Jean-Luc Godard (born 1930) may be one of cinema’s greatest names, but his films remain consistently abstruse and unseen by mainstream audiences.

Jean-Luc Godard was a French movie critic who became one of the major filmmakers of the Nouvelle Vague (New Wave) cinema, a 1960s movement that stressed experimental techniques and film as art. He became internationally known after his first feature film, Breathless (1960, Ábout de souffle), and continued to garner critical success (if not big box office returns) in the 1960s, with films such as Contempt (1963, Le Mépris, starring Brigitte Bardot), Band of Outsiders (1964, Bande á part), Masculine-Feminine (1966, Masculin, féminin) and Two or Three Things I Know About Her (1967, 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d’elle). He earned a reputation by the 1970s as a serious, furiously political practitioner of the art of cinema. He has also stirred up his share of controversy, such as when the Catholic church urged a boycott of his 1986 film Hail Mary, (Je vous salue, Marie) a contemporary treatment of the story of the biblical Mary. Over the years Godard’s existentialist Marxism lost the luster it once had, but his work of the 1960s is still considered part of the canon of great cinema.

Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington’s year dug in with the Second Platoon in one of Afghanistan’s most strategically crucial valleys reveals extraordinary insight into the surreal combination of back breaking labor, deadly firefights, and camaraderie as the soldiers painfully push back the Taliban. Written by Sundance Film Festival.

Release Date: July 2nd 2010 (USA)

Remember Me, My Love (Ricordati di me) is a 2003 Italian movie directed by Gabriele Muccino.

At first glance the Ristuccia family is apparently normal and close-knit, but all of its members are hiding something. Carlo, the head of the family, would like to become a writer rather than continue working in an insurance company. Giulia, his wife, is a professor of literature who aspires to become an actress. Paolo is an insecure teenager who cannot successfully assert himself in front of girls whom he likes. Valentina desires to become a television showgirl at any cost. This silence is broken when Carlo meets his old love Alessia, with whom he starts an extra-marital affair. As a result Giulia falls into total despair, destroying the family’s equilibrium and losing control over their children.

The Hôtel Costes is a famous hotel in Paris, France. Located in 239 rue St-Honore, it is perhaps best known for its bar and courtyard café. Hôtel Costes also releases its own compilation lounge music CDs, which contain music played and mixed within by DJ Stéphane Pompougnac.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H%C3%B4tel_Costes,_Vol._10

Episode 73

I saw this in my German 2 class…

The German poet and author Novalis (1772-1801) was the most important poet and imaginative writer of the early German romantic movement. Both his poetry and his prose writings express a mystical conviction in the symbolic meaning and unity of life.

Poet, aphorist, theoretician, and student of the natural sciences, “Novalis” was the pseudonym of Friedrich Leopold von Hardenberg, who helped formulate the program of Early German Romanticism and penned its most enduring literary works. Novalis was one of the great German romantics; his chief work was the novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen (1802), unfinished at the time of his early death from tuberculosis. It tells the story of a legendary minnesinger, whose wanderings and search for a “blue flower” became symbols of German romantic poetry. Novalis’s grief at the death (1797) of his young love, Sophie von Kühn, found expression in a volume of beautiful and deeply religious lyrics, Hymns to the Night (1800). The Hymns’ popularity was rivaled by that of the posthumous Heinrich von Ofterdingen (1802), which Novalis called “my political novel.” Quintessentially Romantic, this bildungsroman (‘novel of education’) fuses medieval legends with fairy tales, dreams, and visions. It contains “Klingsohr’s Fairy Tale,” an allegory of universal renewal with alchemical, scientific, and political allusions. Novalis influenced, among others, the novelist and theologian George MacDonald, who translated his Hymns to the Night in 1897. More recently, Novalis, as well as the Early Romantic (Frühromantik) movement as a whole, has been recognized as constituting a separate philosophical school, as opposed to simply a literary movement.