The Pack Rat Pack

I had never heard the expression "pack rat" before my girlfriend, Miss Bijoux, told me I was one, a couple of months ago.



Guess she was right. After meticulously analysing the situation, I realised that it was really hard from me to let go of many objects, material possessions that can be seen by other eyes as obsolete or superfluous. It's a material world, folks. My stuff is precious for me, but not for others. I have accumulated an impressive stash of cultural weekly newspapers, with the hopes of having time to read them one of these days, but the weeks are passing and time isn't slowing down. So the stash grows and I wouldn't want it to reach the roof.

I believe this is a problem of intellectual boulimie. I'm eager to read everything, know everything, master lots of fields. I am insanely curious : I want to read different points of view about many movies I will never find the time to watch, just in case a friend asks my advice; I'd probably reply something like : "Oh, the Mirror liked it, but Voir spat on it and the Village Voice didn't even bother reviewing it". Or : "All my other friends who have seen it told me it sucked".

I believe the time has come to let go of many things. I have so many books I will never be able to read, mostly due to a lack of time - or to my attention span shrinking every day. Same goes for movies... It might take a while, but I will slowly empty my shelves in the great unknown universe of municipal landfills. Objects that I once cared for will become other people's trash.

You can't do or know everything. This is a truth I might take some to get used to, but I'm slowly arriving there.

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Cédric Klapisch can be as irritating as he usually is entertaining. I have watched L'AUBERGE ESPAGNOLE on Saturday and I must say I don't get what the fuss was all about a few years back, when the movie was launched.



I always have a pronounced tendency to steer away from over-hyped flicks. Mostly because we hear so many things about them that we feel we don't need to see them anymore, but also because a "mass effect", something universal that moves most people, like let's say Lady Di's death, has a complete opposite effect of repulsion on me. I have never been drawn to the masses watching a house burn, or watching two teenagers fight at high school. It's magnetic : it drives me away.

So as funny as I thought UN AIR DE FAMILLE was, and as much as I liked LE PÉRIL JEUNE, I have grown to see the bad aspects of french cinema and can no longer tolerate them.

What do we have in L'AUBERGE ESPAGNOLE ? Romain Duris, a guy that ladies love a lot, who worked with Klapisch in most of his movies (among others PEUT-ETRE, this futuristic absurdity), as an economy student going to Spain to learn spanish before applying for a job with the French government. He has a girlfriend - Audrey Tautou, an actress everybody loves, but that for some reasons I can't stand - and leaves her behind, and finds himself a nice spot with multi-cultural roommates. It's enough to make a backpacker wet his bed, but the "happy community" aspect the movie tries to highlight is a very clean one : nothing boring or disgusting happens, everybody gets along, and the Barcelona that is depicted is a very clean place where criminality does not apparently exist.

LES POUPÉES RUSSES is the sequel, it was recently released on DVD, and I'll be sure to check it out, just to see where Klapisch is at now.

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Happy birthday, bro !!