herbiehancock

No 41 - Les 400 Coups (The 400 Blows) Director – François Truffaut So, I've been moving house and I've been playing Xbox games. My blog hasn't exactly been well kept. Like the Secret Garden it is full of aged and overgrown relics. It has seemingly ceased to grow. But fear not, here comes Dickon and he has used a knife to strip back the dead wood and show there is still life in the old blog. So soon we will be joined by a spoiled disabled boy and Wendy from Finding Neverland and the blog will flourish anew. Right.... that's one massively overstretched metaphor out the way – lets blog this classic piece of French cinema. Without my notes. So expect a sketchy and vague review of a film which follows a young boy's descent into full blown young offender shenanigans. The film works as series of snapshots, looking at how Antoine ( Jean-Pierre L é aud ) gets pulled further and further into petty crime. Made in 1959 it coincides with the birth of the teenager and th...

No 338 - Jules et Jim (Jules and Jim) Director - Francois Truffaut Sundays. Lovely lazy Sundays. My plan for today was to mix the World Cup with some massively influential 60's New Wave cinema. My guide for this is the song When the lights go out all over Europe by The Divine Comedy, which mixes plot points from a whole range of different Nouvelle Vague films. So what does Neil Hannon have to say about Jules et Jim? Jeanne can't choose Between the two 'Cos Jules is hip And Jim is cool And so they live together The Jeanne in the song refers to Jeanne Moreau who plays Catherine - the film's key female lead. The song also manages to sum the film up in 5 short lines. However, I want to ramble on and on about it and therefore I will speak about it at much greater length. The film follows 2 friends, a French man called Jim and a German called Jules and begins in Paris in 1912. The story falls into two halves, interrupted by the first World War. The first half is the ...