Sunday, May 31, 2015

Thérèse Desqueyroux

A melancholic French film  (2012) starring Audrey Tautou of Le fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain fame as Thérèse. The story is set during the 1920's in the Aquitaine region where important rich families are still very catholic and maintain a culture of hypocrisy and stifling conventions. Thérèse chooses a marriage of convenience, whereby the land holdings of two important families will be joined.

Thérèse and her husband Bernard

However, she suffers from boredom and a faint disgust of her boring and traditional husband. When she gets the opportunity, she tries to poison him but gets found out almost immediately. Rather than face public humiliation, the family decides to cover up the whole affair.

☆☆☆



Wednesday, May 27, 2015

L'Heure d'été (Summer time)

This quiet typically French 2008 film tells the simple story of the handling of an inheritance and the melancholy and sadness that goes with it. Only the oldest son is in favor of holding on to the family home while his younger brother and sister have no qualms about getting rid of the place that holds many childhood memories, in order to support their careers in the US or China.


Beautifully shot, the film's atmosphere fits the subject nicely. Nothing much happens and there are certainly no surprises.

☆☆☆




Tuesday, May 26, 2015

Instant word translation without clicking on chrome

Chrome, at least version 43.0.2357.65 (64 bit) on Ubuntu 14.04 supports translating selected text where the translation pops up next to the original, as shown in the screen shots below.

First select word, then click on icon to see translation.
That is a lot of work, especially if your vocabulary is substandard.

Luckily, there is a chrome extension called Transover by artemave.


With this extension installed (I restarted chrome just to be sure it would be active),  you get translations pop up just by hovering longer than a certain time (this can be set in the options) over a word.

No need to click at all, just rest..

Moreover, you get more information than with the standard translation that makes a misguided effort to select the best one for you. Well worth installing.



Monday, May 25, 2015

Hector and the Search for Happiness

A well made British (2014)  feelgood movie. The main character is an English psychiatrist who leads an extremely well-organized and perhaps boring life.


A mid-life crisis makes him question his usefulness to society and he decides to search for the definition of happiness, which, when acquired, will presumably allow him to be of more use to his patients.

So off he goes, leaving his sympathetic girl friend behind, on a quest which brings him in three continents where each time he will find adventure and learn nuggets of wisdom from some unlikely sources.


In the happy ending, he realizes that he truly loves his girlfriend and swiftly returns home.


The story is fast-paced and never boring or cheesy while making some mildly interesting points on what might make humans happy. Thus, very entertaining and well worth watching.

☆☆☆☆


Sunday, May 24, 2015

Tamara Drewe

This is a light British 2010 comedy about an attractive female writer/journalist, Tamara Drewe, who returns to her native village to oversee the sale of her recently deceased mother's house.


Tamara is played by Gemma Aterton, who also appeared in Gemma Bovery.

Gemma Aterton

Predictably, romantic complications ensue, some of them involving a serial philanderer neighbor and best seller author, whose long suffering wife is played by Tamsin Greig of Black BooksGreen WingLove Soup and Episodes fame. The wife runs a writer's retreat, which makes for some more interesting characters and developments.

Tamsel Greig

The machinations of two bored teenage girls who have a crush on Tamara's first newly acquired boyfriend, a famous rock star, help to move the plot along.

The story is very amusing and there is a happy ending for almost all of the parties concerned, i.e. most characters find their true love interest.



All in all a better than average romantic comedy which was a joy to watch.

☆☆☆☆



Friday, May 22, 2015

Lore

This 2012 Australian-German film shows the aftermath of the second world war from the point of view of the young children of Nazi officials. Lore and her younger sister, as well as her three little brothers, one of which is a baby, are deserted by their parents in a traditional Bavarian (in the south of Germany) mountain retreat. She has been instructed by the parents to go to a hamlet close to Hamburg where their grandmother lives.

Since there are no trains, the journey is arduous and they depend on the charity of people they meet on the way. Interestingly, many of them still cling to the Nazi faith, deploring the death of the 'führer who loved them so' and 'whom they have let down by losing the war'. Also, the shocking images from the death camps that have been put up by the American military are often explained away as fakes.

Later on, the children get help from an adult who carries Nazi ID papers that declare him as a Jew. Having been brought up to despise Jews, Lore is torn between hatred and the necessity to accept his help. It is suggested that Lore gradually comes to accept the truth, rejects her parents' beliefs and the children (minus one who was shot in the Russian zone) arrive safely at their grandmother's farm.

'Vati' turns out to be a monster

I found the evocation of a conquered Germany very interesting. The film shows, in a more or less subtle manner how people face up to the facts that they thoroughly lost the war, and that their beloved masters were a bunch of criminals who had committed unspeakable atrocities on an industrial scale.

☆☆☆



Find the package to install for a missing program

I wanted to use the avconv program on an Ubuntu  14.04 box, but it turned out that it was not available on this particular machine:

  ub$ avconv -i v.mkv -vcodec libx264 -acodec libmp3lame -ac 2 v.mp4
  avconv: command not found

Oftentimes, the name of the package supplying a command is the name of the command. Thus I tried

  ub$ sudo apt-get install avconv
  ...
  E: Unable to locate package avconv

So how to find out the name of the package that would provide avconv? Google threw up a ton of suggestions but the most simple solution turned out to just query a database suppled by Ubuntu :


Clicking on Search told me that I had to install the libav-tools package:





Wednesday, May 13, 2015

Gemma Bovary

This recent (2014) French comedy features my favorite male French actor, Fabrice Luchini, as a Parisian intellectual (Martin) who returned to Normandy where he runs his parents bakery. When an English couple called Bovery moves into a neighboring house and the wife's name turns out to be Gemma, played by he very attractive Gemma Arterton, Martin is strongly reminded of Flaubert's masterpiece 'Madame Bovary'. His obsession only increases when, as in the book, Gemma starts having an affair (unfortunately for him, not with Martin).

Genna Aterton and Fabrice Luchini

The plot is clever and entertaining. There are funny characters representing some stereotypes about English expats living in France and the views of the Normandy countryside are as pleasant as in reality. Overall, a nice lightweight comedy, well worth viewing.

☆☆☆