The neighbourhood around the Grands Boulevards subway station in Paris attracts a lot of tourists, but it is difficult to understand exactly why. Here is an alternative itinerary if you happen to lose yourself there. 

DON’T GO TO: the famous bistro Chartier. Okay, the place looks nice and traditional, but be careful, the food is mostly prepared from frozen meals. As a matter of fact, don’t go to any brassiere around this place neither. Remember you have an Indiana Café at home already.

RATHER GO TO: La Scala, a nice Italian restaurant, probably one of the few decent restaurants in this neighbourhood. Don’t be afraid of the hostile manners of the boss, he will get warmer as your lunch progresses, and anyway the specialties are worth it.

DON’T GO TO: Any theatre around. They are mostly about old fashioned boulevard comedies, nothing Broadway-like, plus there probably won’t be English subtitles.

RATHER GO TO: Le Beverley, the last pornographic movie theatre in Paris. The quality of the film doesn’t really matter, just to go there is a pretty special experience.

DON’T GO TO: All of the Irish-style pubs serving cheap pints. You didn’t really come here to enjoy the Parisian version of the European student exchange programs, did you?

RATHER GO TO: Rue du Faubourg St Denis. It is a short walk from these cheap pubs and you’ll find a more local and mixed crowd and maybe stumble upon Michel Gondry at Chez Jeanette.

It’s the film that followed musical project Lulacruza, over the most remote regions of Colombia, improvising a magical hunt for musical roots.

French nomadic cinematographer Vincent Moon is the mastermind behind this successful “Kickstarter.com” mission documenting extraordinary musicians around the globe and engaging with artists like The National, Sigur Rús, Arcade Fire, Yo La Tengo, Phoenix and Tom Jones; who additionally led him to a Michael Stipe phone call that culminated in a great REM “live” movie.

It’s an honour to have him interested in Colombia’s musical roots. I deeply recommend taking the time to watch a country like Colombia from a unique point of view. You will want to visit this place immediately.

Fortunately everybody can watch the film in this link and programme a (minimum of 5 people) public screening.

Vincent Moon’s plans to continue in Australia, the Philippines, Ethiopia and Madagascar, so follow his footsteps here.

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Esperando el Tsunami

Es la película que siguió al proyecto musical Lulacruza, por las regiones más recónditas de Colombia, improvisando una mágica búsqueda de sus raíces musicales.

El director de fotografía francés y nómade Vincent Moon es el cerebro detrás del éxito de “Kickstarter.com”, en el que ha documentado músicos de diferentes partes del mundo y que lo ha relacionado con artistas como: The Arcade Fire Nacional, Sigur Rús, Yo La Tengo, Phoenix y Tom Jones; que, además, lo llevó a recibir una llamada telefónica del cantante Michael Stipe que culminó en una gran película de su banda REM.

Es un honor que se haya interesado en las raíces musicales de Colombia y quiero recomendar profundamente que se tomen el tiempo de ver a un país como Colombia desde un punto de vista único. Querrás venir a Colombia inmediatamente.

Afortunadamente todos pueden ver la película en este enlace y programar una sesión pública (con un mínimo de 5 personas).

Los próximos planes de expedición de VM están en Australia, Filipinas, Etiopía y Madagascar, así que puede seguir sus pasos aquí.

The David Fincher experience is very much like anything else out there. Few directors in cinema today seem to be that identifiable with such immediacy.

It’s traits like these that the concept of the Swedish “Millennium” film trilogy so appealing. You might know it as The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo.

You’re best served tossing pre-conceived notions about the film out the window, especially if you’ve either a) read the book or b) seen the original films. Doing so allows you to approach this as a very idiosyncratic, individual trip down the rabbit hole. Two hours and 40 minutes go by like nothing, but it doesn’t feel rushed. It’s like downing a bottle of cinematic absinthe.

You will hear lots about Daniel Craig and Rooney Mara. Craig is as Nordicly stoic as is required. Rooney Mara has been handed the breakout role of a lifetime here and she does it justice. You can feel the pot ready to boil over. Playing it with less sass than Noomi Rapace did in the original, you seriously begin to wonder if Mara isn’t entirely sociopathic after all.

There’s been lots of talk regarding why this isn’t a box office hit. Look at Fincher at his darkest; films like Seven, Fight Club and The Game didn’t smash it off the bat. They took time, but like with any good trip, were worth the wait.

The project has 6 sets: a fashion collection created from donated clothes, a song chosen from vinyl’s donated to the Army and covered by a live musician, and a video inspired by the fusion of all these elements. During the show, music was played by dj Stuart, Leo García, Nacho Loizaga, Deborah De Corral and Maxi Trusso; and short artistic and fashion films were gorgeously produced by Primo, Rebolución, Cinco, Landia, Úrsula Cine and Nunchaku.

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Sr. Amor es un proyecto increíble, insólito, pero alucinante de la agencia de publicidad JWT para el Ejército de Salvación: convocaron a un grupo de los mejores diseñadores argentinos  -Hermanos Estebecorena, Pablo Ramírez, Mariano Toledo, Tramando, 12-NA, Ay Not Dead, Laurencio Adot y Bandoleiro- para armar una colección interviniendo ropa donada.

Se trata de 6 sets compuestos por una colección de ropa creada a partir de prendas donadas, una canción elegida entre los vinilos donados al Ejército y reversionada por un músico en vivo y un video inspirado en la fusión de estos elementos. Con todo esto se hizo un desfile espléndido en La Rural: la música en vivo fue de Dj Stuart, Deborah De Corral, Nacho Loizaga, Leo García y Maxi Trusso; y los cortos que presentó cada marca fueron fashion films artísticos por Primo, Rebolución, Cinco, Landia, Úrsula Cine y Nunchaku.

Don’t mess with Julia Kelz: she owns a black belt in karate, has an education in all kinds of dances and speaks four languages.

Apart from acting on stages in Köln, Stuttgart, Milano and Leverkusen, she is working hard on her singing career. “Take me into the Sea“ is just one example of her oral abilities. Does she ever sleep? In case you want to see her, you have to go to Hollywood, cause that’s where she’s taking acting classes right now.

For her first appearance on screen in 2011, Carolina was casted as a tough farmer’s girl from the North of Germany who falls in love with a Russian soldier-hunk in 1945. 

After having worked in theaters in Erfurt, Zwickau and Pforzheim, her talent is currentley on display at Junges Schauspielhaus Hamburg.

“L’Exercice de l’État” is a film by Pierre Schoeller, who makes a point avoiding to produce another carefully crafted and thoughtful theory on double bind in politics (trying to stay in power versus acting for the general interest). Like in many French films, there is a visionary and almost unreal element in the photography Schoeller choses in some scenes, but overall the film is very realistic, so the density of the movie is enhanced by those hallucinatory scenes. There are even electronic noise elements to strengthen a chilling atmosphere. The result is a bit like The West Wing meets David Cronenberg. The narrative tension lies in the political tactics, but from the surreal side of things, even if the ideas are not all good, there is an amazing car crash scene, and a scene of obscene drunkenness which work as a small tour de force. Pierre Schoeller also insists on political life seen as managing speed and double thought – answering two cellphones at once strongly embodies the imperative of two antagonists objectives to conciliate. What would Paul Virilio say?

It’s always nice when your favourite cult actors make it big. I’ve had a platonic crush on Ryan Gosling since he played a jewish neo-nazi (and got to fuck Summer Phoenix) in The Believer.

And now he’s breaking up fights, and popping up shirtless on girlfriends facebook walls every two minutes.

I never really know where nostalgia ends and appreciation begins when it comes to the 80′s. It feels like that decade has been so consistently picked apart and recycled over the last 20 odd years that it’s hard to seperate out the things that were actually good. (insert denim song here).

I’ve just watched The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension and I loved it. It feels like a film that should never have been made -structurally inventive, clever, good looking pop culture mash-up, with built in satire of mid 80′s geo politics, gender relations, cultural stereotypes of everything from rednecks to jamaicans. It’s entertaining and artistic. Oh and after seeing how completely zemekis ripped off the Overthruster for the Delorean’s Flux Capacitator in Back to the future, I’ve lost all respect for the latter film, and in fact, a lot of the ‘classic’ 80′s movies that we associate with that decade. It even references Pynchon for fuck sake!

In-Edit is a film festival dedicated to documentaries about music. It’s in it’s 6th year and it’s kind of a big deal/social event. Perhaps because it’s easier to justify getting wasted after you’ve just seen the Lemmy film, than if you were sitting through a Tarkovsky retrospective.

The program for this year’s festival covers every range of the musical spectrum, f rom a documentary on the 20th century composer Steve Reich to a look into the drug-induced decay of Pentagram, the 70s heavy metal band. 

Also on the programme for this season there is a documentary on Jay Retard called Better than Something.  Considering his recent death (yes, it is still very recent) I am disappointed at how little he is being talked about.  The prolific musician who formed The Retards, The Lost Sounds but most importantly wrote catchy epic rock songs that “everybody likes”. Anyway, what I’m getting at is that he should live on and be played until we scratch through our vinyl and burst out our speakers and get as sick of his songs as we must be getting of Michael Jackson’s or Amy Winehouse’s by now. You don’t know it yet, but you will agree with me.