September 2011 October 2011 November 2011
December 2011 January 2012 February 2012
March 2012 April 2012 May 2012 June 2012 July 2012
|
|
||
| Here's another series of gory police forensics which we all seem to like so much. This one revolves round a 'criminal anthropologist' called Temperance Brennan who works with the FBI. Anyway, it's well-made, funny, and reasonably comprehensible dubbed into French. And that's what counts | When they started a few years ago, Les Stars du Rire was a superb comedy show packed with good comics. Then it became a chat show with lots of old clips and not much new material. So it was a relief when they did one recently featuring the new generation of French comics. Here is a first clip from this show featuring a young Swiss lady called Charlotte Gabris. | |
|
|
|
|
|
Now here is a very curious thing. Arte screened a tongue-in-cheek-piece
called
McDo - une passion française. It
was based around the fact - the astonishing fact - that after the United
States, France is the biggest market for the hamburgers made by
McDonald's, that well-known purveyor of culinary delicacies. I had
to quote an extract, the more so since they had found a reputable
gastronomic journalist who loves stuffing his face with this product,
then washing it down with sticky ice-cream. Linguistically, this
starts easy with a trendy voice-over, and finishes on the far side of
hard with the journalist in a McDonald's bar recounting his guilty
secret over a lot of background noise. But what he is saying is so
extraordinary that it is worth battling with it. As always, if you have a better ear than me (and a strong stomach), do please email me with some corrections |
We've got the diamond jubilee of our dear old queen out of the way now, thankfully, so I am going to subject you to a French TV discussion on the subject. This was in Yves Calvi's late afternoon show C'est dans l'air. You will see that a good time was had by all, mocking the bagpipes which are played while the queen has breakfast, and the corgis which she prefers to human company. Just a little reflection, though; would you ever hear on French TV a presenter asking whether the President of France sleeps with his wife ? Of course not. That would be very bad taste .. | |
|
|
|
|
| This is one of the first Cyprien YouTube videos that I got from Jean-François in Brazil. Here the trendy young Parisian muses on the joys of renting a little apartment in Paris. The voice is fairly clear but fast - excellent listening practice | Esprits ciriminels, (Criminal Minds), is a nicely written American series featuring the FBI and a department of 'profilers'. Here a young girl has been abducted and the tension mounts.. And you even get a quotation from Nietsche. | |
|
|
|
|
| The comedy sketch clips on the site are always very popular, so let's have another from the Stars du Rire - Nouvelle Génération show. Here is Jérémy Ferrari with a sketch about mental arithmetic in school and a nice line in black humour | Whitechapel is a gritty British series which revisits historical crimes. Good fun, though. The English voices are mostly London standard so the dubbed French is fairly clear | |
|
|
|
|
| Fin de droits means that an unemployed French person has come to the end of his statutory right to unemployment benefit. You can read about these periods here, and they are followed by various other measures. What this document demonstrates is the complexity of the French system, which must be largely responsible for the country's fear of unemployment. There is a terrible feeling of powerlessness here. An interesting clip, but a bit depressing... | TF1 - the most popular French channel - did an evening on the composer Michel Berger, for whom I have a lot of admiration. It was mostly young singers singing numbers that others did much better thirty years ago. But the exception was a group led by Pascal Obispo who did a terrific version of Quand on arrive en ville from Starmania. Wonderful... | |
|
#
|
|
|
| On n'est pas que des cobayes, is a light-hearted science-popularisation programme from France 5. A bit amateurish compared to it's American equivalent frankly. I like it chiefly because of the inclusion of David Lowe, an English journalist who speaks good French with our appalling accent. Of course, if the French are looking for a mad scientist with tousled hair to make a car out of kitchen tools.. well they look for an Englishman, don't they ? Ca se voit .. | For the Anglo-Saxon viewer, French films seem to often to concentrate on the well-worn themes of marriage problems, and social woes such as unemployment. There isn't too much room for fantasy. But just occasionally they do a film like Jean-Philippe, where the hero, an ordinary office worker is mad about Johnny Hallyday, finds himself in a parallel world where Johnny doesn't exist! And it's got Fabrice Luchini in it .. | |
|
|
|
|
| Bibliothèque Médicis speaks of anything to do with books, and this time it was people who are mad about horses, and have written about them. As always , the presenter, Jean-Pierre Elkkabach puts a very literary and poetic slant on the subject | Here is an exercise in applied masochism. I admire the actor Jean-Paul Belmondo a lot, so I recorded this film Le solitaire, and decided to grit my teeth and attempt a transcription. It took a long time and much blood sweat and tears. But it's good to remind ourselves that learning to listen in a foreign language is about slowly accustoming the brain to pick up the tiny clues that make sense out of inadequate information - such as the speech of an eccentric Parisian commissaire of police | |
|
|
||
| The long-running soap-opera Plus Belle la Vie is the reference test for listening and understanding. The dialogue is fast, intimate, there are lots of young people speaking as young people speak. If you can catch the detail of what they say, then you will have graduated from this site. I'll happily give you your diploma. Plus Belle always follow current events, and this one was about the 18 year old exam for French kids, the Bac. Here it shows them how to cheat. | ||
