Please join this weekly meme. Grab a copy of the photo above and link back to An Accidental Blog. Share with the rest of us your passion for France. Did you read a good book set in France? See a movie? Take a photo in France? Have an adventure? Eat a fabulous meal or even just a pastry? Or if you're in France now, go ahead and lord it over the rest of us. We can take it.
No, I haven't seen Le Weekend yet, but I want to. It won't be in Columbus until April. The description says a married couple return to Paris to add some pizzazz to their marriage. From the trailers I've seen, they're surprised that things feel very different because they have aged. They're a little more persnickety; the stairs seem much steeper (plus they're out of shape).
Then they run into an old friend, Jeff Goldblum, and he acts as a catalyst to changes.
Here's the trailer:
Have you seen it?
Are you going to? I'll be on the road much of Monday, but I hope to visit your blogs soon. I hope you'll visit each others blogs so you can get more of your France fix.
Please join this weekly meme. Grab a copy of the photo above and link back to An Accidental Blog. Share with the rest of us your passion for France. Did you read a good book set in France? See a movie? Take a photo in France? Have an adventure? Eat a fabulous meal or even just a pastry? Or if you're in France now, go ahead and lord it over the rest of us. We can take it.
I first heard about this movie when they were calling it Mr. Morgan's Last Love. I learned about it on Sim's blog Chapter 1 - Take 1. Apparently, somewhere along the line, they changed the title to Last Love. It stars Michael Caine and Clemence Poesy (Fleur de la Coeur from the Harry Potter movies). Matthew Morgan (Michael Caine) is an American widower living in Paris who can't get over the death of his wife (Jane Alexander) three years before. He rarely goes out of his apartment. He's given up.
One day on the bus, he meets Pauline (Poesy) and they strike up an unlikely friendship. Pauline reminds Morgan of his wife when she was young. Morgan reminds Pauline of her father who died. The expectations are a little off.
After Morgan tries to kill himself, his adult children show up in Paris and assume that Pauline is after his money.
I love the scenery and the feel of France throughout the movie.
This movie is in English, but from the ending feels more French than American. Some of you know my feeling that French comedies are often more tragic than funny.
I'll say that the ending is sad but hopeful.
Here's the trailer.
I'm busy writing and editing today. I've passed 35,000 words in my Nanowrimo efforts and as I was writing a love scene, I had to return to one of my favorite lines from Room With a View when Cecil asks Lucy if he can kiss her. She says, "Well, of course, you may, Cecil. You might have before. I can't run at you, you know."
Here's the scene from youtube. The kiss comes around 3 minutes.
And, as a comparison, we must revisit the scene of the kiss in an Italian poppy field. This was what she compared -- Cecil's kiss and George's kiss.
Love the soaring Italian opera music. I might have stuck with the Italian drive myself but Julian Sands is divine in this.
Which would you choose?
Lovely to remember and enjoy as I continue my solitary life as a writer.
Please join this weekly meme. Grab a copy
of the photo above and link back to An Accidental Blog. Share with the rest of us
your passion for France. Did you read a good book set in France? See a movie?
Take a photo in France? Have an adventure? Eat a fabulous meal or even just a
pastry? Or if you're in France now, go ahead and lord it over the rest of us. We
can take it.
Maybe we can all satisfy our yearnings for France, until we get
there again.
This week, I finished reading a book set in France and watched a French movie.
I can't recommend the book too highly.
The book, A Chateau in Provence by Charles Wood, was such a strange title. The book truly had nothing to do with a chateau, but I thought the premise was fun. Some Americans vacationing in France get caught up in intrigue over a painting stolen by the Nazis and never returned. As a matter of fact, my own novel, The Summer of France, deals with some Nazi-stolen art as well, so, of course, I thought the idea was great. In spite of the good plot, the characters were not fleshed out enough so the reader could relate to them, and some basic editing would have helped the book. Also, when writing with a different language included, like French, it's always a good idea to check and re-check to get it right. Since I'm an English teacher, some basic punctuation issues, like misplaced commas, bugged me too.
Here's an excerpt from the book on page 63:
He tried the knob. he not only hadn't closed the door, he hadn't even locked it. He pushed it open and went to the side of the bed, knelt on one knee and reached his hand into the area between mattress and spring and felt the comforting bulk of his wallet. He felt relieved.
The next thing Sam felt was an immense explosion in the back of his head followed by brilliant firewords behind his eyes. The room spun and tilted sidewise. His consciousness slipped away like a medieval ghost gliding out the door.
The book skipped back and forth from different characters points of view and the reader didn't get a chance to know any of them enough to really care about them.
This also counts toward the meme Books on France 2013 at Words and Peace. I've vowed to read 12 books set in France and this is my second. It counts even if I'm not crazy about it, right?
We also watched a French movie Saturday evening -- Tous les Matins du Monde with Gerard DePardieu. The film was based on the life of the composer Sainte Colombe. It tells the story of the eccentric composer in mourning for the wife who dies young. He refuses to play at court
because he feels the music is more important than recognition from the king. The composer is left to raise two young daughters, and he teaches them both to play the cello as well. Then a young man, Marin Marais, comes to learn the cello from Sainte Colombe and one of the daughters falls for him. It's this young man who later becomes the DePardieu character.
Like many French movies, this one leaves a lot of questions. The opening defintely made me uncomfortable. Probably the first 15 minutes was a close-up shot on Depardieu as he began to tell his story. I just wanted to look away, but I had to keep looking to read the English translation.
The movie did hold my attention through the end even though I was very tired. And some things seems so French, like the daughter pulling her breast out of her blouse to offer herself to Marais. Or the line about the daughters growing up and that they now had to wear a pad between their legs because they bled monthly. I just thought that was something that wouldn't have been voiced in an American film. Maybe we're too squeamish, or maybe it's obvious.
The music throughout the film was lovely and full of emotion.
The movie took me to 17th century France for a short time, although the life seemed hard and fairly joyless. The composer took joy only in the moments that the ghost of his wife appeared to him, and (spoiler alert) the daughter dies young as well. The reviews of this on Amazon are breathless, so I suppose I should assume I didn't gather the true meaning.
Enjoyable, not a "must see."
Last week, on Thursday, I tried the "I Love France" meme. Unfortunately, it looks like the blog that used to do that is no longer doing it. Sigh...
I want a weekly France meme, but I don't have any bright ideas. Do you?
What could bloggers write about every week if they love France?
I'd like to include books, movies, photos, stories, food, fashion -- all from France.
I could even make a cool logo for it (or ask a more-talented friend to do it).
I'm waiting for your brilliant suggestions. Meanwhile, here's a photo that Grace took of Mont St. Michel with some sort of special effect. Lovely.
When I blogged about my book being published, Sim from Chapter 1- Take 1 immediately asked if I'd picked out who would play the characters in the movie. Of course, her blog is all about books that are made into movies, so that's the way her mind works.
I would love to see my book made into a movie. It has scenic landscapes in Provence, flashbacks to World War II, and a motorcycle chase from Provence to Krakow.
I haven't really pegged any certain actors into roles though -- except one. The handsome Frenchman Christophe should be played by Gilles Marini.
I think I first saw him as Samantha's neighbor in Sex in the City, can't remember if it was the movie or the television show, but it was when Samantha lived in California with her boyfriend. Gilles was the next door neighbor who peeled off his wetsuit on the balcony.
Yummm.
I'll wait til the rest of you have read my book to throw out some ideas about who should play the other characters.
Earl and I watched a movie on one of his two nights off and when we got to the end, we looked at each other and said, "Good movie." Many times, we watch a French movie and feel a little depressed at the end.
I was trying to explain this movie to my friend Angie at work yesterday, and she said, "That sounds like the lamest movie ever."
Okay, maybe my description wasn't very good, so let me try with you. Les Choristes, The Chorus in English, begins with a white-haired orchestra director in New York. He received a phone call from France saying his mother has died. When he returns home for the funeral, an old school mate arrives with a book written by a prefect of their school. The movie then plunges into the past.
That past follows Clement Mathieu, who has failed at a number of jobs, as he takes a prefect job in a reformatory school for boys. The school is, of course, run by a tyrant who beats them and puts them in solitary confinement for the slightest infraction. Mathieu tries a softer approach and the anticipation is that he will pay the price for letting up on the boys.
He carries with him a leather satchel that he locks away in his room. The next day, he finds the lock broken and a clutch of boys is crouched in the bathroom with the contents of the satchel spread out before them -- music that Mathieu has written. He finds the boys and snatches back the music. As he yells at the boys, another teacher comes in the bathroom to find them. Mathieu claims they are having choral practice so the boys don't get in trouble. The teacher gives Mathieu a look that accuses him of things that teachers in boys' schools should not do and says he will not report him this time. As Mathieu tries to control the unruly boys in their dorm at night and in a study hall, he decides to begin a chorus.
As you might predict, the chorus turns around the boys, especially one who is in trouble constantly and whose beautiful, single mother works two jobs. The boy has a clear, haunting voice.
This movie has many of the things you would expect in a movie about trying to save children that others have written off, so what makes it different? Inspiring?
I think it's the actors. A cute little guy named Pepinot waits by the gate everyday, sure that his father will come for him on Saturday, but his parents were killed during the occupation of World War II.
The movie was nominated for 2 Academy Awards and won at film festivals in Chicago and Austin.
The ending is hopeful, although all of the problems are not miraculously fixed.
I think you'll like it.
Earl works evenings, so most evenings I'm home alone or chaperoning Tucker and his girlfriend.
On Earl's two evenings off a week, we try to find something fun to do. Tuesday night, we walked down to the library and borrowed a couple of movies then went to a local coffee shop. We sat at tables along the sidewalk and enjoyed the beautiful September night.
When we had walked home, we watched one of the movies. Made in 1995, French Kiss with Meg Ryan and Kevin Kline is a great romantic comedy for anyone who loves France, like I do.
Earl had never seen it before, and I only fell asleep for a small part of the movie. Kevin Kline plays a Frenchman, Luc, who is a thief. I wondered why they had chosen him to play a Frenchman and when I searched it online, I found that the role was originally written for Gerard Depardieu. I like Depardieu, but I can't imagine Meg Ryan falling for him. Kline has since played other French-speaking parts. The plot is that Meg Ryan is petrified of flying so she doesn't go overseas with her fiance. He meets a French woman and falls in love. She gets up her nerve to fly over and win back the fiance, but meets Luc on the plane. He hides some contraband in her bag and they are thrown together.
Although I love France, I still prefer to watch American movies made in France. The problem is that comedies in France aren't generally funny. Someone almost always dies. But the other movie we watched on Earl's night off was French, billed as a romantic comedy. We were prepared for bodies to start stacking up as the hilarity ensued.
The movie was called Heartbreaker with Vanessa Paradis and Romain Duris, French actors. The premise is that Duris plays Alex who, with his sister and brother-in-law, runs an elaborate business to break up couples. The examples they gave were a brother who paid them to break up his sister and her lame boyfriend, and a father who hired them to keep his daughter from marrying someone boring.
The beginning was fun as Alex and his crew went to elaborate lengths to convince a woman that she deserved more than the man who preferred to stay by the pool and watch a wet t-shirt contest.
Of course, Alex meets his match when he is asked to stop the marriage of Juliette, an independent woman, to a British philanthropist. Alex takes the job because he needs the money, even though it goes against his principles. He usually only breaks up couples who are unhappy or a bad fit. Juliette puts up quite a fight, which makes Alex fall in love with her. I won't tell you how it ends, but surprisingly, no one dies, which makes it 'ilarious, as the French say.
Both movies were full of lovely French scenes.
As an adult, I don't have a lot of favorites. My kids were always trying to pin me down to my favorite color, my favorite food, my favorite child.
But I do have two favorite movies. One of them is recent and the other has been my favorite since grad school.
We've rented Midnight in Paris several times. When the Redbox dvd froze the other night, Earl pointed out that we simply should have bought the movie. I love all the scenes of Paris. We play the "I've been there" game with Grace along, and I got to play it with my friend Ruth the other night too. She hadn't seen the movie. Doesn't like Woody Allen. Doesn't like Owen Wilson.
"Yeah, but that doesn't matter. You'll like this movie," I told her and I was right.
I also love figuring out who all the historical characters are. Of course, I recognized the Fitzgeralds and Hemingway and Gertrude Stein right away. Man Ray? Luis Bunuel? I didn't know about those surrealists or American writer Djuna Barnes.
I see something different every time I watch it.
And, of course, Wilson's fiance in the movie is so dismissive of his love for Paris and urge to finish his novel. I spend the movie trying to convince the screen that he should dump the fiance.
My long-term favorite movie is Room With a View. I find myself quoting this movie or thinking of scenes in this movie all the time. Just this morning I said, "I can't go running at you now, can I?" quoting the Helena Bonham Carter character as she encourages her fiance, Daniel Day Lewis to give her a first passionate kiss. I think of our French friend Maguerite as the proper maiden aunt Charlotte Bartlett and wrote in my memoir how the family dreaded her visit at the vacation house in Corsica, just as they dreaded having "Poor Charlotte." The movie is so witty and clever, plus it has the first full-frontal male nudity I ever saw in a movie when the men are skinny-dipping in a pool and Helena Bonham Carter, her mother and fiance are walking past. Another hilarious scene. And I frequently find myself wanting to call out "Truth, Beauty..." the motto of the young George Sands character, who yells this from a tree, before the branch breaks and he takes a tumble to the Tuscan countryside. Tourists are mocked. Romances are mocked. The idea of raising children in the countryside to maintain their innocence before sending them on a world tour to finish them, seems like what we might have done with Grace. See how I've embraced this movie.
How about you? Do you have a favorite movie? Why is it your favorite?
Okay, it's time for me to stop kvetching about the fact that I'm never with my extended family on holidays. Instead, I need to start building traditions with my kids so that when they are grown up with families, they'll come home for holidays. When I think of Thanksgiving as a kid, I remember my mom in the kitchen while I watched the Thanksgiving parade on television. Sometimes we went to my grandmother's house in Kentucky and we'd play with the cousins. Nana always had stackcake, which was my favorite (or maybe I'm confusing that with Christmas). Right, so back to Thanksgiving traditions. My parents are in Florida, one brother is in Texas and another brother spends every Wednesday before Thanksgiving and Thanksgiving Day at his in-laws. That leaves my husband's family. This year, they are doing a run and then going to their in-laws for a 4 p.m. meal We wedged out a tiny block of time for a Thanksgiving brunch. Then Earl will go to work in the evening. Grace is still in France, so it will be me and two teenage boys at home. I came up with one possible tradition to add from reading Corey's blog. Corey has an amazingly close-knit family that makes me so jealous. She lives in France, but she is home in California for Thanksgiving. She talked about her mother baking cookies and showed a cookie cutter of a turkey. Eureka! I have a turkey cookie cutter from my Mom. So my husband mixed up the dough for the cut out cookies this morning while I was at work. Tomorrow, I can roll and cut out the cookies shaped like turkeys. The boys and I will probably go to a movie on Thanksgiving, but if Grace was home, she would not go for that. She's very traditional. She would insist on family games probably. So, any suggestions for Thanksgiving traditions?
Manifique! Superbe! Charmante! Imagine a movie filled with images of something you love and long for. I saw another reviewer explain that Paris is the main character in this movie, and I have to agree. The movie begins with shots of famous Paris monuments and tourist attractions. At first, Earl elbowed me each time he recognized something in Paris -- Monet's gardens, the green metal book stalls along the Seine -- until I threatened him. After all, we had visited most of those tourist attractions. I'm not a Woody Allen fan, but I loved this movie. From the previews,I could see that Owen Wilson, who plays Gil the main actor, yearned for Paris. He plays a writer, so already here is another connection. A writer who loves Paris -- I felt I could relate. What I didn't get from the previews was that Gil goes back in time to the Roaring 20s, the time when Paris teamed with American writers like Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Stein; painters like Picasso and Dali; along with surrealist filmmakers. The frenetic Gil itches to be in the Paris of the 20s until he is transported and finally learns that people, maybe writers and artists and philosophers, long for that time in the past when things were better. Yet each time period wishes to have experienced a previous, better time period. It made me think of an episode of Mad Men where Don pitched the Kodak slide carousel. He explained, "...in Greek, nostalgia literally means the pain from an old wound. It's a twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone." Perhaps people are always nostalgic for that time they can't recapture. They remember it as a superior time. I wonder if Woody Allen is nostalgic for a simpler time, or maybe, like me, he simply loves Paris and wanted to showcase it in a movie. I'm so glad that he did.
When I was in ninth grade, our little town of Lebanon, Ohio was chosen to film a movie. A big Hollywood movie. Harper Valley PTA. Now, you may think that the honor was rather dubious. Unfortunately, that little town I lived in was perfect for a movie about small town backstabbing and politics. The authentic downtown has an ice cream parlor, antique stores and The Golden Lamb, Ohio's oldest continually operating inn (a place I later worked as a hostess). The main attraction though was Berry Middle School, an old school set atop a rolling lawn. I'd gone to school there fifth through eighth grades. My mother taught there. I remember she told me that during the filming the teachers were not allowed to adjust the shades in the windows so that the shots always looked the same. The movie was based on the song and had a far-fetched plot about a slightly loose mother whose daughter will be punished by the school board if the mother doesn't conform. As the quote on the movie poster says, "The day my momma socked it to the Harper Valley PTA." The mother gets back at the school board by exposing their own questionable behavior. So why am I telling you this? Because I was an extra in the movie. It's funny because I haven't rented the movie or searched for it on Hulu. I haven't watched it since it came out in the theater and I saw myself on screen for a split second licking a peppermint ice cream cone. If you want to look for me, I had on a maroon wool sweater, crew neck. I had out of control hair that I tried to straighten and then flip backward from my face. So here's what happened, somehow, I got signed up to be an extra in the movie. Every kid in school must have wanted to be an extra, I don't know how I got on the list ahead of others. There were a bunch of us though. We got to leave school for the day, taken on a bus downtown to the ice cream parlor. The ice cream parlor was a place we'd hung out since we were old enough to leave our parents behind. In addition to ice cream, they sold hamburgers and other food. Think of it like the burger joint in an Archies comic book. We were all sat at tables in the ice cream parlor and given treats. I had a sugar cone, the pointy brown kind, with peppermint ice cream. I'm sure some of my friends were in the movie too and we sat together. The scene in the ice cream parlor involved us all eating and talking when some main characters come running through. We shot the scene over and over. At one point, Craig Colston, a friend of my older brother, got to be pushed over by the main characters running through the ice cream parlor. At another point, we were all herded outside to stand in line before they brought us back in for more shooting. I remember licking that ice cream cone quickly in the sun so I could get another one before the next shooting began. What I learned about movie making that day: repetition is dull. The pay I received: a day off school and two free ice cream cones. Even today, that might be enough of a reward. P.S. I found this youtube clip that shows clips from the movie set to the song. Note the very fashionable clothes that the students are wearing. Guess that was what I looked like. Sorry, you know my links never work on this blog so you'll probably have to copy and paste, but here it is anyway.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ivUOnnstpg
On Saturday, our family squared our proverbial shoulders and prepared to change the rest of the summer. So far, it has been a summer of swim meets and game show network and late night lolling on the couch and front porch. That was before our house guest arrived. Marie lives in Paris and she will stay with us in Ohio until school begins in August. We have never met her, or her family. She is a friend of a friend of friend, but she and Grace are the same age so we decided to offer her a place to stay. We picked her up at the airport and she's been talking ever since. She's explained the school system in France, different types of flowers, climbing a glacier in France, well, the list goes on. This French teenager is an easy guest to have. She's personable and offers to help out, but my own American teenager is bearing the brunt of the entertaining. Marie smiles a lot and is giggly, like a teenage girl. Grace, my own not so giggly daughter, knows that she is, at heart, an introvert. On the second night when Marie fell asleep, she snuck down to the computer to spend some time with her facebook friends. I started to feel some niggling doubts about the wisdom of a six-week visitor until Monday when I got home from work. The two of them were on the couch watching Pirates of the Caribbean 3 and laughing together. Grace dragged herself off to swim practice, came home to a dinner I had fixed. We talked about activities for the next day. There was the zoo, or COSI the science museum, or the art museum, or the Harry Potter movie, which Marie hadn't seen yet. "Harry Potter," Marie crowed. I laughed and said that when Grace goes to visit Marie next year they won't see The Louvre or the Musee d'Orsay, instead they'll go from theater to theater watching movies. "Now what?" I asked as we finished eating. I was grading papers, but I was willing to put them away to play cards or a board game. Grace looked at Marie, "Mamma Mia or Emma?" she asked. And they walked off singing, "Mamma Mia, here I go again, my my..."
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