Psychological torture & its derivatives

Big day ahead.  I got up at 6:30 to come to work and I was half awake all the way.  Near the Loto-Québec building a taxi made a U-turn in the middle of the morning trafic and ended up blocking everybody, unable to manoeuvre.  What an idiot.  I'm the only one who screamed something at him.  I can't help myself.

I went to Indigo looking for the June issue of Metropolis - again - and their magazines selection is pretty lame.  I saw a soft cover edition of Deyan Sudjic's THE EDIFICE COMPLEX at 18$, which completely pissed me off, because I paid my hardcover deluxe edition more than 40$.  And I finally found - restocked - Avi Friedman's "ROOM FOR THOUGHT - Rethinking Home & Community Design" on the shelves, a book I could not resist buying.  Guess you'll hear about it if I finally get to read it !

When I'll get out of the office, at 2, the sky will hopefully not spit rain at me and I'll head to the Mirror's offices to pick up the passes that I won for the AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH premiere tonight.  Then I'll go & get Miss Bijoux at her workshop and we'll get something to eat together, or go browse old books in a second hand library.  A siesta is in the works too.  What my friend Mr. Moto would call a "disco nap".



Because there will be disco tonight : after our movie, we'll head down to Francofolies and catch Ghislain Poirier at Zone Molson Dry at 10.  He'll be onstage with the Omnikrom posse & a dangerous predator named Séba 273.  Outside shows at Francofolies are always fun, especially when they involve third degree gangster crunk.

Afterwards, as part of the Nostalgia pre-party, Chromeo DJ's at Saphir.  Guess where we'll be.  Chromeo can be real mean when they DJ, since they'll pretty much play what they love the most : 80's electro-funk !  The mix they released last year on Eskimo will give you a good idea of the vibe they're able to create.  Be there or be square.

So I think that will all this excitement going on, we'll be able to take it easy tomorrow, then ?  Not quite : the fifth edition of Voyeur welcomes Romeo Kardec, and we'll be more than coerced into dancing all night.  Is Montreal the disco dancing capital of Canada ?

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Eli Roth started getting some well deserved attention when he directed CABIN FEVER, a 70's inspired horror flick that featured enough thrills to establish him firmly and drive Quentin Tarantino to "present" the next movie he'd shoot, HOSTEL.



HOSTEL has been well received by critics, generally, but not so much by horror fans in general.  Since I'm pretty curious and am not the type to rest on somebody's opinion without checking the movie out myself, I watched it yesterday with a horrified Miss Bijoux.  I knew that the movie started rather slowly, with some dumb americans backpackers traveling Europe and being all about sex & booze, so I wasn't put off by that prologue.

And when the horror comes, we're prepared.  I have observed, over the years, that whenever an american was making a movie about a subject as delicate as snuff films, he'd generally screw it up.  I haven't seen Johnny Depp's THE BRAVE yet, but 8MM was rather crappy and VIDEODROME was shot by... Cronenberg, a canadian.

Roth brings a fresh idea here - those who've seen the movie will understand - by playing on a larger scale.  However, it's so big it's impossible to believe it.  The handling of the paranoia aspect is rather naive.  The conspiration is too extreme.  And East Europeans are presented in such a cliché'd way it's almost laughable.  I don't know if these scripting choices were made not to confuse the american audience too much, but it's sad to see that nothing is done to reverse these aberrant beliefs.

HOSTEL tries so much to be evil and twisted that it just doesn't work.  Those who are easily impressed will acquire a vision of Europe that is completely biased and deformed.  Nice effects, though.  There's enough blood in there to quench your thirst for at least a couple of weeks.