Draconian and does music redeem? A “travel” to France, Alicante, Santiago and Marrakech in Morocco

Have you already been as tourists in Marrakech and Morocco? From the Netherlands? Your experience there? And Alicante, Playa Xagò or Santiago de Compostela in Spain?

07.12.08 Have you seen the French film Les Choristes (The Chorus)? The website of the British newspaper The Guardian defined it “a postwar boarding school drama”. “Set in an authoritarian reform school in 1949, – the Guardian adds – the film focuses on the attempts of a dissident master to subvert the draconian regime by teaching the boys to sing, and shows the redemptive power of music on the boys”. I wondered what “draconian” means and then I looked up the word in my English dictionary and found these meanings – “of or relating to Draco or his code of laws” and “harsh”. Instead, Draco is described as “7th century B.C., Athenian statesman, whose code of laws (621) prescribed death for most offences”.
Film for families? Moreover, there are other opinions in that article. “It is a family feelgood movie – the journalist Amelia Gentleman writes – with a saccharine gloss which has chimed with a new French nostalgia for the postwar era. Due for release in Britain in January, it is being promoted as an export to rival the international success of Amélie in 2002″.
Well, that is what this quality newspaper writes, but first of all I would ask you whether it is really a family feelgood movie. Maybe it is partially, at least according to me, but I do not think it is that way a lot. After all and as an add to this opinion of mine, I do not think it has a saccharine gloss and the reference to Amélie is really very fascinating with hindsight because both movies are two very nice French films (but why ever is there no reference to Chocolat?).
Fashionable singing? Eventually I read about a particular in the article I did not know – that is “Les Choristes is a remake of the 1945 French hit La Cage aux Rossignols (The Cage of Nightingales)” – and, moreover, we can read an opinion of the director Christophe Barratier about the plot too. “This isn’t – he says – a particularly fashionable subject”. I do not know what are your opinions about it, but personally I think that he may be right. Maybe he really is or more probably he is not… Who knows but you…