Down the Corporate Ladder... to Hell

When you're nervous, it can sometimes mean that you have something to hide. Especially on this satanic day, June 6th of 2006.

We have some visitors in the office and they're coming from our main branch in Omaha, Nebraska. The big boss is here as well, with his cohort of fans in suits. I got here wearing a t-shirt and my manager gave me a dirty look. I guess our american friends will have to live in the present and accept the fact that I can be efficient even if I'm heavily tattooed.



So my superiors are all nervous and very well-dressed. They act like their job is hanging on a string. Maybe it is. We occupy a beautiful 8th floor with a view on McGill College, just in front of Place Montréal-Trust. We can see busy little people walking around all day, and Eaton Center shoppers smoking cigarettes outside.



[Yet another cigarette remark : some friends told me they were on the verge of never drinking again because swallowing alcohol made them want to smoke. I say bravo to that. The government has achieved a nice goal here : making people realise that they CAN control their impulsions & bad habits. This is the impulse that most of these self-destructing smokers needed. If you can't have a drink without ALSO having a cigarette, you need to seriously work on yourself.]

This "status" is always temporary : you may be among the finest enterprises in town and have nice offices, but you always need to be reminded that you could loose all that tomorrow morning while I snap my fingers at Death's stare. Homeless computers & cubicles aren't very useful. Office space is an expensive bitch.

Part of your manpower is the way your employees are treating your clients. If you treat your employees like dirt, chances are they'll in turn treat your clients like the assholes they probably are. And you'll be losing both of them, and your credibility at the same time. If you're into business, there's one thing you have to respect : your employees. And paying them like they're the last thing on earth you care about is not what I call respect. Not giving them insurances & other benefits after almost three loyal years is not what I call respect.

See how disposable we all are when everybody quits at the same time. Take the calls for me, will ya ?

Now, I'm not about to quit, unfortunately, because I need the money & the stability. And the company is probably not about to close down either, judging on people's smiles today. It's just funny to see how certain human beings can make other human beings very nervous, just by hopping out of a plane from Omaha, of all cities, and showing up.

That's my personal little comedy channel of the day.

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Miss Bijoux never fails to impress me and she has recently revealed to me that she's a big slashers fan. Not to say she likes serial killers slashing throats for a living in what we commonly call "real life", but she likes to watch movies from the 80's where the spraynet & blood flow freely. Movies that we geeks like to call "slashers".

So I have attacked the gigantic task that consists on extracting all the interesting slashers left in my VHS collection, putting them on a pile next to the TV, and viewing one from time to time, when we feel like we need some extra cheese on our slice of life. I have recently seen ICED, the KILLER WORKOUT, and last week came the time for Buddy Cooper's THE MUTILATOR.



Now this is something stupid. I don't think the french dubbed version helped, but when I mention "mindless fun", this is maybe not what I have in mind.

A kid kills his mother by accident. His father comes home and freaks out. Flash forward a couple of years later. The boy now dates a virgin chick, and has a few friends in college. Also titled "Fall Break", the movie is about that : they have a week off, don't what to do with their time, and end up going to clean the father's house near a beach somewhere in Anytown, USA.

They're clearly in it for the party, to drink beer and run on the beach, screw around & make stupid jokes. However a not so mysterious figure comes out of the dark and starts killing them, one by one. The suspense element usually associated with slashers is evacuated almost as soon as the massacre starts : the killer's identity is revealed. Now, all we have to do is watch the teenagers die in various, uninteresting ways, until there's nobody left, while the time passes... slowly.

So there we are. A very "average" entry in the slashers genre, and one VHS tape I gladly used to copy something else on.

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Did anybody I know borrow the two Omnibus volumes of George Simenon's complete works I had ? They're pretty big books, and surprisingly enough, I cannot seem to locate them anywhere. So if somebody has them, please return them at my residence, I have recently started feeling a Simenon craving - maybe because of summer ? - that I would like to calm down by reading these old crime novels.

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Speaking of "old crimes", I watched Robert Enrico's LE VIEUX FUSIL yesterday. It has been staring at me for ages on a jam packed VHS shelf, just beside Henri Verneuil's I COMME... ICARE and LES MORFALOUS. It's a copy that dates back from the days where I captured any interesting movie that would grace Télé-Québec's schedule, back when I was still "au courant".



This 1975 schlock narrates the tale of Lucien (Philippe Noiret), a Montauban surgeon, during WW2. In 1944, working in a hospital and trying to help with war casualties, under the German occupation, with his family - a lovely wife Clara (Romy Schneider), his daughter & the dog, Marcel. He sends this very same family in the provinces, after feeling they'd be safer over there, but something really troubling happens, and changes him forever.

It's a classic tale about a circle of violence, and about an honest, normal citizen turning berserk after losing a part of himself. The violence is cathartic, but the viewer still feels that it's wrong. As with death penalty, I think there's a social limit to vengeance, and I am not adhering to that "eye for an eye" bullshit. What is done to both sides is terrible. Enrico tries to show that, and it works. It's a moment of our history that we are not allowed to forget.

When Romy Schneider dies, we're hit by an emotional charge that may, or may not be, the cinematic translation of her own real premature death. Noiret is exceptional here. The everyday man turned into a cold blooded murderer. Bertrand Tavernier used this Noiret feature to good effect later on in his wonderful COUP DE TORCHON.

LE VIEUX FUSIL is filled with vegetation, as the south of France permeates every gorgeous shot. It is also a naturist drama, that could have been written by Zola or Balzac, if only they had foreseen the future war's atrocities. The old school dialogues were written by Pascal Jardin, Alexandre's father, and they echo this sweet, dusty & flamboyant style that filled european litterature in the 60's. A nostalgic trip it is, even if in that case, nostalgia means remembering something that you have never lived.