“c’est la très grande”

compare and contrast

Raï Rules

I’ve been using Last for a bit more than a year now and if you aren’t using it too, you should be. Below are  my ten most-listened-to artists over the the last 12 months.

1

Rachid Taha

2

Altan

3

Ali Hassan Kuban

4

Souad Massi

5

Sawt El Atlas

6

Cheb Mami

7

Khaled

8

Patrick Street

9

De Dannan

10

Bob Dylan

Ronnie Drew

A great popular artist died today.

Two Bad Films

I had the misfortune to see two dire films in recent days. The first was Café del los Maestros. You’d think that a basic faith in the music being presented would be a prerequisite for a music film, that there’d be a belief that the music could sustain the interest of the viewer without the addition of too many distractions. That basic faith in the music is entirely lacking in Café de los Maestros. If I remember correctly there isn’t a single tango played from beginning to end in the film. It’s a lick here, a fragment there and just when the emotion of the music begins to catch you they jump to an interview with some lovable old codger recounting some anecdote of his youth, You never get a chance to drink in the music.

My Blueberry Nights is a terribly disappointing effort from the man who has produced such masterpieces as Chungking Express and Happy Together. A bog standard road movie with dialogue so wooden you could cut it up and make parquet flooring out of it, it makes some episodes of Sex and the City seem like King Lear by comparison.

There are some pretty shots of course and even a few faint signs of life from the scenes with Natalie Portman but the general feeling produced, at least in this viewer, was of being in the presence of unfunny parody of one of Wong, Kar Wai’s previous films.

Wales