We have a nice little cinema in town which shows foreign films and films that the big corp like Cineplex would never show. We saw The French Dispatch by Wes Anderson. He also made another favourite of mine, The Grand Budapest Hotel.
The film is inspired by Anderson’s love of The New Yorker, and some characters and events in the film are based on real-life equivalents from the magazine. One of the three stories centres on the May 68 student occupation protests, inspired by Mavis Gallant’s two-part article “The Events in May: A Paris Notebook”. A good fun movie to see and very attentive to details, brilliant dialogue, just loved it. The film features Liberty, Kansas, pop 87, counterpart is a French City, in this case Angouleme.
Today got up and went to the bakery to get bread which they bake early each morning, I also got some croissant stuffed with ham and cheese. Put up the Christmas tree, while Will made a Mincemeat pie. We will decorate the house tomorrow and the tree gets decorated once Will has polished the Christmas balls from Neiman Marcus. Same routine each year. This year we decided to put up the Crèche or Presepio of the Turin artist Emanuele Luzzatti (1921-2007) who created these three dimensional Christmas scene which are very famous. We received ours in 2009 while living in Rome, but rarely used it. We usually use a crèche we bought in Poland in 1998 hand sculpted by a Polish Artist.
Today we returned to the cinema to see a film entitled The Messiah Complex, the entire film is shot in all provinces and territories of our vast country. The scenes in the Yukon and at Lake Louise or in Newfoundland are breathtaking. All the artists are either Indigenous, singing in their own language, Innu, Inuktitut, Dene, also French, English, Arabic. Some choir like the Toronto Mendelssohn Choir and the UPEI Choir and Acadian Choir perform and the Toronto Symphonic Orchestra provides the instrumental part. A very different take on the Messiah and to hear it in all those languages is very interesting. The photography is stunning. All of it was recorded outdoors in 2020. Each native artist wear traditional garb, in the high North arctic region it is seal fur and beaded work, very beautiful. In one segment an old lady who is Muslim performs prayers, the link being that the Everlasting Father and Allah is the same God. I really liked that, having lived in the Middle East, this is my understanding of it all.
Larry Muffin At Home 