Taylor Swift has released 1989 (Taylor’s Version), a re-recorded version of her fifth studio album, 1989. The singer announced it during her concert at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, California on August 9 (aka 8/9) – eight years, nine months, and 13 days since the album’s original release. Stream it below.
“The 1989 album changed my life in countless ways, and it fills me with such excitement to announce that my version of it will be out October 27th,” Swift wrote in a social media post announcing the album. “To be perfectly honest, this is my most FAVORITE re-record I’ve ever done because the 5 From The Vault tracks are so insane. I can’t believe they were ever left behind.” She then revealed the ‘From the Vault’ song titles: ”Slut!’’ (written by Swift, Jack Antonoff, and Patrik Berger), ‘Say Don’t Go’ (written with Dianne Warren), ‘Now That We Don’t Talk’, ‘Suburban Legends’, and ‘Is It Over Now?’ (all three of which are Swift and Antonoff co-writes).
1989 (Taylor’s Version) follows Red (Taylor’s Version) and Fearless (Taylor’s Version), which came out in 2021, and Speak Now (Taylor’s Version), which arrived earlier this year.
This November, MUBI, the renowned film streaming platform, is set to captivate cinephiles with an exceptional lineup titled Master Thieves: Heist Films. Featuring enigmatic personas, inventive plots, heart-pounding action, and ingenious plots, this curated collection embodies the quintessential heist experience. It will also include cinema classics such as Sidney Lumet’s Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead and David Fincher’s Fight Club.
Travel is an important aspect of many people’s lives. They allow you to expand your horizons, and learn new cultures, traditions, history, and geography of the world. Travel also promotes personal development, improves health, and increases happiness. They can become a source of inspiration and creativity, help relieve stress, and escape from everyday worries.
Travel can promote cultural exchange because it allows us to experience other cultures first-hand. Being in another country, we find ourselves in completely different conditions: nature, life, and society. We see other people, we absorb all the features of the place where we are. Whether it’s a seaside resort where we enjoy the sea and relaxation, or an excursion trip that enriches our cultural level, where we get to know the city and its sights. Any trip gives us unforgettable memories and sensations that will “recharge” us for a long time after arrival.
Historical Exploration – Uncover the Past
Visiting historical monuments gives us a glimpse into the life and culture of our ancestors. We have the opportunity, as if for a short time, to move into the past and feel the atmosphere of those eras that have long been left behind. In addition, after such places, you can better understand the history and significance of the cultural heritage of different countries and civilizations.
Each historical place has its unique history, architecture, and atmosphere. Some of them are witnesses of great historical events, others are architectural masterpieces, and others simply inspire a sense of awe with their beauty and grandeur. Cultural diversity is reflected in many aspects of life, including architecture, art, music, dance, cuisine, and religious practices.
Visiting local holidays and festivals will allow you to immerse yourself in local culture and get unique experiences. Many interesting places offer the opportunity to learn about crafts that have existed for centuries. You will be able to visit workshops and see the process of creating traditional products such as carpets, ceramics, wood carvings, national clothing, and jewelry. Historical and cultural sites such as castles, museums, and ancient cities emotionally transport the guest back in time, revealing the grandeur and glory of an era.
Arts and Entertainment – Attend Performances and Exhibitions
The opinion of some people that art exhibitions are uninteresting is wrong. The purpose of any exhibition is to demonstrate certain material. There are practically no boundaries in theme, boldness, beauty, and unusualness. Those who, for example, find it difficult to perceive low-color, strict graphics will happily find a place in their hearts for bright, rich paintings. Those who are tired of looking at classic paintings will be happy to gaze at fresh and non-standard works of contemporary art.
Thus, almost every person, regardless of social status, age, or level of culture, can enjoy visiting an exhibition or gallery if they find a suitable option for themselves. After visiting an unusual exhibition, you will experience a renewal within yourself. Also after such a kind of relaxation, you will find a solution to an old problem or be able to look at the situation from a different angle.
By attending such cultural events, you can establish social contacts with people who are interested in or professionally involved in art. You can learn more from them about some details or points related to their work and the world of art in general.
Adventure Sports – Thrills and Adrenaline
Extreme tourism is very multifaceted, yet there is no single and unambiguous definition of this phenomenon. In general, extreme tourism can be characterized as traveling to hard-to-reach, remote places (mountains, caves, jungles, deserts, etc.) and engaging in sports that involve difficulties for the human body and danger.
If earlier extreme sports were in demand only among certain groups of people, now there are an increasing number of clients who want to find themselves in extreme natural conditions, engage in life-threatening sports during their holidays, and visit places of natural and man-made disasters.
Let’s look at some of the popular extreme activities:
For those who like to test themselves, improve their physical fitness, and learn to control their body, rock climbing is a great option.
Go-karting will allow you to surrender to speed and test your reaction. Small racing cars can reach speeds of up to 85 km per hour, and their design allows them to enter dangerous corners without slowing down much.
You can jump from a height with a dynamic (stretching) rope. This type of extreme sport is called rope jumping and it is for absolute adrenaline junkies. Emotions and experiences are comparable only to a parachute jump.
Another option to get an adrenaline rush is to fly in a wind tunnel, where the airflow, hitting with force from below, makes you feel like a parachutist in free fall.
Whatever entertainment you choose, in any case, delight and unforgettable impressions are guaranteed.
Relaxation and Wellness – Unwind Amidst Tranquility
The choice between passive and active recreation can greatly affect our mood and overall impression of the trip. Passive holidays offer the opportunity to relax, enjoy tranquility, and simply pamper yourself, while active holidays energize us, allow us to experience adrenaline, and create unforgettable experiences. By selecting holidays according to our mood, we can create the perfect combination of both options for ourselves. After an active holiday, you want to relax a little and lie down on the beach, read a book, do yoga, or play at casumo сasino nz. States of complete relaxation are also a necessity for our bodies. You can enjoy endless views of the ocean, lie on the sunny sand, and try local exotic cocktails. This way you will forget about everyday worries and can enjoy peace and tranquility, restoring your strength.
Photography and Documenting Memories
They say that travel is a small life, the memories of which should be represented in original photographs. To capture the mood and atmosphere of a place or event, take photos of action. Photos in diary format will tell you about the highlights of your trip and interesting events in your life.
You can ask someone passing by to take a photo of you with a camera while shooting. As a result, you will have both a photograph taken yourself and an “outside view.” Such photographs will tell not only about the places you visited but also about what happened and how.
Travel is about creating memories, and high-quality photos allow us to make these precious moments last longer in our memories.
Based between London and Brighton, ME REX started out the solo project of songwriter Myles McCabe and has since expanded into a trio with the addition of Phoebe Cross (drums/vocals) and Rich Mandell (bass/keys/vocals). As a full band, the band released the double EP Triceratops/Stegosaurus via the UK label Big Scary Monsters in late 2020, and followed it up a year later with Megabear, a uniquely ambitious and immersive 52-track collection meant to be played in shuffle mode. Another compelling pair of EPs, Plesiosaur and Plesiosaur, came out in 2022, when ME REX were prepping what’s billed as their debut album proper, Giant Elk. Despite being recorded at four different studios, with the band having limited time to practice the material before laying it down, the songs cohere into a cathartic, fully-realized work whose cyclical structure mirrors the narrative that unfolds – one of growth through loss, loneliness and unity. Bound up in metaphor, the details may be hard to pin down and are open to interpretation, but the story resonates more than it confounds, and the music reaches new peaks of sweeping catharsis. The backdrop may always be one of impending collapse, but as ME REX put it on the closer, ‘Summer Brevis’, there’s still “a little bliss and ecstasy yet to squeeze out of the days we have left.”
We caught up with ME REX’s Myles McCabe and Phoebe Cross for the latest edition of our Artist Spotlight series to talk about the journey behind Giant Elk, the mythology around the album, and more.
You put out two doubles EPs and the Megabear project before Giant Elk. When did you realize this collection was shaping up to be a full-length record, and what did that affect the way you approached it?
Myles McCabe: It was a real journey with this one. There were times when we were like, “Oh god, it’s taking so long, we’re not gonna have time to finish it.” It kind of put itself together in a way, in the sense that, we have a concept for what the next record is going to be, but it’s a bit of an ambitious one, so we knew that we would have to put something out in the meantime. We looked at re-recording the EPs that I made before Rich and Phoebe were in the band and reinterpreting those songs. I was like, I’ll write something else that fits in with the context of those songs and very much sits within the themes of those records. So ‘Python’ came – I believe that was the first one. But then writing from that position, a couple of more songs came, and then another one and another one, and at that point made more sense for it to be a full-length record. The songs kept on coming, and it got to the point where they were actually pushing the older ones out as well because I was writing songs, bringing them to the band, and we were completing them together. The new songs that were coming were very much in that world, and for me, it began to take the shape of this sort of narrative – but even then, that in my mind is this very amorphous, loose, shifting thing. I don’t know if you could call it a story, exactly, but a narrative certainly.
How much do you still see that narrative as an extension of the mythology of your previous work, and how much do you feel like it’s moving forward from it? Does mythology feel like the right word for it?
MM: I think of it very much as sitting in the same world. I like to think of it in comparison to Discworld, if you’re familiar with Terry Pratchett – the way that you’ve got all these different stories but they take place in the same universe and there’s crossover between them and there are different throughlines as well. I think mythology is a good way of putting it, because you have these perspectives that maybe shift around, or you have characters who appear as one thing and then somewhere else may occupy the same sort of space but arrive in a very different way, and are communicating, in a sort of transrational sense, something outside of that. Someone actually compared Megabear to Finnegans Wake, this book that’s pretty much incomprehensible, but you have, from what I could glean from the introduction, the same few stories that are told over and over again in different ways, using language very differently, using characters that represent the same things each time the story is told, but the characters change, the language changes, the perspective changes, the meaning changes. That’s in a sense how I approach interpreting something like Giant Elk.
Phoebe Cross: Is that what you were reading on tour once?
MM: I definitely brought it with me on one of the shows or festivals or something.
PC: You’re so mysterious, because I’ve never seen you read, but I feel like you read a lot.
MM: [laughs] I certainly like to give that impression.
Is that narrative framework something you discuss as a band?
MM: We actually had a bit of a moment when I tried to discuss what the album was about, and everyone was like, “What are you talking about?”
PC: I was like, “What are you talking about, worms? I’ve interpreted the whole thing wrong!” [laughs]
MM: The way that I like to approach this kind of thing is that everyone’s interpretation is just as valid as anyone else’s, including myself. So I don’t like to be too prescriptive about meaning or interpretation, but when it came to preparing the release, we got a question: So what is the album about? I wrote out this long thing, saying, well, it’s about the worm who’s split in half, but that happens cyclically and infinitely – but they’re not worms, but they’re people, but it’s me, but it’s not me. It was this long explanation of this thing that is very abstract in my own understanding and is really, to me, just an interpretation of what is on the record. It’s something I struggle a little bit with when it comes to this thing of having to define and nail down a meaning, because then I feel like you’re cutting away at all of the other possible interpretations. By saying it means this, you’re saying doesn’t mean that. Also, I have the belief as well that you can write things that you don’t know are in there, so to say it’s about this, I am potentially selling short my own understanding of the piece.
PC: I posted on one of our stories today that it’s not our album anymore, it’s yours. It’s like, “There you go, world, what do you make of this?”
MM: As soon as the vibration leaves the speaker, it’s yours to do with what you will.
Phoebe, how did your own vision or understanding of the record develop over time?
PC: This is the most collaborative we’ve probably ever written together, so it was lovely getting in the rehearsal studio, and depending on what mood I was in, the songs became different. I think the drums speak a lot and give a lot of energy or less energy depending on you know how it’s going that day, so some some of the drumming ideas I had really stuck. Just because the other two were like, “Keep going like that,” it was quite nice to be like, “Alright, I’ll do this drum pattern,” and it can completely change how a song feels. It’s just been lovely watching it grow that way. It really felt like quite an emotional album to be a part of for me.
The opener, ‘Slow Worm’, provides a kind of thesis for the album: “Everything that comes together will eventually divide.” What drew you to that idea, especially as a starting point for Giant Elk?
MM: I think central to it for me is a grief metaphor. A lot of the stuff that I’ve written in the last couple of years has been touched by the fact that I lost my dad in 2020, and coming to an understanding of what grief is. To me, that metaphor of the worm being cut, losing a part of itself but growing into a new creature – everything that comes together will eventually divide, and then divide and divide and divide again, and in that way, multiply and continue and become whole.
PC: I have such an image of cells. I don’t know if it’s because I did a biology degree, but I just realize how much I have that in my head when you’re singing it: the beginning of life, but I suppose also things like cancer, things dividing wrong. It’s life and death, innit?
MM: [referencing a lyric from the song ‘Python’] It’s not life and/or death anymore. But yeah, exactly, that is an image as well that has occurred to me. The idea of evolution as well and dividing out down through generations, splitting and changing and diversifying and becoming this huge breadth of living things.
This idea of a huge mass of living things serving as the narrator was part of what drew me to Giant Elk, and it’s what made ‘Spiders’ stand out as being quite personal, because it doesn’t center around a “we” the way most of the songs here do.
MM: Interestingly, that’s the first song that I ever wrote as ME REX. That one’s really old, and it set the tone, certainly for those early EPs, and by extension for all the recent songs. So in a way, it’s all building into the world of that song.
Do you see it differently now it exists as part of that world?
Yeah, absolutely. If you’re the same person that you were a decade-ish ago, you’re doing something wrong. [laughs] So I almost see that person as a character within this world, and I look at that person with more compassion now and a little bit more understanding than I would have looked at myself at the time when I wrote. I suppose in a way it’s sort of a dialogue with that person, the newer songs.
Do you have any favorite memories of recording the album?
MM: There were definitely times in rehearsal, particularly as it was getting to the crunch where I had not finished writing my part for the songs and we had the dates in and we had to record – I don’t particularly write well under pressure, but playing, for example, ‘Summer Brevis’ together, they both really changed that up. Phoebe, for example, was like, “Let’s just slow it down.”
PC: We slowed it down, did we?
MM: Yeah, we massively slowed it down.
PC: I’ve been having such a Big Thief moment for years now, but I’d watched a lot of [James Krivchenia] lately, and that drum part I really wanted to do.
MM: It just completely landed, and the song took on a completely different character from that point. It makes much more sense as an ending song.
Could you share one thing that inspires you about each other, as musicians or just friends?
MM: I’ve got quite a lot that inspires me about about Phoebe and Rich.
PV: Aw, go ahead. [laughs]
MM: With Phoebe, it’s a very specific kind of optimism and a very genuine positivity, very much seeing the best in people. Rich is kind of the rock of the band. He very much holds us together, and he has such an eye and ear for detail and quality, for things that work and things that could be adjusted. I could go on all night about them.
PC: That’s so sweet. Obviously, Myles, I love your lyrics and musicianship. I was listening to Miles before I was even in a band with him. Whenever a ME REX gig was happening in London, I’d try and get down to it, so I was already a big fan of Myles, and I’m glad he let me be in his band and do all these things for the last – it feels like we’ve been doing this for quite a while now as a full band. But Myles has got this quiet determination about him as well – nothing seems to faze him. Me and Rich are hard-wired to be a bit more nervous and anxious, but Myles is quite a solid – a rock in a different way, you know. I think you need that in a band.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.
The Beatles’ final song is coming out next week. ‘Now and Then’ is set to arrive on November 2 at 10am ET (via Apple Corps Ltd./Capitol/UMe) and will be available digitally and as a double A-side single. A 12-minute documentary telling the story behind the track, written and directed by Oliver Murray, will premiere on November 1 at 3:30pm EDT. Watch a trailer for it below.
‘Now and Then’ originated as a demo that John Lennon recorded at his home in New York’s Dakota Building in 1978, featuring just Lennon’s voice and piano. In 1994, Yoko Ono gave the recording to McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr, along with Lennon’s demos for ‘Free as a Bird’ and ‘Real Love’. The remaining Beatles members attempted to finish ‘Now and Then’ with producer Jeff Lynne for The Beatles Anthology, but at that time, technological limitations prevented them from properly isolating Lennon’s vocals from the piano. In 2022, McCartney and Starr set out to complete the song after working with director Peter Jackson on his Get Back documentary. Jackson and his sound team, led by Emile de la Rey, were able to isolate Lennon’s vocals from the original home demo with the help of artificial intelligence.
In addition to Lennon’s vocal, the song features electric and acoustic guitar recorded in 1995 by Harrison, Starr’s new drum part, and bass, guitar, and piano from McCartney, who also added a slide guitar solo inspired by Harrison. The track comes with original cover art by Ed Ruscha.
“There it was, John’s voice, crystal clear,” McCartney said in a press release. “It’s quite emotional. And we all play on it, it’s a genuine Beatles recording. In 2023 to still be working on Beatles music, and about to release a new song the public haven’t heard, I think it’s an exciting thing.”
Starr added: “It was the closest we’ll ever come to having him back in the room, so it was very emotional for all of us. It was like John was there, you know. It’s far out.”
George Harrison’s widow, Olivia, wrote: “Back in 1995, after several days in the studio working on the track, George felt the technical issues with the demo were insurmountable and concluded that it was not possible to finish the track to a high enough standard. If he were here today, Dhani and I know he would have whole-heartedly joined Paul and Ringo in completing the recording of ‘Now and Then’.”
And John Lennon’s son Sean Ono Lennon commented: “It was incredibly touching to hear them working together after all the years that Dad had been gone. It’s the last song my dad, Paul, George and Ringo got to make together. It’s like a time capsule and all feels very meant to be.”
In addition to the release of ‘Now and Then’, expanded reissues of 1962-1966 (The Red Album) and 1967-1970 (The Blue Album) will be released November 10 with expanded tracklists. All the songs have been mixed in stereo and Dolby Atmos.
bar italia have shared a new single, ‘worlds greatest emoter’, taken from their upcoming second LP of 2023, The Twits. The track follows previous entries ‘my little tony’ and ‘Jelsy’ and comes with an accompanying video, which you can check out below.
The Twits, the follow-up to May’s Tracey Denim, is set to arrive on November 3 via Matador.
What does Blink-182 have to prove in 2023? Near the end of their new album ONE MORE TIME…, Tom DeLonge broadens the question further: “2023, who the fuck are we?” Twelve years since they last released an LP with the classic lineup of DeLonge, bassist Mark Hoppus, and drummer Travis Barker, they know they’re not the same group yet are all too aware of their legacy and place as elder statesmen of a genre they not only helped create but that’s entered back into the cultural mainstream (thanks in part to Barker’s role as hip-hop’s favorite drummer). The new record doesn’t try to stake their claim or push pop-punk forward in any significant way, which has the positive effect of not sounding self-serious or overly precious. At best, it captures the pure joy of three friends having fun making the sort of music that propelled them to stardom while acknowledging the challenges they’ve faced along the way, namely Hoppus’ recent battle with cancer and the 2008 plane crash that nearly killed Barker. But despite the growth they’ve experienced and display on ONE MORE TIME…, and as earned as the sentimentality feels, the trio lean so hard on nostalgia that they neglect to answer the question they ultimately direct towards everyone.
One way this nostalgia manifests is through references to the band’s past work, which some fans will find exhausting and uninspired. For others, it’s the thing that will draw them into it. On an album that reaches for the anthemic more than the personal, ‘You Don’t Know What You’ve Got’ sees Hoppus opening up about his diagnosis in relatively grim detail (“Long weeks of impending doom/ Stuck in life’s waiting room”), but it stumbles in combining the haunting echo of ‘Adam’s Song’ with a more spirited chorus. ‘Anthem Part 3’ calls back to 2001’s ‘Anthem Part Two’ and 1999’s ‘Anthem’, but it’s more focused on simply completing the trilogy than adding anything of value beyond serving as a musically satisfying intro. Even paying homage to their 2004 smash ‘I Miss You’ as the title track draws to a close, heartfelt as it may be, sounds obvious and obligatory. “My old shit ends here tonight,” DeLonge and Hoppus declare early on, but ONE MORE TIME… is all about the old shit.
That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but the music is too clean to embrace the messiness that comes with trying to grow up without distancing themselves from the adolescent impulses that fired up their early output. Existential despair and juvenile humour go toe to toe, and while sometimes the band strikes just the right balance (‘Turpentine’), it’s mostly a mixed bag – a song titled ‘Edging’ that includes the line (“She tried to pray it away, so I fucked her in church”) wouldn’t work in any context, but certainly not sandwiched between two of the record’s most earnest cuts. One of those is ‘When We Were Young’, which shares its name with the emo nostalgia-fest that Blink-182 just headlined and would have made for a rousing sing-along if the chorus wasn’t so lyrically clunky (“Nothing’s too fast cause we explode together”). The album is overstuffed at 17 tracks, and it sounds less like Blink-182 have a lot to say than trying many different ways to say the same thing. However palpable the chemistry still is – and noticeably elevated rather than watered down by Baker’s crisp production – the songs are too cloying and by-the-numbers to stir up too much new excitement.
Maybe you wish the band would transfer some of the raw, youthful energy of the interludes onto the rest of ONE MORE TIME…, as they effectively do on ‘Dance With Me’. Or maybe you wish there were more songs like new wave-inspired ‘Blink Wav’, which is a more invigorating tribute to their influences than the song that actually interpolates the Cure’s ‘Close to Me’, ‘Fell in Love’. But that’s not the album Blink-182 intended or have made. The song that comes closest to encapsulating it is in fact the title track, an acoustic ballad that references the band members’ near-death experiences yet sounds stripped of all its power. You don’t doubt the emotion when DeLonge sings, “Do I have to die to make you miss me?”, and you never question what it’s taken for the band to get back together. But its adherence to a certain formula leaves you feeling, like much of the record, that it’s meant to soundtrack their lives instead of really capturing them. Even in its immature moments, it’s all a lot little too neat and almost cinematic. There’s nothing wrong with looking back on and honouring the past, but that’s only one way to go about it.
Wilderado have shared a new version of their latest single ‘In Between’ featuring Matt Berninger of the National. The track was recorded in Norman, Oklahoma with producers Chad Copelin and James McAlister. Check it out below.
“Matt is one of my favorite lyricists and singers of all time, plus he’s in one of the coolest bands ever,” the band’s Max Rainer said in a statement. “We’re incredibly grateful and honored to feature him on this track.”
Wilderado released their self-titled debut album in October 2021.
BIFA (British Independent Film Awards) has announced the longlist for Netflix’s Breakthrough Performance Award. Known for spotting tomorrow’s stars today, the highly anticipated longlist for 2023 features outstanding performances from some of the most talked about independent films in the UK. This category has been nominated and won by Ben Whishaw, Jamie Bell, Naomi Ackie, Hayley Atwell, John Boyega, Florence Pugh, Chiwetel Ejiofor and Letitia Wright in the past.
BIFA will launch a development and support programme for performers longlisted in this category in partnership with We Are Bridge. Founded in 2018, We Are Bridge began as an aftercare programme for the cast of Rocks, led by a collective of filmmakers behind the BIFA and BAFTA-winning film. WAB has evolved into a leading industry body dedicated to preserving new and emerging talent’s legacy in the years since.
As part of the six-month programme, participants will receive career development, well-being, casting, financial literacy, and networking opportunities. A safeguarding industry training session will also be presented to help those looking after new on-screen talent.
The final five nominees will be announced Thursday, 2 November. Winners will be revealed at the 26th BIFA ceremony on Sunday, 3 December.
Paris has a certain je ne sais quoi that’s earned it the reputation of being one of the most romantic cities in the world. It’s a reputation that has piqued the interest of filmmakers for decades, starting from the days of black and white cinematography right up to the present day.
When you visit Paris, you may experience inexplicable sensations of deja vu even though you’ve never been there before. No, it won’t be the memories of a past life coming back to haunt you. It’ll be because you’ll have seen that same spot you’re standing in as the backdrop in a movie scene.
Producers and directors haven’t just fallen for the romantic allure of Paris, though. They’ve used the city as a filming location in many of the biggest blockbusting action and thriller movies of the past twenty years. Dedicated cinephiles and filmmakers on their way to Paris should definitely make sure they don’t miss out on visiting any of the following famous film locations in Paris. It won’t be a Mission Impossible, and that’s for sure.
As you plan your itinerary full of Paris movie locations, make sure you also have a plan for your luggage. Bounce luggage lockers are conveniently located all over Paris to help you worry less about your luggage and focus more on your film tour.
So where are the famous film locations in Paris?
Champs-Élysées
The Champs-Élysées is a broad, tree-lined mile and a quarter-long avenue in the center of Paris with the Arc de Triomphe at one end and the Place de la Concorde at the other. While it’s world-renowned for its surplus of designer stores, take a stroll along it, and you’ll be following the footsteps of some of the top A-list actors.
Films with scenes shot on the Champs-Élysées include:-
2008 – Taken, starring Liam Neeson
2018 – Mission Impossible Fallout, starring Tom Cruise, shut down the city traffic to film scenes at the Arc de Triomphe.
2006 – The Devil Wears Prada, starring Meryl Streep, filmed scenes at the Fountain des Fleuves in the Place de la Concorde.
The Louvre
The Louvre Museum is one of the most prestigious art museums in the world. Housed in the enormous and very grandiose Louvre Palace, the museum is home to such outstanding works of art as the Mona Lisa and the Venus de Milo. More outstanding for any cinephile than any artwork the museum may contain is the museum’s iconic and instantly recognizable glass pyramid in the Napoleon Courtyard.
Films that have been shot at the Louvre are from diverse genres and include:
2006 – The Da Vinci Code, starring Tom Hanks, shot scenes inside the museum and in the courtyard in front of the pyramid.
2017 – Wonder Woman with Gal Gadot in the lead role.
2011 – Monte Carlo, a comedy, starring Selena Gomez, Leighton Meester, and Kate Cassidy, saw the three protagonists race through the museum.
The Eiffel Tower
There is no structure more iconically associated with Paris than the Eiffel Tower. Including a shot of the 300-meter high tower in the opening scene of a movie instantly lets the audience know where some, if not all, of the film, will be taking place.
During its lengthy film history, actors have scaled the tower, dined in its restaurants, and danced and crooned on its observation deck. The tower has also been cinematically destroyed by monsters or other means more than a few times.
The wrought iron tower has been seen in romance, action, musical, animation, and every other genre of film in between. The Eiffel Tower is, without a doubt, the most used and represented film location in Paris.
There have been far too many films made on, in, or showing the Eiffel Tower to mention them all by name, but here are a few to give you a general idea:
1957 – Funny Face, starring Fred Astaire and Audrey Hepburn, who sang and danced on the deck.
1965 – The Great Race, a film in which the protagonist destroyed the tower with a cannon.
1967 – King Kong Escapes. King Kong fights off a robot gorilla in front of the tower.
1985 – National Lampoon European Vacation contains comedy scenes on the observation deck.
1985 – A View To Kill, where Roger Moore as James Bond fights off his arch enemy.
2007 – Ratatouille, a Pixar movie where a rat takes over the tower restaurant.
2011 – Hugo, a film directed by Martin Scorsese about a child clock repairer.
Jardin du Palais Royal
The gardens of the Royal Palace in Paris have served as a scenic backdrop for quite a few scenes in well-known feature films. The manicured grounds with their statues and fountains, the facade of the palace itself, and the unique striped column sculpture have all played leading roles as filming locations. They proved photogenic enough to capture the imagination of directors like Woody Allen and Christopher McQuarrie.
Films in which you’ll catch glimpses of the Royal Palace Gardens include:
2011 – Midnight in Paris, starring Owen Wilson and directed by Woody Allen.
2018 – Mission Impossible Fallout.
2010 – The Tourist with Johnny Depp and Angeline Jolie.
2018 – Season 1 of Killing Eve, the hit TV show, also featured the gardens in episode 1.
Gare du Nord
The Gare du Nord is one of the biggest train stations in Paris and one that has made its presence felt on screen on several occasions. Although, admittedly, some of those appearances are more memorable than others. The majestic, palace-style station always does itself justice on screen, no matter how bad the script is.
Good films featuring the Gare du Nord in Paris include:
2002 – The Bourne Identity, an action-packed thriller with Matt Damon as the protagonist.
2013 – Gare du Nord, a French-Canadian film about four travelers who meet at the station.
So now you know that whenever you get that tingling sensation of deja vu when you’re in Paris, it’ll be because you’ve seen the spot you’re standing in on the big screen. The good thing is, if you fall in love with Paris and want to see it but can’t go, all you have to do is watch one of the above movies, and it’ll be like taking a trip down memory lane.
