on the floor and the walls. It is very moving [ . . . ]
Read the Full Interview at: Marie Richeux, what movie buff are you? – THREE COLOURS
He looks like Lefty Frizzell, sounds like Lou Reed, and he’s French. Love Rodolphe Burger, pas de merde.
A new book features illustrations some of the city’s most famous buildings
Source: We’re in Love with These Drawings of Paris | Architectural Digest
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
