Hotel Chevalier is a 2007 short film written and directed by Wes
Anderson, starring Jason Schwartzman and Natalie Portman as former
lovers who reunite in a Paris hotel room. The 13-minute film acts as a
prologue to Anderson's 2007 feature film The Darjeeling Limited, in
which a man (played by Adrien Brody) reunites with his brothers (Owen
Wilson and Schwartzman) in India after the death of their father. Hotel
Chevalier was shot on location in a Parisian hotel by a small crew and
self-financed by Anderson, who initially intended it as a stand-alone
work. Its first showing was at the Venice Film Festival première of the
feature film on September 2, 2007, and it made its own debut later that
month at Apple Stores in four American cities. The day after its
première, it was made available for free from the iTunes Store for one
month, during which it was downloaded more than 500,000 times. The film
garnered near-universal critical acclaim from reviewers who compared it
favorably with The Darjeeling Limited and praised its richness,
poignancy, and careful construction.
Read more: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotel_Chevalier>
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Today's selected anniversaries:
1666:
A large fire began on London's Pudding Lane and burned the city
for three days, destroying St Paul's Cathedral and the homes of 70,000
of the city's 80,000 inhabitants.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Fire_of_London>
1792:
French Revolution: Due to an overwhelming fear that foreign
armies would attack Paris and prisoners would revolt, thousands of
people were summarily executed.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_Massacres>
1946:
The interim government of India, headed by Jawaharlal Nehru,
was formed to assist the transition of India from British rule to
independence.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interim_Government_of_India>
1985:
Hurricane Elena, an unpredictable and damaging tropical cyclone
that affected eastern and central portions of the United States Gulf
Coast, made landfall near Biloxi, Mississippi as a Category 3 major
hurricane.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Elena>
1998:
Swissair Flight 111, en route from New York City to Geneva,
crashed into the Atlantic Ocean, killing all 229 people on board.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swissair_Flight_111>
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Wiktionary's word of the day:
autochthon:
1. The earliest inhabitant of an area; an aborigine.
2. (geology) An autochthonous rock formation.
<https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/autochthon>
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Wikiquote quote of the day:
Human thought is like a monstrous pendulum: it keeps swinging from
one extreme to the other. Within the compass of five generations we find
the Puritan first an uncompromising believer in demonology and magic,
and then a scoffer at everything involving the play of fancy.
--Eugene Field
<https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Eugene_Field>