Anaïs is a solo French singer-songwriter who has a beautiful voice, amazing musical skills and a great sense of humour. She combines it all together in the live recording of The Cheap Show which features just her, but in listening to it the first time I didn’t realize that she was alone. Using the JamMan sampler, she manages to harmonize and create surprisingly full arrangements while on stage alone. While you could place her generically for the most part in the folk area, she has an amazing range and I love the live recording that is filled with energy and fun. “Mon Coeur Mon Amour” is one of my new favourite songs.

I love it when an action film takes chances with the style of shooting and editing and doesn’t condescend to the audience. With The Bourne Ultimatum Paul Greengrass creates a film that is stylish and fun with a breathtaking pace. While Greengrass received a lot of attention for United 93, the constraints of the events and the memories of September 11 made the film a strange mixture with many different forces acting both within and outside of he film. Freed of those constraints with The Bourne Supremacy and now The Bourne Ultimatum he creates intelligent action films that push the limits of the audience with hand-held camera, rapid cutting, and information delivered quickly and subtly. The brutal pacing and editing of some of the sequences in Supremacy gave people a headache and I loved them because they pushed things so far. In Ultimatum Greengrass gets the balance just right and gives the audience a bit more time to breathe, while still creating amazing sequences that built suspense with careful blocking, shooting and editing without resorting to bigger and bigger explosions.
While it’s technically a superb film, it also has some great performances with Matt Damon as the memory-deprived hero, Joan Allen as a CIA boss and an amazing performance from David Strathairn that was almost of exciting as the action sequences. This is what an action film should be – fun, intelligent and exciting.

I’d been anticipating Sunshine for a while and wasn’t completely sure what to expect and at times the film had me off-balance (which I liked). I’ve enjoyed everything that Danny Boyle has done and this time he reworks the sf genre in a story that is mainly more philosophical science fiction with some thriller elements thrown in. The pacing and rhythms are different with the film and the constant presence of the sun is beautiful. It wasn’t until after the film that I really started to think about the effects as I just was thinking about the sun, which is a testament to seamlessness of the effects.
Cillian Murphy is great to watch as usual and there is a understated quality to much of the interaction and storytelling that I appreciated. While I wouldn’t say that it’s my favourite Danny Boyle film, it had some great touches and I kept thinking about it for days afterwards. It’s thoughtful sci-fi that doesn’t condescend, but does entertain and provide some things to think about.

With a light tone that belies the research behind it, The Myths of Innovation deconstructs many common myths about innovation and even takes a look at the notion of innovation itself. If you’re wondering if you can be innovative or understand why some things take off and some things don’t Scott Berkun book is a great place to start. It’s fun and inspirational.

Right from the short subject, “Lifted” to the end credit roll of “Ratatouille” I loved the whole experience. In thinking about the film the underlying appeal and the reason that it worked so well could be because of nostalgia. While most computer-animated films are driven technologically or by stunt casting of big stars, the genius of the direction of Brad Bird is in focusing on the characters and being inspired by great films and filmmakers of the past.
It’s a lot of fun and has the feeling at times of Hitchcock and Billy Wilder. There is an innocence in some ways, but never a sense that the film is condescending in any way. I never thought that the animation was amazing (but it is), but I was sucked in to the story and the characters, which is what all great filmmaking does.
Ultimately the film is about being an artist and accepting who you are, no matter how difficult it is. It’s fun and inspirational and doesn’t hit you over the head with anything. Subtle and beautiful, it’s a film that happens to be animated.

While I thought that This Film is Not Yet Rated was going to just be about censorship, I was pleasantly surprised to find out that it was a lot more. It cleverly tells the story of the MPAA rating board and manages to also give a glimpse into how the rating system actually operates and how the rationale behind it hasn’t really worked. By humanizing the process it paints a picture of current society and exposes the monopolistic nature of the motion picture business and those who fight to preserve the control of the screens where we watch films. With interviews with filmmakers and a brilliant sequence that does a split-screen comparison of virtually identical scenes with different ratings that seem to be based on the sexual orientation and not what is actually shown, it’s thought provoking and entertaining.

The idea of a mashup is simple and mixing a few songs together seems easy, but it’s very difficult to do well. One of the best collections that I’ve heard in a long time is Sounds for the Space-Set from the RIAA (Robotic Intergalactic Astro-Artists). It combines bit from sci-fi films and mashes together older and newer music to create something that is a lot more than the sum of the parts. A great sense of humour runs throughout the tracks an infectious beat and diverse sources that are sometimes hard to identify. Fun and free!

One of the neat things about the “Ocean’s” films is that they hearken back to the old days of Las Vegas and Hollywood where stars were stars and it was fun just to watch them. Ocean’s 13 is an almost perfect Summer movie that looks good, is fun and not too demanding. Shot is a beautiful style that constantly changes colours and movement, it almost feels like hanging out with cool people for a couple of hours. Nothing too profound, but well-crafted and everyone knows that they’re in a film and they all seem to be having a great time. It’s got a great retro feeling with the soundtrack and titles that pop up through the film and it was delightfully understated and had just enough of each character to make it interesting. It was light and fun and personal in a way that didn’t feel like it was tested and tuned with focus groups.

The idea behind the French group Nouvelle Vague is to cover 80s New Wave songs in a Bossa Nova style. The clever part in the name of the group and the style of music is that all of the words mean “New Wave” and together they form a strangely familiar but very catchy songs that I just can’t get enough of. Their second album, is named after Jean-Luc Godard’s film Bande a Part , which is another nod toward the name of the band and that they are based in France. It’s fun and works better than I thought that it would.

April March is very cool and very talented. She’s an animator and a singer, and with “Chick Habit” she covers a number of French Yé-Yé songs, which have a distinctive and catchy sound that is poppy and firmly rooted in the 1960s. While March isn’t from France, she manages to do great versions of the songs that have me tapping my toes. They’re fun whether you speak French of not.