Aki Kaurismaki: Le Havre
What a beautiful film. A social fairytale about a shoeshiner, his wife and friends in le Havre, and a refugee who happens into their midst. Breathtaking. Sidesplitting. Gentle. Melancholy. True. The news is all bad, but human nature? Slow down, and there is room for hope. When we came out of the cinema I couldn’t […]
Ruby’s shoes, ruby shoes
“The Problem We All Live With” by Norman Rockwell is currently on display at the White House, just outside the president’s office. It shows Ruby Bridges, the most famous of the children who in 1960, at the age of 6, walked into an all-white school and helped desegregate the schools of New Orleans. Daddy’s brave […]
Marlene Dietrich: Falling in Love again – Ich bin von Kopf bis Fuss
Marlene in English and German and then again in English, great German accent; followed by Caroline Nin singing franco-anglo-tinged German. ICH BIN VON KOPF BIS FUSS AUF LIEBE EINGESTELLT (Friedrich Holländer) Marlene Dietrich Ein rätselhafter Schimmer, Ein “je ne sais-pas-quoi” Liegt in den Augen immer Bei einer schönen Frau. Doch wenn sich meine Augen Bei […]
Midnight in Paris: Discourse markers
Today my main task was to find examples of discourse markers in context in a movie trailer, explaining their functions in a given utterance. I chose Midnight in Paris by Woody Allen and, because it caught my imagination, transcribed and thought through more than necessary. It’s fun to examine a dialogue and make what is […]
The Webbies
In EFL, we are just so behind. Look at the brilliant stuff that media designers and game builders and public educators and entertainers are up to, and it makes you want to weep. I have to stop surfing now, and get back to work, but it’s just too cool, all of it. A very few […]
America 100 years ago on film
The Library of Congress a few days ago uploaded a playlist to its YouTube channel entitled America at Work, America at Leisure, containing 150 motion pictures from 1894 to 1915. “Highlights include films of the United States Postal Service from 1903, cattle breeding, fire fighters, ice manufacturing, logging, calisthenic and gymnastic exercises in schools, amusement […]
Room full of testosterone
Looking for sitcom scenes for a grammar exercise on reported speech (yeah, really), I wound up spending the morning watching selections from “Two and a Half Men“. Didn’t find a scene that works perfectly for that purpose, perhaps because they’re all so good it’s hard to cut them short. The scene I’m using – it’s […]
