French film festivals - the Americans are coming!

Less than a week after the announcement that US actor Robert De Niro would jury chairman at the 64th annual Cannes film festival in May comes the news that another American will be "topping the bill" so-to-speak at this year's César awards in February.

Jodie Foster, Berlin 2007 (image from Wikipedia, author Franz Richter)

Actress Jodie Foster will add her very own brand of American flair, in fluent French of course, to this country's equivalent of the Oscars next month as president of the 36th annual César awards ceremony to be held at Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris.

While De Niro's appointment continues a trend that will have seen three out of the last four jury presidents at Cannes coming from across the Pond (Sean Penn in 2008 and Tim Burton in 2010) Foster will become the first foreigner since the late Italian actor Marcello Mastroianni to preside over the César ceremony and only the fourth American ever after Kirk Douglas (1990), Gene Kelly (1984) and Orson Welles (1982)

The choice of the 48-year-old Foster perhaps comes as no surprise as the weekly national Le Journal du Dimanche pointed out on its website.

She is, as the paper reminds its readers, "an accomplished francophone" who studied at the Lycée Français in Los Angeles.

Apart from an acting career which includes the not-so trifling accolade of winning two Oscars for best actress (1988 in The Accused and 1991 in The Silence of the Lambs) and being nominated on two other occasions (for best supporting actress at just 14 years of age in the 1976 film Taxi Driver and again in the best actress category in the 1994 movie Nell) Foster has also directed and produced.

And, as US Daily reports, she is no stranger to French cinema having "appeared in Eric Le Hung's 1977 film Moi, Fleur Bleue (Stop Calling Me Baby (Moi, fleur bleue), Claude Chabrol's Le Sang des autres (The Blood of Others) in 1984 and Jean-Pierre Jeunet's Un long dimanche de fiançailles (A Very Long Engagement) in 2004.

The César award ceremony will take place on February 25 and be broadcast live on Canal + television.

The nominees in each of the categories will be announced on January 21 in Paris.

The double-American whammy should put paid (for a while at least) to those assertions that the French always look sniffily down their collective Gallic noses when it comes to US "culture", although perhaps both Foster and De Niro are noteworthy exceptions to the rule that "The world is turning Disney".



The making of the real The Silence of the lambs






The spoof starring Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders

EasyJet treats Paris-Toulouse passengers to a 10-hour journey

Another tale of travel woes in France and one in which you pays your money and you takes your chances perhaps.

This time around though it's not the weather that's solely to blame and it doesn't involve Air France-KLM or the state-owned railway SNCF.

Instead it's the British-based lowcost airline easyJet and the 10 hours it took for passengers aboard one of its flights to make a trip that normally takes a maximum of one hour and 30 minutes.


It happened last Sunday as the 141 aboard the 'plane made the journey from the French capital to the southwestern city of Toulouse.

A two-hour delay in taking off because of maintenance problems certainly didn't put passengers in the best of moods, but worse was to come.

As the 'plane approached its destination the captain refused to land because apparently conditions were too windy and instead redirected 240 kilometres away to Montpellier, where passengers then boarded buses to complete their journey.

"Weather conditions" coupled with "technical problems that didn't affect flight safety", according to the airline were the reason for the diversion, but passengers aboard the flight weren't so sure they were being told the whole story.

"When we arrived at Montpellier I overheard one of the ground staff talking via two-way radio with a colleague saying that the 'plane wouldn't be taking off again," Luc Mousseaux, a passenger aboard the flight told BFM TV

"That makes me wonder if the weather really was the reason for not being able to land," he added.



That's a view backed up by an aviation expert who, according to the national daily Le Figaro, said the wind had not been particularly strong around the city on the afternoon in question but admitted that the decision about whether to land was entirely at the captain's discretion.

As is company policy, easyJet did offer any compensation apart from refreshment vouchers and passengers are not entitled to any reimbursement because, as far as the airline is concerned, it met its obligation of ensuring passengers arrived at their destination.

Toulouse or 'La Ville Rose" as it is nicknamed is one of France's largest cities. It's home to one of Europe's top rugby teams, and of course is the base of Airbus.

It's also a major destination for holidaymakers in summer as it's very much the gateway to the whole of the southwestern region of the country.

The Paris-Toulouse route is a busy one, and the city is one of the destinations for the Navette or shuttle service operated by Air France from both Orly and Roissy-Charles de Gaulle.

In total the company operates 30 scheduled flights from both Paris airports combined each day and during peak hours there's a 'plane leaving every 30 minutes.

Not surprisingly perhaps easyJet has also grabbed a piece of the action with five Toulouse-bound flights leaving Paris every day.

Break open the Bolly to fight the flu

"Feed a cold and starve a fever" goes the saying familiar to many of us.

Regardless whether it's true or not there is apparently a way to treat cold and flu symptoms that might - to say the very least - appear somewhat unorthodox, if not a little decadent.

With this season's number of flu cases in France now having reached the epidemic threshold as defined by the Groupe régional d'observation de la grippe (with the entirely appropriate acronym of Grog) it comes as a timely reminder perhaps that there is a way to beat the bug.

Well at least, according to the French health website Top santé.com, there's a surefire trick for dealing with the symptoms and aiding recovery.

It's a recipe, in all senses of the word, plucked from the pages of Remèdes de famille : Se soigner malin et naturel de A à Z by Henry Puget.


And it involves imbibing a glass of the fizzy stuff.

That's right, Champagne, albeit warm.

Just before bedtime apparently, you should pour one glass of bubbly into a saucepan, add two sugar lumps and bring to the boil.

Allow it to cool before drinking and drift off into the Land of Nod.

At this point you might be thinking a number of things. Firstly that Puget is something of a "Quack" out to make a quick Euro or two.

But rest assured he's a bona fide general practitioner living in Paris who, as the blurb tells us, "has been treating patients and successfully offering advice for the past 30 years by combining high tech with natural therapies."

And to cast aside any doubts you might have about the efficacy of the recipe (bearing in mind that it's not so far removed from a traditional rum-based grog) it works because "after drinking you'll sweat a lot throughout the night as the chemical action of the components of champagne mixed with sugar neutralise toxins from the cold or flu."

So if you feel a slight tickle in the throat or an aching in the joints, you know what to do.

Don't plunder the medicine cabinet for a bottle of linctus.

Instead follow the "natural" way of Dr Puget's advice and do as Ab Fab"s Edina and Patsy would without any hesitation.

Break open the Bolly!

A bottle of Bollinger (image from Wikipedia, author - Manchester2k6

Cheers.