Category: French

  • Top Flicks About Chicks

    I really can’t remember exactly when I started out the Top Flicks About Chicks list on MUBI, but it must have been around the same time I wrote how Chick Flicks was a doomed genre in regards of critics. So it might be almost 4 years… and I’ve finally reached 300 titles in the list!!!

    A Chick Flick should center on little girls, girls, young women and women… as students, as neighbors, as friends, as daughters, as granddaughters, as sisters, as mothers, as lovers. They are simply women. With that alone, we can tell all sort of other stories that have little to do with romantic comedies.

    The purpose of the list, of course, was to encompass an array of female character — not only in the binary sense, since the list also includes men/boys who identify as women/girls… and viceversa — of various cultural, ethnic, social backgrounds. Not favoring one genre over the other, not valuing dramas over comedies… just simple stories about different women.

    Though I’m sure the list could be longer, that’s 300 feature length films out of the 2896 (counting shorts) currently rated on the site- that’s roughly 10% so I suppose the list could expand to up to 500 or maybe 1000 once I reach 5000 or 10000 rated films on the site.

    top-flicks-about-chicks
    1. Treeless Mountain 2. Welcome to the Dollhouse 3. Juliana 4. Labyrinth 5. Fuckin’ Amal 6. Mirrormask 7. Gun Hill Road 8. Pariah 9. Bend it like Beckham 10. Swing Girls 11. The Land of the Deaf 12. Sunny 13. Whip It 14. Stoker 15. Maria Full of Grace 16. Breaking the Waves 17. My Marlon and Brando 18. 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days 19. Dil Bole Hadippa! 20. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo 21. Kotoko 22. Violeta Went to Heaven 23. Skin 24. Raise the Red Lantern 25. Incendies

    I picked 25 of the 300 films to illustrate some of the variety (I hope it’s AS varied as I intend the list to be), though I ran out of picks and couldn’t include any of the ‘older’ female characters. If I could pick 5 more, they’d be: Lemon Tree, Frozen River, Late Bloomers, Mother, For 80 Days.


  • Current Flavors and Getting Your Type

    Has people ever ask you what’s your type? In terms of the people that you like, and you really have no idea because you’ve never really talked about.  I wondered if I could see a pattern in the people I like on-screen, so I made a list of women and men — 25 picks each — and placed generally okay photos of them to see if I could see any characteristics they shared.

    A few rules- it has to be people that you follow — not randoms that you just find hot. Sofia Vergara is hot but I haven’t seen her outside Modern Family or Chasing Papi. And it also isn’t about talent… completely. It’s people that you would somehow, if given the chance, do / be with / however you want to call it or do is.

    Also, photos should generally be color and looking to the front-ish. Natural looks favored, but since it’s a type thing, I suppose you can use any photos you find your subject attractive in.

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  • Xiami Just Rolled Its Subscription-based Service

    xiami-subscription

    If you’ve (for some reason) been following this blog a while, you’d know that I’m a big fan of Xiami, the Mainland China-based music site that has never flashed me with a “this content is not available in your region” message. I’ve actually bought some tracks off of them, started way before iTunes became available in my country, and have continued with tracks that aren’t available in my iTunes store, or with overpriced albums/singles.

    It’s particularly useful for Chinese-based artists.

    In general, all tracks are priced at 0.8米 (Mi) and 1 Mi is 1 Yuan, which is about 0.16USD, which is like 1/10 of what iTunes charges. They accept Paypal as one of their paying options, which seems way simpler than paying with your credit card (I tried). And since Xiami is a community-based site, they give you points for activities. Every time you log in, you get points and once you log in for a whole uninterrupted week, they give you a red envelope which also serves to download tracks. If you log in every day for a month or a whole year, you’ll get even more for free downloads.

    Downloading tracks, adding albums, adding information (photos, lyrics, etc), participating in community discussions, and joining groups also gives you points to raise your Xiami level. Though, I still don’t know what’s that for, other than showing off and user respectability.

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  • The Ultimate Guide to Boy Bands of the 90s

    yammag-ultimate-guide-boy-band-90s

    What started like a simple post, ended up taking a lot of hours of research and boy band video-watching. I may or not regret it.

    Voila! The Ultimate Guide to Boy Bands of the 90s ~

    There were boy bands I hadn’t even heard of… and some that I had to dust off my VHS tapes to get their names. Ha!


  • Bérénice Marlohe vs. Meisa Kuroki – FIGHT!

    Maybe I am the only person in the world who saw actress Bérénice Marlohe on Skyfall and thought of Meisa Kuroki. Am I? Is it crazy? Not… maybe? A little? Come on, they do look alike, right?

    berenice marlohe meisa kuroki

    Both mixed-race — apparently Marlohe is part Chinese/Cambodian/French, while Kuroki is Japanese (possibly Okinawan???)/Brazilian — thought early web talk stated her dad was part Panamanian instead. So there you go, the internet. And they’re like 10 years apart from each other.

    I don’t think neither of them are stellar actresses — but somehow, I’m still rooting for Meisa Kuroki to pull through after the 2012 that she’s gone through, LOL. Now that is crazier than thinking these two look alike. xD


  • Faces: 105 of Cinema’s Most Beautiful Close-Ups

    After some flame from their compilation of 135 Shots That Will Restore Your Faith in Cinema [1], Flavorwire is back with a new compilation~~~ this time around focusing on faces, their emotions and their beauty… to relative success. I don’t think I could fault them… I had enough with Wong Kar Wai (included multiple times), multiple Zhang Yimou shots (and a double appearance of Gong Li to boot!), there was Park Chan Wook, Guillermo del Toro, Leslie Cheung’s face.

    It was a thing of beauty.

    The only face I could possibly suggest would have been Greta Garbo’s last shot on Queen Christina, but I’m content.


  • CNIEL’s Cheese Monster Commercial

    Look at this cheese commercial shot for CNIEL -Centre National Interprofessionnel de l’Economie Laitière by the EURO RSCG Agency. It’s like a cute combination of The Host and… you know, Cheese. In Paris. xD

    Client: CNIEL -Centre National Interprofessionnel de l’Economie Laitière
    Agency: EURO RSCG – Creative Director : Christophe Coffre
    Director: Ruairi Robinson
    Production: Henry de Czar
    Creature design: Jordu Schell
    Cinematography: Macgregor
    Music: The Moon is Shining for You de Kouz Productions
    Post-producer: Nathalie Delvigne