A Tuesday Night Out

It all began as a regular weekday night. I was about to watch Claude Chabrol's POULET AU VINAIGRE quietly. I wasn't planning on going out, even though Dan Berkson & James What were in town performing at Salon Daomé. I have been suffering from a weird bronchitis for more than a month, and every time I think it's gone it comes back. I wouldn't want to point any fingers in misleading directions but the fuckin' schizo weather probably doesn't help. I was terribly tired yesterday, and felt pretty bad. I lay down for a nap and couldn't even sleep.



So I got up around 11 to eat some ice cream - good for the throat, bad for the waist - and while I was feasting Mr. Bérêt called me. He felt like going out so I said : "Sure, come on over". He brought his trademark Troïka 60 ounces vodka bottle with him, and got to my place around midnight. We had a drink and took the 24 at 12:30, intending on getting off at the corner of Sherbrooke & St. Laurent and walk up. However, while waiting in front of the Sherbrooke metro station, some drunk jock in a sports car smashed the side of the bus. He then went to park in front of it and got out of his car while we ourselves were getting out of the bus. A crackhead appeared out of nowhere and asked the jock, running to the bus to talk to the driver, if he had 4$ !!

We entered the station. I was dead tired and Mr. Bérêt was drunk, so we chose the wrong direction and none of us noticed. We got out at Berri-UQAM and walked to the opposite tracks. Hugotron appeared in front of us as I was sipping on my Rev. We waited a while but finally were able to get out at Mont-Royal and walk to the Daomé, where there was already a nice bunch of people dancing.

The night went in a flash - the music was good, but I didn't feel like dancing. I chatted and slightly moved my butt, people offered me beer and I sure took my time to drink the bottles, abandonning them when they were piss warm. Mr. Bérêt disappeared, and around 3:15 I noticed that almost everybody was gone. I left too. On the sidewalk, we had drunk conversations, and finally Krystel took me home on her scooter whose motor kept on stalling. The air was freezing, but the ride felt nice.

*

Parties are fun to attend, and sometimes cinema has tried to emulate their euphoria on the big screen. We could almost say it's the case with Walter Hill's 1984 fun-ride STREETS OF FIRE. Subtitled "A Rock n' Roll Fable", its tagline is "Tonight is what it means to be young". The movie could almost be a musical, but it remains a fast-paced, feel good urban adventure in an anachronistic world very much inspired by the 80's "new romanticism".



Ellen Aim (Diane Lane), a singer not unlike Stevie Nicks, is kidnapped while giving a performance in a small seedy town populated by rockabillys and bikers. The local biker gang, the Bombers, led by Willem Dafoe, are the ones responsible for the kidnapping. A mercenary named Tom Cody (Michael Paré), who also happens to be Ellen Aim's ex, is called on to rescue her, and will go on a mission with his newfound lesbian sidekick McCoy (Amy Madigan) and Ellen's manager (Rick Moranis). Fights will burst out, and flames will rise up in the streets.

It came to me as a major surprise that I had never seen this flick before. For various reasons :

1 - I am obsessed with the eighties;
2 - I pretty much adore Willem Dafoe;
3 - I'm a tender rocker;
4 - I love bikers movies.



...and I wasn't disappointed. STREETS OF FIRE is an epic studio movie, a weird mix of rock culture, eighties kitsch, and proposes a glossy image of a typical industrial American city with diners, rock clubs and understanding policemen. The fight scenes are over-the-top, and Michael Paré must have been the coolest anti-hero on the block back in the days; he stands there with his working-class pants, his suspenders and his wife-beater, hair in the wind, cigarette sending smoke in his eyes. It was an era of glorious bar binges, brawls with rockabilly gangs, and the mighty Dafoe is the ultimate un-credible bad guy : he walks around with big guys dressed in leather pants, wears more makeup than his female counterparts, and wears the gayest outfits you've ever seen [in fact, as a side note, since blogs don't allow footnotes, I once went to Mr. Hairdresser's birthday party around 2002, and he had invited a guy he was bangin' at the time. The guy showed up, to everybody's embarassment, dressed in a shiny leather overalls, and nothing else, bare torso & all. I told myself that I had never seen a cheesiest outfit and never would again, but how wrong was I - because Willem wears exactly the same one in pretty much the first half of this movie].

Michael Paré is a bad-ass, yes, but the visuals are also to blame for the movie's over-the-top feel : motorcycles who are shot at litterally EXPLODE; the cars roar all the time; there's a constant animosity between Moranis & Paré, and "never a dull moment". What can I say about the soundtrack that hasn't been said before ? If you don't like classic rock, it could be slightly annoying to you, but in the context of the movie it's quite appropriated. Bands like Fire Inc. and The Blasters offer nice contributions, and the Ry Cooder score does a pretty decent job.



Dafoe was just starting his carreer back then, and appeared as a money-laundering villain the next year in William Friedkin's TO LIVE & DIE IN L.A. Director Walter Hill, after his peak at the beginning of the 80's, made some decent movies, among which figure westerns WILD BILL (1995) and the Kurosawa remake LAST MAN STANDING (1996) with Bruce Willis. Which probably, eventually, lead him to direct an episode of DEADWOOD in 2004, but that's just another story.

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I recently stumbled upon an excellent web page ("Critical Condition", at http://www.critcononline.com/video_companies_cover_art.htm) detailing numerous VHS distributors of the 80's, and I spent quite a lot of time just browsing the galleries, wasting entire hours just staring at the cover arts of obscure releases. While doing so, I realised that I possessed - and used to possess - quite a large number of these tapes, including Academy Video's ENDPLAY. This one was given to me at the end of the millenium by a fellow trader who used to go by the name Baron Blood, referencing a very entertaining Mario Bava classic. ENDPLAY wasn't that far on my VHS shelves, so I decided to give it a chance and pop it in.



My first disappointment was that it wasn't an American exploitation piece from the 80's about teenage hitchikers getting sliced, as the box suggested. It was an almost monastic Australian thriller from 1976, directed by Tim Burstall. In which a pretty boy named Mark (John Waters - not the one we know) is believed to have disposed of the body of a "blonde nympho" he picked up while driving to visit his brother Robert (George Mallaby, who also appeared in THE SPY WHO LOVED ME in 1977), a crippled in a wheelchair.

Believe me, there's not much going on. Then it slowly hits you. The storyline is told from a viewpoint that leads you to falsely assume some beliefs that may not be entirely true... The novel aspect of the script's construction is only revealed towards the end, making us "get" why we waited until the end to make any judgement. The movie verges on the huis clos, taking place almost entirely in Robert's house. The few scenes happening in the "outside world" are filmed in such a bizarre way that they lend the ensemble a surrealistic feel.

This movie is apparently a classic in Australia, and I can understand why; however, thanks to the false marketing by Academy Video, some of my expectations were not exactly fulfilled. Better luck next time !

200

Global Warming has decided to make an exception in his eternal quest of... warming up the earth. In a Montreal Times article titled Global Warming avoids Canada, he is quoted as telling the Associated Press, earlier yesterday, that : "Canadians are too boring. Why should I care about them and warm their asses up ?". Therefore, it has been officially announced that Global Warming will not be granted a Canadian visa, and will never be able to set foot in our country. Airport personel is nervous, and the borders are closely watched. Grey skies are expected to last forever from now on, and we can forget about a suntan, or the simple idea of summer. Just like in any regular Canadian movie.



I've read somewhere that when a blog regularly does topics about the weather, it's gone bad. Have I reached my expiration date ? Have I "jumped the shark" ? You be the judge. I may have lost my edge at the same time I was losing my abs under a cake & ice cream coating around the waist, but I have not lost my will for irreverence. And in fact this post, that I'm typing right now, will be my 200th. In less than two years.

Those of you who were there in the beginning probably noticed how much the blog has changed. I first started it as a kind of "diary" of my sexual encounters and general experiences with serial dating. Then I met Miss Bijoux, and calmed down. I've been using Porn Science mainly to keep tabs, since then, on the movies I see, and the general state of mayhem my life is in. And you know damn well that all this could change at the blink of an eye. My eye.

I have a confession to make. Everybody gets on my nerves today. I'm at work, at the office. I'm in this kind of monastic, quiet mood required to think, and I have a shitload of articles to finish, as I may already have written right here, and there are girls all around me screaming their lungs out. It's not even hysteria, it's just the way they are : they run around and talk really loudly about work, and I'm pretty sure that they consume every calory of their more than generous meals while they're here. Then they go home to their husbands or boyfriends, and are too exhausted to do anything besides couch potatin' and watching TV. Why they invest the best of their day in such a trivial thing as "work", I'll never get it. When your employer does the minimum for you, what does he expect ?



This is my philosophy on jobs that are not "carreers". If you're there mainly to pay your bills, don't overdo it. It might look suspect to people like me.

I do what I'm asked to do, and I never step over the line. I don't take initiatives. I don't go helping out other departments when I have less stuff on my agenda. Corporate behaviour sickens me to the point of almost puking. I believe in success, but I don't think that climbing the corporate ladder without sacrificing your soul is possible anymore. I'm not the type of guy to say "Good stuff !" and pat people I hate on the back in the elevator on the way to the food court. I will not dress in a suit and spend 16 hours a day in my office, surrounded by assholes with no life. And I don't think that personal accomplishment can be achieved via a faceless business empire.

I strongly believe that, if you have a strong personality and are intellectually autonomous, you have to find your way on your own. Go out there and do it.

And while you're at it, please, keep your voice at a reasonable level.

Horrified

Everybody loves horror, it would seem. Most people in my immediate emotional surroundings are horror fans, or can at least stomach a good old gory movie from time to time. We do have snobs, who'll only be interested in art house and foreign films, but I like to stay balanced. I like my movies as visceral as they can be social. There's a time for everything, and I'm interested by a very broad range of types of "entertainment". I of course draw the line at reality. Recently discussing with a good friend of mine - and fellow blogger - I found out that I wasn't the only one sickened by the view of real violence. Be it Nick Berg's beheading on the net or just somebody accidentally cutting his finger on tape, I don't like the sounds or the view of it. As long as it's fiction, even if it comes from a sick mind, it stays in the realm of the imaginary.



An article from today's New York Times drew my attention. Written by Michael Cieply and titled "Government to Take a Hard Look at Horror", it mentions that Hollywood's marketers don't always have a clear conscience when the time comes to aim their ads to underage kids. And that ads of studios not part of the M.P.A.A. aren't regulated. Hence, kids coming home from school can see huge banners for upcoming movies such as THE REAPING, PERFECT STRANGER and CAPTIVITY.

Trailers for these films also play on TV and some people think that children shouldn't be exposed to them. Let me tell you something.

I am not a particularly twisted guy, but I like my horror movies uncensored. I don't mind the violence, when it is in tune with the story. I just don't like it when brutality is glorified, as if it was noble of some characters to punch people to death. Recent examples include BON COP BAD COP and CRANK. I think that some youngsters out there are not very well equiped, judgement-wise, and can be influenced. And if violence is spread on daytime TV and contextualised as "normal", it can become a problem, especially when coupled to lax gun laws in the US. Guns don't kill people, people do. True to a certain extent. But if guns were hard to put your hands on, you'd have some time to think twice before pulling the trigger and blowing your landlord's brains off during a heated argument.



During most of my youth I have willingly been exposed to horror movies, sometimes indirectly. Some of my babysitters were gorehounds, and sometimes my little brother and me were left unsupervised in front of the TV during some afternoons where some channels were showing movies such as David Cronenberg's RABID. I had a cousin working in a Nicolet video rental store, and when we'd frequently visit her at work, riding in her then boyfriend's Sirocco, I spent most of my time staring at the boxes displayed on the upper shelves, out of children's reach, where horror and porn was stored.

A new bill is being studied right now, and if adopted would allow some new guidelines on violence in films. Taming them down, of course. There is already a similar hypocrisy going on with these studios : in order to avoid the "R" rating, some of them are cutting down movie scenes upon release. Then, when the movie is released on DVD, the scenes are put back on and it's marked as "unrated". Therefore, those of us blessed with impatience see a "cut" movie when they go out with their dates to scare their pants off.



Horror movies are here to stay, and wether you like the genre or not, trying to impose moral barriers will not make it disappear. Movies like the SAW trilogy might be gory and hard to stomach for some, but nothing matches the grotesque dismemberments of daily news. Irony ?

Baboul Hair Pullin'

A subject close to my heart is discussed in this month's Walrus (April edition). This Canadian magazine never fails to impress me with its broad range of topics & the quality of its articles, and I rarely mention what I'm reading on the bus, so there you go.



On top of an article about BC's Pine Beetle, slowly annihilating our forests, there's an article by John Lorinc about cognitive overload, Driven to Distraction. Cognitive science specialists have apparently found out that multi-tasking and being constantly interrupted by a never-ending flow of information make it more difficult for us to think for a long time, shortening our focus. If we constantly receive information and don't take enough time to "process" it, or think it through, our brain doesn't "record". Or, in Lorinc's words : "When someone is bombarded by data, the executive processor doesn't have the time or the resources to encode everything and starts to show signs of fatigue."



Another passage states that "Email for many people has become an oppressive feature of work life. MySpace, YouTube, chat rooms, and the blogosphere, for all their virtues as new mediums of political debate and cultural activity, have an amazing ability to suck up time."

Do I need to say I highly recommend this to y'all ?



Another surprising article, this time in the Atlantic - also the April edition - is about the Darfur genocide. According to Stephan Faris, global warming would have a bigger responsibility in the conflict than ethnic hatred !

This sounds so refreshing that I'll have to read it before writing about it any further. And since I'm pretty sauced right now, being hung over at work & all, I'll get back to you tomorrow in a finer shape.

Eat Your Emotions

I'm eating a spinach cream soup and pretending nothing's happening to the world. I just took a look at Meteomedia's website and even though it will probably rain all day, it is predicted that the weather will reach 12 degrees. Not bad for my day off. I wouldn't lie to y'all if I told you I needed a break. Most of my co-workers would agree. I stay calm on the phone at all times, but as soon as our customers are gone, let's just say I'm fast on the bitch switch. Sleeping long hours is already helping. But a week or two in the sun wouldn't hurt.



Speaking of which, I'll be off to California for a whole month this summer. From July 16th to August 13th, I will be harvesting lavender and living the good life on a farm in Los Gatos, near San José. Horseback riding, climbing redwoods, cruising around the coast... It will be a much needed month off, the first I will take since 2000. My holidays since then have mostly been bad jokes, spent in Montreal doing exactly what I'm doing all year long. I know I'll miss the Daft Punk show at Bell Centre, but they're playing in Berkeley at the end of July so I'll be there. And I will, of course, let you know what's going on from time to time, as I plan on bringing my laptop with me.

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Hookers are making "friends requests" on my MySpace page. It's not a recent trend but it's rather annoying. If you go on their profiles, you are magically redirected towards some porn pages. How lame. If I want to look at online porn, I don't need a spammer to tell me WHEN to do it...

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In Miami on Monday, a drunk police officer named Michael Ragusa - yes, same name as one of the firefighters who perished in the World Trade Center on 9/11 - stopped his patrol car (he was off duty) near a 31 years old woman walking home from her job, around 5 AM. He called her "beautiful" and got her to approach the car, and when she did, he grabbed her arm and forced her inside. With the lady still on his lap, he drove to a secluded area and proceeded to grope her and take her pants off. He was about to rape her when she told him she had a venereal disease.



That stopped him short. She was permitted to put her pants back and the policeman drove her home. Just before letting her go, he asked her for her phone number. She gave it to him, and he told her he'd like to see her again. He sent her a text message 20 minutes after she got out of his car, while she was telling her uncle about her little "adventure". Later during the day, Ragusa called her again, inviting her to lunch.

At that point, the Miami police was made aware of its member's inconduct, and Ragusa was promptly arrested, and relieved of duty.

Source : The Miami Herald.

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Freddie Francis is dead. He died leaving behind him an impressive body of work. A cinematographer on films such as David Lynch's THE ELEPHANT MAN (1980) and Martin Scorcese's CAPE FEAR (1991), he was first and foremost a director, deeply invested in Britain's genre cinema industry. Beginning his directing carreer with an uncredited involvement in THE DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS in 1962, he would go on to pursue an impressive stint of b-movies, including classics such as DR. TERROR'S HOUSE OF HORRORS (1965, reuniting an impressive cast comprised of Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee and Donald Pleasance) and the Hammer's DRACULA HAS RISEN FROM THE GRAVE (1968).



While he died before I had the chance of watching his productions, it is still a great loss that follows a long series of losts. The men who have shaped the b-movie industry of Europe in the sixties and seventies are falling like flies. R.I.P.

Keepin' Busy With Safari Movies

I am in the process of writing an article about safari movies, a rather weird sub-genre, for Detroit's underground cinema magazine Cashiers du Cinemart. My relationship with Mike White, the editor in chief, goes a long way. We "met" back in the days where he was still a pretty big tape trader, looking for rare movies and often ending up with washed out, 14th generation copies of gems we all thought lost - or undistributed. We were all doing it. Buying a VHS 20-tapes pack a week, and mailing away.



I had access to a mythic place at the time : the basement of St-Eustache's Vidéogie rental store. I would go there every week with my friend Trucker G, and lurk in the darkness of the basement for hours, looking at the never-ending stashes of tapes among which you could find the most surprising and rare threats. I would rent 7 movies a week - one for each day - and I was allowed to keep 'em for seven days for the friendly price of 7.77$. I eventually became friends with Marc, the manager, because every time I would climb up the stairs back to everyday life, covered in spiderwebs, my treasure under the arm, he would have to recreate the movie titles in his system and put barcodes on the tapes - most of these movies had not been rented in more than ten years.

Long after I stopped going there, not because I had rented everything I wanted, but mostly because Trucker G was too busy to give me rides, Marc would come to see me in Laval, where I lived, and bring me gifts he would "borrow" from the huge collection his employer didn't care about : Joe de Palmer porn rarities, THE MONK with Franco Nero, and Joe d'Amato's Canadian-shot BILL CORMACK LE FÉDÉRÉ, starring Fabio Testi, and in which the villain is named "Cariboo".



Mike White was always on the lookout for rare titles too, so we eventually hooked up on the web and started trading tapes by mail. He didn't care about ending up with French dubbed versions of the movies he seeked, and I didn't mind his generosity - he was one of the first folks out there to buy a DVD burner and to send digitalised versions of VHS tapes on convenient DVD-Rs, and received only tapes in return.

Right now, he is putting up the 15th issue of the Cashiers and my article needs to be sent to him by April 1st. I usually don't have any problems with deadlines, and I'm pretty confident I'll make in right on time, but there are still a few things I need to tune up. Some of the movies I have watched a few months ago are a blur now, so I'll need to run them at full speed in my VCR and take notes. I also haven't watched Hong Kong's CRAZY SAFARI yet and can't bring myself to finish the impossibly boring Bitto Albertini no-brainer THREE SUPERMEN IN THE JUNGLE.



I also forgot to include CANNIBAL WOMEN IN THE ADVOCADO JUNGLE OF DEATH, a JF Lawton-directed Shannon Tweed vehicle. I still have the tape lying somewhere - I remember beginning to watch it, and stopping because I was falling asleep. I also couldn't find Michele Lupo's AFRICA EXPRESS (1975), some kind of "prequel" to Duccio Tessari's SAFARI EXPRESS (1976). I am under the strong impression that both movies were shot back-to-back but released separately, as they feature the same cast (down to the monkey !), and pretty much the same synopsis.

On top of this rather peculiar assignment - that I personally assigned to myself, that's the beauty of working with Mike White - I also have my debut reviews to write for Contamination, the new Montreal french language free quarterly magazine about genre cinema. That would include Kevin VanHook's DEATH ROW, a TV movie called DEAD & DEADER, with Dean Cain, and the recently released ANIMAL. Did I mention the end of my semester that's getting nearer ? So yeah, I might be burned out pretty soon, after all.

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The year it was made was unclear on the VHS sleeve of BABY LOVE, this demented Alastair Reid flick. The VHS release date was mentioned, as well as 1965 and 1974 for various copyrights. Turns out that it was made in 1968, making it almost more daring than Joël Séria's MAIS NE NOUS DÉLIVREZ PAS DU MAL. One thing's for sure - it couldn't be released nowadays, in any format.



It was jailbait Linda Hayden's first movie, and she was 15 at the time. She is also supposed to be 15 in the plot. And she's one fine-looking mama. The movie works pretty well at manipulating the viewer, trying to excite him with eroticism and then turning the wheels around to throw guilt in his face. Although her last serious role dates back to the BOYS FROM BRAZIL adaptation of Ira Levin's book by Franklin J. Schaffner, also starring Gregory Peck, she has been active in television series until '97, when she disappeared from the map. However, between BABY LOVE in '68 and THE BOYS... in '78, she has appeared in enough movies to keep you busy for a while.

The story is reminiscent of Pasolini's TEOREMA (released the same year, and loosely based on Nabokov's LOLITA) and of Max Pécas' LES MILLE ET UNE PERVERSIONS DE FÉLICIA (1975), in which Béatrice Harnois, as Félicia, fucks up a couple's life beyond repair by seducing them all. While I haven't yet seen TEOREMA - nor its 1993 remake SIX DEGREES OF SEPARATION, directed by Fred Schepisi and starring none else than... Will Smith, apparently inspired by a true story and a guy named David Hampton - I can safely assume that its themes are deeper than those of BABY LOVE, a rather unsuccessful attempt at showing teen skin with moral reasons.



Luci, quite litterally a young slut, loses her mother one grey afternoon, coming home from school to find her in the bath with sliced wrists. The suicide note asks her former lover, a middle class journalist called Robert (Keith Barron of 1976's AT THE EARTH CORE), to take care of Luci. Robert has a beautiful wife (Ann Lynn, who appeared in STRIP TEASE MURDER in 1961 and has done a lot of TV work since then) and a son, and they immediately adopt Luci as a member of the family. Luci, however, will soon use her tight body and innocent looks to seduce 'em all, and will eventually be a menace to their relationships.

The story is interesting enough, and it's funny to wait & see who will fall for Luci, and who will resist. It's also a decent enough portrait of the typical British middle class family, complete with heavy drinking and flacid sleazyness. It would feel like a TV movie if all the nudity was cut off, but then again, the subject matter is quite heavy and the flick is pretty daring for its time.

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I have finally fell victim to BON COP BAD COP. I resisted to its premiere at Fantasia last year, to its original theatrical release, and to the DVD. But when I saw that the monster had crawled its way to ICI's top 20 of the best made-in-Québec films ever, I almost fell off my chair. Either my flair was dead or something was up. I decided to check it out for myself.



Éric Canuel, the director, introduces the movie. He seems pretty proud. He mentions the extras, and then the Éric Lapointe-penned song "Tattoo", written specifically for the movie, whose video is also featured. My nausea started then. But rest assured, it didn't last long.

Apart from the first scene of the movie, which is filmed in such a shaking way that your eyes can't seem to focus - probably intentional, since it's about a guy waking up from some kind of drug-induced stupor while being tattooed in a dark room by a villain wearing a hockey mask - the rest is pretty flawless, from a technical point of view. Grim colors, lots of filters, and a gorgeous cinematography to booth. The movie itself is an attempt at creating the perfect bilingual buddy movie, while making the big bucks with two markets at once : english and french speaking canadians. I don't see how it could be relevant to anyone outside of Canada, because they wouldn't get 90% of the jokes.



David Bouchard (humorist turned comedian Patrick Huard) and Martin Ward (THE INSIDER'S Colm Feore) are two cops, from Quebec and Ontario respectively, who are reunited on a case when a victim is dropped from a helicopter and lands directly on the "Welcome to Ontario" sign. Since the body is split in two, the case is shared, so they reluctantly team up and try to find a weird killer who eliminates corporate players in the hockey industry.

I don't think that there's a real respect of police procedures here, as these two guys basically do what they want. They beat up suspects, burn down evidence, and basically behave like wild animals, resorting to cartoonesque violence that's worrysome in that kind of "family" entertainment. There is some sex and a lot of violence, and hockey jokes and references that many people won't get - including me. However, the players here are strong; HU$TLE's Sarain Boylan appears as Martin Ward's slutty sister; humorist Louis-José Houde plays a funny motormouth coroner; Pierre Lebeau an improbable police chief; Nanette Workman cameos as a ballet teacher; and finally the breath taking Lucie Laurier poses as Huard's ex wife, with which the lucky bastard still lives. The breast jokes aren't spared and we love it like that.



We can't say that time doesn't fly when watching this movie - after all, the rythm's been ameliorated by various cuts, and the team behind it all is comprised of seasoned pros. Éric Canuel has steadily turned out action-packed comedies and dramas since 2001 (LA LOI DU COCHON was his first full length feature) and Patrick Huard does more acting these days than stand up comedy, after debuting in 1997 in Claude Fournier's J'EN SUIS !. You knew you wouldn't find a fine intellectual analysis of the Ontario / Québec relationships when this movie was made, so why expect more ?

Shivering in the Sun

My itinerary to work has been screwed by heavy construction on Saint-Laurent. I am trying to go from Papineau to McGill College, on Sherbrooke all the way, and this stretch of road usually takes about 20 minutes to accomplish by bus, and 10 minutes when biking. These days, it's more like 30 minutes, because there's only one lane on Sherbrooke at the corner of the Main.



What's up, grey Montreal ? I haven't seen the sunshine since... I don't know when. I sleep in my living room these days, among plants and audio-visual equipment, and my plants are the only ones complaining. Oh, and my back hurts too. I thought Spring was imminent... how wrong was I. The snow that fell during the night + the strong winds aren't making my life any easier. On April 1st I plan on giving up traveling with the STM and using my bike, but its direction is screwed, and even if I have it repaired, will I be willing to jump on it every day if it's minus 10 and snowy all the time ?

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I feel like crap having to read Canadian magazines these days. In this month's Maisonneuve, there's a photographic report on a beach in Bangladesh where most of the world's oil tankers are dismantled. Dismantled by men in flip flops, with no security equipment and no proper training. And by writing "men", I'm being generous since children as young as 10 are also working on the premises. They die a lot, too, of course. And there's a picture of 16 years old Abdul Kashem, who lost his right arm at the elbow and his right leg at the knee when a large steel plate fell and hit him while he was working.



This week's MacLean's cover, meanwhile, features a soldier standing on one leg, with a cane, under the title "Coming Home", of course refering to the Afghanistan mission. Bombings, suicide missions and the numerous landmines buried everywhere are making ravages on the troops. And I think that losing a limb is one of my greatest phobias. Hence the nauseating effect that these pictures have on me. I remember stumbling upon a picture of a limbless girl on Rotten.com, back in the days. Someone had deposited her in front of a white wall and there she was, powerless, smiling at the camera, with no arms and no legs.

I could always close the browser, but the image would never again be erased from my memory.

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WHO KILLED MARY WHAT'S 'ER NAME ? That's a question as valid as any. And that's a question that Mickey (Red Buttons), an ex boxer with diabetes, asks himself when he gets out of the hospital and reads a small article about the killing of a Greenwich Village prostitute that nobody cares about. He'll start investigating about the crime and will soon implicate his own daughter in the affair. They'll go family-style to solve the mystery, and will encounter many unfriendly New York souls on their way to the truth.



Part of the seventies wave of movies with odd questions as titles, this 1971 noir film, directed by Ernest Pintoff (mainly a television director with credits in, among others, episodes of "Ellery Queen" and "The Dukes of Hazzard") left me with a strange impression. As if it was a children's movie with adult themes. The explanations are emphasized, there's a good-natured team of humorous do-gooders on the job, and lead Red Buttons is a former stand-up comic who does his best to let his redhead charms get in the way.

Bad acting is never too far, and the campy Malthus (played by Dick Anthony Williams, of THE MACK and SLAUGHTER'S BIG RIP-OFF fame) wins the medal of grotesque as the junkie leader of a sect of old ladies beating up prostitutes. Also worthy of mention is Mickey's daughter, played by the lovely Alice Playten, who would go on to become a National Lampoon regular. Also marketed as Death of a Hooker on the VHS market of the eighties, this one's a nice forgotten flick that has its merits, and that is actually more fun than burden.

*

FORMULA 51 is the classic case of a Hong Kong director coming to Hollywood to inject some visual flair and freshness to an action-packed thriller. Ronny Yu, best known for his entries in the classic American horror franchises (BRIDE OF CHUCKY in 1998, FREDDY VS JASON in 2003) and his punchy visual style, has worked on FEARLESS with Jet Li in 2006, and is on his way to direct a live action version of the manga BLOOD : THE LAST VAMPIRE.



This seldom seen blockbuster from 2001, shot in the UK, surfs on the trend of British gangster flicks and features a commentary on the modern drug scene. Samuel Jackson, a chemist, has come up with a drug that is 51 times more powerful than heroin, cocaine & ecstasy combined. It's not explained how you can socially behave (or even avoid to die) while being high on it, though. So everybody's interested in buying the formula from Sam. He wipes off his lab in L.A. during a drug meeting, but his fat-assed boss the Lizard (Meat Loaf) manages to survive, and send a cute contract killer (Emily Mortimer, the charming housewife of Woody Allen's MATCH POINT) after him. Jackson, meanwhile, travels to the UK to sell his formula and is greeted at the airport by a small time bloke called Felix DeSousa (hilariously played by Robert Carlyle). What follow is a ride through the usual imaginary landscapes of Hollywood, where the morals are those of a video game and the cartoonesque violence as unrealistic as shocking.



In Hollywood, where you can't see a nipple but showing buckets of blood is acceptable, the rules of the game are twisted. And so is this movie : it almost promotes drug use, in a weirdly hallucinating way. There is a scene where Sam Jackson, in the middle of a huge club, stands on a sub-woofer with his hands full of pills and throws them at an ecstatic crowd.

As doubtful as it is, in the end it's pretty entertaining, but equally forgettable.

*

A very similar movie in tone, Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor's CRANK (2006) goes one step further in the extreme. It is the cinematic equivalent of an electric shock to the testicles administered by a Suicide Girl in black stockings while being strapped to an ice cold waterbed while high on GHB.



Neveldine & Taylor are mainly music video artists, and it shows in the way they directed this joint. The action is efficient, straight to the point, and most surprisingly non stop. The basics are quite simple : Jason Staham plays Chev, a contract killer who has been poisoned by a chinese substance that will kill him if his heart beats at a normal speed for more than a few minutes. He learns this upon waking up, feeling like shit. He has less than an hour to live if he doesn't run on adrenaline. And all he wants to do is find out who poisoned him & why, and kill the responsibles.



It's the perfect excuse for action ! And it's quite funny to see Staham run around like crazy, drink Red Bull like it's water, and generally act like a sped-up madman on the lose. His advancing state of decrepitude is almost painful to see, and I'm pretty sure you know a few meth-heads who share a few similarities with his vein-poppin', animalistic behaviour. He starts a rampage in L.A. that will only stop with his death, if it ever occurs. He tries all sorts of things : drugs, fights, gunfights, high speed cruising in his sports car, screwing his girlfriend in public, etc... Amy Smart, playing his girlfriend, does everything she can to contradict her last name : she's the dumbest blonde you've seen in a long time. While running away from a gunfight, she thinks about her birth control pills; while her boyfriend breaks some arms and kills some mafia guys who are after him, she doesn't notice a thing and puts on lip gloss. She ain't so smart, but she's smoking hot.



Other players include Dwight Yoakam, posing as Staham's doctor, a corrupt and funny substance-abusing gambler who enjoys the company of hookers. Pretty much everybody else is cartoonish, from the latino gangsters to the mafia blokes chasing after the main man. I have yet to see a movie as spastic, where you can't even catch up your breath, and if it's not CRANK's only claim to fame, it's its best one for sure.

*

Michael Radford, after directing IL POSTINO in 1994, got lost in transit. I haven't yet seen his drama about L.A. strippers, DANCING AT THE BLUE IGUANA (2000), but I have just seen B. MONKEY and I am rather puzzled. It's a UK / Italy / USA co-production, and it's set in London.



It is the story of Alan (Jared Harris), a quiet schoolteacher, who falls in love at first sight with Beatrice (Asia Argento), an armed robber who also goes by the name of B. Monkey, when he sees her at the pub. He'll do everything he can to attract her attention, and they'll eventually start a fling. Beatrice's criminal friends, Bruno (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) and Paul (Rupert Everett), kind of get in the way of the relationship with their criminal connections, and soon it's no use hiding from the rabid mob bosses who are after them.

Funny there should be a "B" in the title, because this is a B movie, whatever its cast thinks about it. From the plot to the acting, everything is pretty average, and nothing we haven't seen before. I'll be honest : the main reason I sat through it is Asia. Since I was about 18 I have made plans to marry her and I'll never let go. To those of you, out there, who like her many charms, I have only one advice : see this movie.



Other than that, we get what's expected : Everett brooding, in a fashion almost similar to his role in Michele Soavi's 1994 masterpiece DELLAMORTE DELLAMORE; music straight out of the 90's that didn't really aged well (Portishead anybody ?), and an idyllic but cliché'd vision of the English countryside. It's not completely a waste of time, but it's close.

*

What would life be without Italian cinema ? Whenever you've had it with the unsubtle Hollywood marketing and various "hommages" that unshamefully steal from past oeuvres, you turn your head towards the seventies and you find something refreshing. This week, I have watched a seldom known cop thriller directed by Stelvio Massi, Squadra Volante, a movie that was recently released on DVD by No Shame under the title EMERGENCY SQUAD.



In it, Interpol inspector Tommaso Ravelli (Tomàs Milian) is still looking for his wife's killer after five years. She was hit by stray bullets fired by the Marseillese's (Gastone Moschin) machine gun. The Marseillese, meanwhile, hides with his crime buddies after a hit where they stole a big stash of Liras, killing a cop in the process. The criminals are trapped in an appartment and fight over small matters, but end up greedily killing each others. Ravalli is in the meantime getting closer to them...



The budget of this thriller appears modest, but the cinematography, script and actors all make up for it. The small italian towns through which the chases take place are all very charming. The Marseillese's buddies include Ray Lovelock as Rino, a marxist philosopher; Guido Leontini as Cranium, one of the most peculiar faces in Italian b-movies, and also one of its most annoying performers (he also appears in LA BANDA DEL GOBBO (1978), where Tomàs Milian performs a double role as two brothers); Mario Carotenuto, an omnipresent face in cop thrillers of the era, who strangely ressembles Jean Lapointe; and the always sexy Stefania Casini as the Marseillese's girlfriend.

Tomàs Milian seems rather nonchalant, walking through his scenes like a zombie, and it can disappoint; his looks are however as good as always and we can only interpret his apathy as "acting like a mournful guy". Stelvio Cipriani's music is funky, of course, but the best he's done. It was one of Stelvio Massi's first features and it's already worthy of mention; he would go on to direct a series of high quality cop thrillers until he completely lost his judgement, after a few motocross movies (!!!) starring Fabio testi at the end of the 70's.

I almost was a sex columnist

I got an email from a friend about a magazine I won't name looking for a new sex columnist. Aware of my researches in the "field" - chronicled on this blog during the summer of '05 - and my interest in getting a paying gig as a writer, she sent it to me, hoping I would apply. I did, and was contacted & asked to write a sample article about "performance". The instructions were vague, so I basically wrote what I felt like writing. I was later told that the editorial team absolutely wanted the sex columnist to be a girl, perhaps to stick to the usual practice of papers such as the Mirror and Hour. So here's the unpublished piece.



I might be a depraved, oversexed fiend, and an obsessed one-track mind loaded with testosterone, but at least I know how to perform. Sort of. Here’s a public confession : when I first initiate an intimate encounter with a new girl, I always have some trouble getting it up. And booze doesn’t help. It might be a pretty good panty remover, but vodka sure isn’t Viagra.

With performance often comes anxiety, and once it's there, you're screwed. Not your partner. Ironic that the thought of not performing so often prevents you from actually achieving something, isn't it ? An erection can be so ephemeral, so fragile, almost like a porn star candle in the wind. We all know what happens to the hardest studs once the camera starts rolling : they turn from steel to butter in a matter of seconds.



Far from porn, in the confort of your own bed, what could possibly make it difficult to use your sexual skills to their maximum effect ? Could it be the fear of what this new « partner » will tell her friends as soon as she walks out of your place the following morning ? The authentic eagerness to explore a new body ? Afraid of being judged unjustly, or of not getting a second chance ? With all the one-night stands and multiple sex partners of our current urbanity, I have to say the competition is fierce.

A local saying suggests that « if you can’t get laid in Montreal 15 minutes after getting out of your plane, there’s something wrong with you ». Does this saying encourage flirting with taxi drivers or engaging in bathroom sex with complete strangers at the Pierre-Elliot Trudeau airport ?

Peer pressure and modern legends often add up to the possible psychological burden you might find yourself faced with, should you be at the beginning of your sexual awakening. I remember my first few rounds of « making out », under a bridge in Shawinigan. Having dozed through most of my sex education courses at school, and never having seen any pornography before, I had no idea what a vagina looked like beyond the usually hairy pubis, and was left rubbing aimlessly, with the distress of a housewife trying to assemble an Ikea desk without looking at the instructions. Fast-forward a few years later and there I was, my cock in a girl’s mouth, unsure if I was supposed to warn her I was about to cum. The moral dilemma quite often turned in my head to the point that it made me lose my erection, which was always followed by tons of questions like « Am I this bad ? ».



I often asked myself the same question, after I lost my virginity in the dark of my living room, following an intercourse that lasted about 20 seconds. How can something so simple be so complicated ? Having sex doesn’t require a PhD. Once you know the basics, it shouldn’t take too long to improvise and learn the rest, no ?

But sex is almost a science, and being submitted to a new, blooming relationship is like passing a test. You might try to postpone the inevitable by pretending you’re not yet ready, or the sex can comme almost immediately, fueled by booze and hormones, and really suck. You can be surprised by the sudden compatibility, or try to get it over with while counting the stars. Your new partner can be eager & sleazy, or boring and inadventurous. It’s like throwing the dice, really. You never know which number you’ll be stuck with.



For some guys, wondering if a girl is clitoridian or vaginal takes away the fun. Others see it as a challenge and don’t want to know right away, like courageous explorers of the unknown. It’s a question of philosophy, I guess.

I wish I could say that performance anxiety often disappears with age and experience, but I’m way too young to make that assumption. It can happen to anybody, any time, and even the most confident individuals can be struck by lightning. We are not immune to insecurity, and obsessing over performance will not solve anything. There’s more to a relationship than animalistic copulation. Should it happen to you, relax : it’s just sex.

Six Fois Rien

Sans ordre particulier

-Le retour d'un front froid extrême coïncide chez moi avec une bronchite qui ne finit plus, un empoisonnement alimentaire qui me rend couramment plus faible que je ne l'ai jamais été, et mon zipper de manteau d'hiver qui a rendu l'âme hier soir dans l'autobus qui me ramenait chez moi. R.I.P. zip.



-Le plus surprenant dans la mort d'Henri Troyat, c'est d'apprendre qu'il n'était pas déjà mort !

-Même si je n'y mettrai vraisemblablement jamais les pieds, je suis bien content de savoir que c'est Jean Nouvel qui bâtira la nouvelle "succursale" du Louvre à Abu Dhabi, aux Émirats Arabes Unis.

-Quand j'étais môme, après une visite scolaire chez un apiculteur, chaque enfant a eu droit comme souvenir à un petit ourson en plastique contenant du miel. J'ai littéralement bu le mien, et il était vide quand l'autobus scolaire me ramena chez moi, malade comme un chien, et bien décidé à ne plus jamais ingérer de miel de ma vie.



-En Alaska, une controverse sévit présentement quant à la construction hypothétique de deux nouveaux ponts. Le congrès des États-Unis vient de sabrer dans leur financement. Le premier pont, le "Knik Arm Crossing", est en discussion depuis 1959. Le deuxième, situé dans le sud-est de l'état sur l'île de Gravina, relierait celle-ci à la ville de Ketchikan. Le pont desservirait... les 50 habitants du secteur.



-Sylvia Bourdon, star porno française des années '70 et reine de la provocation facile, serait devenue une activiste politique, "propagandiste de la monnaie unique" ayant milité pour l'adoption de l'Euro au sein de l'Union Européenne, et ce dès '88. Qu'est-elle devenue de nos jours ? Quiconque ayant entrepris la lecture de son autobiographie L'Amour est une Fête a maintenant le droit de ricaner en essayant de l'imaginer dans l'arène politique...