Everyone knows that Godard is a bit of an acquired taste, and that no matter how much some cinephile effuses about the man’s genius, there are plenty of people that are going to find his movies unwatchable. This film, however, is a bit of an exception. It’s a rollicking tale with quirky narration (done by [...]

Well, after taking a look at the blurb on the DVd cover and feeling in the mood for some black and white Nouvelle Vague classics, i decided to get this one…and was quite disappointed. The themes treated in the movie, including the worldwide conspiracy against disaffected lefty artists in Paris, made me roll my eyes [...]

This recently published ranking is supposedly measures overall globalization, taken as some kind of composite of business activity, human capital, information exchange, cultural experience, and political engagement. New York, London, Paris, Tokyo and Hong Kong were the top 5. Beijing made it at #12, and Shanghai at #20.
Shanghai’s highest ranked aspect was business activity, [...]

I looked up the word “flaneur” in the index of hte boojks and skipped straight to it: I’d heard this term first in books by and about Walter Benjamin, and the idea of these urban wanderers–poets, wastrels, misfits, outsiders, rebels–was always appealing to me. The rich cultural life of Paris in the 19th c. [...]

…but it does have Beijing. I learned about this interactive map from Lifehacker (source of all good information in the universe), it’s kinda nifty, for example in the Beijing one the usual suspects are featured — the Bell and Drum Towers, Tiananmen Square, Lama Temple, CCTV building and tower, etc. There is basic information about [...]

Les Amants (The Lovers) is another of the Louis Malle CC films I’ve picked up before the DVD shop got harmonized for the Olympics. They say this is the film that made Jeanne Moreau into a star. She had already been famous before this (1958), most notably as the youngest woman to ever become a [...]

I think it was a happy coincidence that I watched Mike Leigh’s Naked and Louis Malle’s Le Feu Follet (The Fire Within) in succession, on the same day. Both are character-driven movies about men who, on the surface, appear to live in the same world as us. Sure, they’re troubled—but only temporarily so.
Of course, [...]

Ever since stumbling across his grave at the Montparnasse cemetery, I have been not quite obsessed � persistently inquisitive � about the life and times of the Romanian-French poet Tristan Tzara, one of the founders of the Dadaist movement. I was just looking over his single entry in Wikipedia, and found this quote plastered on [...]

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