STORY: That's One Way to Meet a (French) Movie Star - Part II

[Continued from I. Ooh La La in Egypt]

II. AND IF A FRENCH MOVIE PREMIERE WEREN'T ENOUGH 

Skip across southern France, through four wild days in Barcelona (and a story unto itself) and up to a rather small and no-nothing office in downtown Paris, France in June of 1997. The film distribution company was probably Polygram, I've deduced based on three minutes of internet research. It wasn't any great shakes of a space, but they had the posters up on the wall and our Frenchie friend worked there and she was sweet as ever and happy to see us, but terribly busy and very sorry because she had no time to hang out with us. She was, however, a woman of her word and gave us two tickets to the big premiere. The film was called Dobermann and it co-starred Monica Bellucci and Tcheky Karyo, who I was most excited about since I'd actually heard of him. He'd been in La Femme Nikita.

We were in and out of her Paris office in about nine minutes. She gave us the tickets and said her goodbye and apologized again, this time because she was so sorry not to have been able to score us wristbands for the after party. Suffice it to say this was more than OK to Jon and I who were only beginning to realize that this was real, and our luck. Going to the premiere was more than enough for us. We certainly didn't expect more. Still, she gave us her cell number and told us to call after the movie just in case she could get some wristbands. We said we would. We gave hugs and French kisses and very nearly skipped our way out of her office. Jon and I both. We were going to a movie premiere in Paris.

It didn't matter that I had come down with a cold from hell, or that our best outfits were short sleeve shirts tucked into khaki pants. We wore our hiking shoes because it was that or sandals. Still, I stuffed some Kleenex into my pockets, tucked shirt into khakis and off we went, literally walking up the red carpet, under a kind of tent like marquee outside the theatre one not especially hot June night in Paris.

Blame the head cold or the trip to Amsterdam a week later, but memory goes fuzzy around now. I like to think there were photographers and flashing bulbs. I recall Jon and I laughing as the bulbs stopped flashing when we walked up the red carpet. I recall me punching Jon in the arm not believing any of it was real. I recall sniffing hard through my nose so I wouldn't drip all over that red carpet.

But there we were, Jon, me and the who's who of Paris in their black-tie finery. It didn't matter. We were excited as hell. It was a great grand theatre and before the movie started the director and the stars came up on stage and gave a little speech, all in French. Again, no matter.

Then the film. In French, of course. No matter. Luckily the picture was all style and plenty of action. You really didn't need a huge linguistic entrance point to understand the story, that we could tell. Leather plus techno music plus guns equals cool. Get it. We got it. It was fun. We were hip. It was a premiere in Paris. OK so we kind of already knew before the film was done that this wasn't going to go down in history as the greatest film in French film history, but still.

We called our French friend after cause what the hell. I was actually sick enough to just want to go home, but, of course, as per our luck thus far she came through. She had the wristbands. She had someone meet us. (I don't actually remember the details of how we got the wristbands, but we did - ask Jon; it's all true.) The point: we were going to the after-party.

Live abroad, somewhere not home, and not Hollywood. Let's say Japan. When you are in another world it's all surreal, from the dirty to the pretty, from the poor to the rich. I tell you this because celebrity in an other world like that doesn't mean nearly so much.

A few years after our trip Jon would return to Paris to spend a year working there. Only then did he learn and relay back to me that the club where the after-party was held was one of the chicest in all Paris. At the time we probably took that as a given but it was all part of the whirlwind. Cause who the hell were we and how the hell was any of this happening to us?

To two Canadian boys on a fairly tight daily travel budget, far more exciting than the assumed chicness of the place and darkness of its ambience was that the food was all you can eat and the drink was all you can drink your face off. The sick loser of us two wasn't able to indulge quite as he might have liked in the latter. Still I managed to drink a little, Jon a lot and we did well with the eating.

I remember us first grabbing a table in this downstairs club. Jon got us drinks and we toasted each other and our good luck and that we couldn't believe this was real. Also, clearly we were now among the beautiful people. And at a party like that you can't help but look around a lot to see who has just come down the stairs. Cause who doesn't want to meet a movie star?

Which brings us to the greatest coup of the whole evening, when I went to line up for food at the buffet table. There were shrimp salads and cuts of beef (Jon's laughing as he reads this, knowing this is all to be part of my imagination since I actually have no memory of what was served - I can tell you it was impressive, and that there had to have been beef, there had to have been seafood). Either way it was all the fancy fancy you hope to eat for free at the after -party of a big slick French action movie. But more fun than the free drink or the free food was that it turned out I was in line to get mine behind the very star of the movie. I had not known him then, would only go on to see the now widely revered art-house film La Haine years later, and only very recently has Vincent Cassel became something of a known name around the world (and if you don't know his name: see Black Swan - he is the teacher).

As we scooped ourselves shrimp salads (or was it crab) and pierced us each slices of roast beef (or maybe beef tenderloin?) we got to chatting. I was barely twenty. He was barely thirty. At the time I thought I was going to be an actor and so got to asking him for advice. He was a sincerely nice guy, seemed to have all the time in the world for me and told me to keep at it.

I shrug as I admit to you that the conversation ran out soon after. I asked him a bit about how he came to be an actor and that kind of thing. He again was charming and never condescending to the cut of my khakis or the dirty laces of my hiking shoes. But, as often happens, if ever you've met a famous person, there's only so much that can be said. Eventually he went his way and I went mine, trying to ride out the night best I could, with a very runny nose and a friend who was enjoying much drink.

Within a few hours we were back at our hostel (the Three Ducks), back on budget and back on the trail for more adventure. Our French friend never fell for either of us, and Vincent Cassel and I didn't become the best of friends, but hell, at least we'd come home with a story.

The End.

STORY: That's One Way to Meet a (French) Movie Star - Part I

[Click here for The Introduction to the Movie Star Story.] 

I. OOH LA LA IN EGYPT

Jon had come to meet me in Israel, where I'd been living for four months. After doing a rapid highlights tour of the country, Jon and I agreed we both wanted to spend a few days in the north of Egypt, for the sake of saying we'd been to Africa, of course, but also because Egypt's north, much to the unfamiliar's surprise, also has some very beautiful and very affordable beaches. We'd go for just a few nights then back to Tel Aviv and from there to Greece and the rest of Europe.

To drive through the south of Israel and the north of Egypt is to drive through nothing but desert. Through the Negev in Israel, through the Sinai in Egypt. These people, the Jews of Israel and the Arabs of Egypt, who share literally the same formations of rock and sand,who eat such similar diets, who even share the same passion for throaty consonants, why oh why must they have such strife? But I digress. Let us resolve the conflict in the Middle East in a future post, shall we? Besides, this is nowhere near where the source of the conflict lies as the Egyptians and Israelis signed a peace treaty decades ago.

Anyway, on the back of camels across the Sinai desert we rode. I'm kidding. We rode no camels. I've once ever ridden a camel, on another trip to Israel, my first as an "adult," when I was sixteen. A boy need only ride a camel once. That very hard, very bumpy ride. Sat astraddle the bouncing was and I'm positive still is rather unpleasant. Need I say more? No, for Jon and I it was in so-called taxis that we rode from the Eilat/Taba border crossing. I thought it could get no worse than the aggressive and rather terrifying nature of the average Israeli driver. Then I hopped into the Egyptian taxi - taxi being a station wagon circa 1973 that you waited to squeeze as many tourists in as humanly possible.

When not petrified that we'd die, careering on two-lane highways round sharp bends at impossible speeds that forced us into oncoming traffic that we couldn't see coming on account of the sharp bloody bends, I did my best to take in the beauty of the desert mountains surrounding us. The Jewish kid forced to go to the Jewish day school, he can't help but think of Moses at times like this. For one, because he's close to death, but two because if the bible has it right, we were almost exactly where God was when he/she/it handed Moses the Ten Commandments. Of course, being barely twenty year old boys, a list of moral imperatives telling us what we must and must not do was slightly less appealing to Jon and I than snorkeling in clear green waters and meeting girls with good tans.

They were French, the girls with good tans were. Actually only one had a good tan. The other had the kind of pale white skin that will only burn in the sun (takes one to know one). Jon, who tans quite nicely, is the better looking of the two of us. I, in my defence, was the one more likely to be bold, or stupid, depending on the circumstance, and its result. My excuse for approaching mes nouveau amis involved either the need of a cigarette or sun tan lotion. Does it really matter? The point is they were happy to meet us for dinner that night. And neither Jon nor I could not believe our luck.

Jon married his wife a week before I married mine three summers ago. Jon also now also has a beautiful baby to go along with his beautiful wife and I hope that Jon will not kill me when I say that some thirteen years ago, on the beach in Dahab or was it Terrabin, we were both after the same girl, the one with the tan. We both vied for her attention that night by the Red Sea and while I like to think I "won," nobody slept with anybody that night. Or any other night. They were leaving the next morning. They also both had boyfriends. Or at least, the one Jon and I wanted did.

Also, although I got to sit next to her and chat with her long into the desert night, there wasn't really much chemistry between us. It was nice but not exciting, which was actually really ... nice. Just talking to a pretty French girl, the sound of the waves behind you. Nothing wrong with that, and we did have a love of movies in common. In fact, though she was only two years older than me, she'd already graduated uni and was now working for Universal or Paramount or one of the big Hollywood movie distribution houses. Or, at least, a French division of. I thought this was the coolest thing I'd ever heard. The painfully mundane nature of her sure to be grossly underpaying job never crossed my romantic mind. Why would it? I was barely twenty. I was in Egypt. She had a great tan.

Before we said our goodbyes (kissing French cheeks) she told me that if we were coming through Paris and the timing worked she might be able to get us tickets to a movie premiere.

Oh tra la la.

What?!

A movie premiere.

In Paris!

I was over the moon and as sure of our going to see a French premiere as I had been of Jon and I romancing the French girls (the Frenchies we called them). Jon was more skeptical. He'd believe it when it happened.

Nevertheless, not the type to to be dissuaded, one Egyptian taxi, an Israeli bus, an airplane, three Greek ferry rides and countless European trains later we were somewhere in Western Europe (the south of Italy, or Spain, maybe) when I called our French friend up and told her we were planning to arrive in Paris in a few weeks. I don't think Jon could believe that:
a) I had remembered to call; and
b) that I was calling (and thinking I'd get anywhere with this).

She was really sweet, happy to hear from me and truly disappointed as she explained that if only we could arrive a week earlier. There was but one premiere her company was showing that middle part of June of 1997. Could we not come a week earlier? Freaking inwardly and likely showing it all over my never poker face, I asked her if she could hold on a second, covering phone mouthpiece to rapid-fire explain the situation to Jon and positing the possibility that if we just changed our plans slightly, doing Amsterdam after Paris instead of before we would make this work. Jon was pretty shrug-casual about it. He said why not. Or probably why the fuck not. He said it cooler than I could have. This was important. We were barely twenty. It was critical to act cool and smoke many cigarettes and say fuck a lot.

I'd never be as cool as Jon, always finding the need to say things like:
Holy shit! We're going to see a movie premiere! In Paris!

[To Continue click And If a French Movie Premiere Weren't Enough]

STORY TIME: That's One Way to Meet a (French) Movie Star

THIS IS JUST THE INTRODUCTION

The only real trouble my old high school friend Jon and I had traveling our way across Western Europe when we were nineteen (aside from sharing the same name) was a single spat caused by a grumpy me, me being grumpy from lack off sleep, coming off yet another long train ride, this one overnight, and the inevitable overlong urban hike from train station to youth hostel after, the sun already high in the sky, our massive Mountain Equipment Coop packs on our backs helping to exponentially increase the temperature back there, where the pools were forming and sliding steady droplets down the base of our spines.

I want to say we were in Amsterdam at that point, but now you know why I have good reason not to remember so well. (All those museums, Mum.)

Like many, when I get tired I mumble. Over the course of the two months Jon and I travelled together, whenever I mumbled or, to be fair, when he was tired, Jon would say, 'Huh? as in what. I was never a big fan of being huh-ed and on this particular mumbly, grumbly morning the frequency with which Jon managed not to hear me and the general annoyance of the rudeness I perceived in the word just got to me. So after yet another, 'Huh?' as we walked down another endless sidewalk leading nowhere close to where it seemed we needed to go I threw it right back at him, mimicking him with it, going 'Huh?' and again, 'Huh? managing to make it pretty damn hostile. At which point Jon dropped pack from back and whatever he'd been shlepping in his hands. This, I thought, might really get ugly. He didn't punch me, though. He just said he’d had enough of my shit. The word fuck was used. He was tried of my grumpiness. I can be a grumpy bastard and so felt immediately wrong. Like so many who grump easily, I'm also a relatively excellent apologizer. And I was sorry and the fight was basically over after that.

But about that name thing.

Seriously. We felt pretty dumb. It wasn't just that we had the same name, but the fact that the notably (or at least usually) Jewish spelling of our name is in fact the short form for a full name neither of us felt comfortable using at that age, and the sixteen times a day that you meet someone new when you travel and the inevitable introductions that Jon and I grew to quietly dread:

-Jon, I’d say by way of introduction to our new roomate, train seat neighbour, or fellow bus #64 traveller to the Vatican (that detail I do, inexplicably, remember). 

-Hi! I’m So-and-So, So-and-So would say. 

-Jon too, Jon two would say.

-Oh. Ha ha ha, So-and-So would laugh. That’s so funny. Jon squared. That’s easy.

-Yeah. Ha ha ha, one of us Jons would fake laugh. The other was required to not so subtly roll their eyes.

Multiple times in multiple new cities arrived at we considered making up names but weren’t adventurous or courageous enough to stick with.

That, however, is not the story I want to tell. Cause the story I want to tell, well:

It'll start in Egypt.
And it'll end in Paris.
If our absolute best were khakis and hiking shoes,
how, you wonder, is it ever gonna get glamorous?

And how about that movie star?
Go here. 

Jonny's Journal Sundays #3 - Ie. the third post where Jon will expressly not write about books or movies

This time of year people across Japan are having parties. They're called bonenkai. They are the end of year parties you have with your workmates to celebrate, to de-stress, to be stupid or silly or gay. Not dissimilar to Christmas (or "holiday") parties we have on this side of the world, drinking is central to the whole game.

From a family of eaters rather than drinkers (ie. Jewish), I was skeptical and rather judgmental when I first saw the extent to which the Japanese salaryman would drink. In time though I came to feel the utter need each December to gorge myself on Japanese pub food and drink more draft Japanese lager (Kirin, if I had a choice) than I knew would be good for my head come breakfast the following day.

When we eat so much and drink so heavy, when we smoke, all these things, they are escape. Escape from difficulty, escape from ordinary, from boring. It seems most of our vices and addictions are about escaping the moment or, at least, making it more bearable. I'm always wishing I could drop a vice or two. The moral voice reminding me that what I'm doing is Wrong Wrong Wrong.

Vice can be anything: it can be cocaine and it can be coffee; it can be sex and it can be video games. I manage to have a small handful of vices, lucky me, but now more than two years returned from the Land of the Rising Sun to the Land of the Overeating, food takes the, yup, cake. As per every December in the history of my life, I have already gained a good five pounds, eating far too much of all I shouldn't. If it's filled with fat and sugar, or with fat and salt, or best of all with fat, sugar and salt (salted caramels anyone? or Starbucks' Salted Caramel Hot Chocolate?!) I'm in; I'm game. Carrots, apples, salad - these are all difficult things for me to swalllow at a time of year when all I want is greasy crap served with a big fat coke.

But I'm reminded of a teenage moment. My friend Allen and I. We were eighteen, maybe twenty. It doesn't matter. Just that we were not finished being teenagers and happy to stay up through much of the night talking about things that seemed terribly important at the time.

I'd been smoking in a daily and strictly habitual way since I was fifteen and had gotten Allen started that year or a year later (a real winning role model, I know). At least by then, say twenty, Allen had already quit, or so I thought, until that night when he pulled out a pack of cigarettes, DuMauriers, I'm sure. He'd started up again, he said sheepish like a little boy. I, a then smoker who, like all engagers in addictions of every kind, was gleeful at his return to my particular sphere of the dark side.

We were sitting outside the 7-11, our backs against the store, our butts on the cement, our feet pointing toward the empty parking space in front of us. There may have been slurpees involved. I don't get a visual of the snacking details, though a big bag of chips and many litres of pop would be fair guesses. What I do know was that we were smoking and talking and talking and smoking like we'd be young not-quite thugs (not close, let's be honest) forever.

At some point, probably after me droning on about girls for three hours, I asked Al,
-So what is it about smoking? Why the hell do we do this to ourselves?
-It's a social lubricant, he said. It makes it easy for people to get together, to bond.

I thought that was brilliant and share it with you now because it's December 12th. The days keep getting shorter, the nights longer, the wind colder. The first three times I tried writing this post I kept going at it with the preachy approach, all soapbox like. About the way we escape too much these days with all our distractions and  how sometimes we just need to face (kick at) the darkness. But it sounded preachy, not to mention that I fail at this continually. Darkness facing, I mean.Cake is just so much sweeter.

Feeling sure you have at least one vice you'd be willing to cop to, here's hoping you have a friend to share it with. Happy winter solstice all (and much love, if a little bitter envy, to my cousins in South Africa and Australia about to being their long hot summers). Cheers, kampai and le'chaim.

Danny Boyle's "127 Hours" - A Movie Both Fun(ny) and Smart

In my post about Haruki Murakami's Dance Dance Dance I spoke of how I love stories that move somewhere, literally. Go on a journey, take a train, a swim, a flight. It's what I most enjoy in story. The idea of being stuck, in this case, in a canyon for ninety minutes or 127 hours sounds like torture. I'm the kind of guy that needs to get up from the dinner table once in a while, stretch my legs, step out the front door. I was a smoker for a reason.

That in mind, I wasn't rushing to 127 Hours, wouldn't have gone in fact were it not for the great reviews.

They're well deserved for two reasons. Namely: Danny Boyle and James Franco.

How do you turn a true story that most already know the climax and ending to and churn out something entertaining?

Boyle

Danny Boyle's directorial feature film debut was the excellent and underappreciated Shallow Grave (1994; starring a very young and manic-wonderful Ewan McGregor). Appreciation on a much bigger scale came just two years later with Trainspotting. I'll also pause to mention 2002's 28 Days Later which has one of the coolest openings of any horror movie ever. But the big-time, the big bucks, the phone calls from celebrities begging to be in his next film came after 2008's Slumdog Millionaire, a fifteen million dollar movie that made ten times that in the US alone. (We'll gracefully mention the less that critically loved The Beach and  A Life Less Ordinary as a parenthetical side note - hey, even Spielberg has the occasional Hook-type piece of crap.)

Boyle is a lensman so good at blending music with visuals, with taking the sense-based and the kinetic and having that ebullient energy come across to his viewers that, shee-it, the guy could make solving math problems exciting.

Franco

James Franco. He's been all over the magazines lately. Then again IMDB has him listed in seven movies in 2010. Seven! For perspective, Tom Cruise was in one (and no I didn't see it). But back to Franco. Here's a guy who at thirty-two has already played James Dean, has been a profoundly riveting side character in a massively successful series of summer blockbusters (the Spiderman movies) and has played Sean Penn's lover in the excellent Milk. This guy gets around.

Top this off with the fact that he's got a book of short stories out (pisses me off, in the ugly, jealous way - can't you just keep your superstar A-list movie making career and give the publishing contracts to your Canadian fans), he's been working on about three separate Masters degrees (I'm not exaggerating) and is thinking about a PhD. No wonder they keep writing about the guy. 

But whatever his writing or academic talents, here is a fellow who can act, a guy who can go from jokey-silly-goofball to intense and dramatic in a single subtle shift of facial expression. There is a fierce intelligence there. Not of the chess and library kind exactly. Though the guy clearly reads! But it's something else. It's that best kind of intelligence an actor can have. A kind of ability to experience it all and show that experience in your face, in your body, out your nostrils! He is energy. He is interesting. He is, best of all, for us movie lovers, truly complex and thus ceaselessly riveting to watch.

Just hope he doesn't go too far, too fast.

Boyle and Franco together is good, really good. Worth an in-theatre view. True. See you.

Jonny's Journal Sunday Entry #2

It's cold in Canada now. Cold in Vancouver. Colder in Toronto. I'd hate to be in Edmonton, let's be honest. But at least tonight there's snow where I am. Fluffy white coming down under streetlight. Coming down fast and furious in bitter cold wind, but I don't mind. Especially not when I've hurried meself into a warm and welcoming apartment, the old school rad(iator) pumping more heat than is environmentally friendly, but that makes for my toes gone toasty. A warm duvet, a good hot chocolate. These things are nice. Like turtleneck sweaters. Like a partner to spoon in your bed, or your lack of bed since it broke. So a partner to spoon on your mattress on the plank on the floor. Who says student life ever has to end, says the guy sleeping on a mattress on the floor and working part-time at a bookstore.

Goodnight my friends.

A Book to Read and Probably Reread, Probably Because ....

Wading in Plotless Wonder: Percy Walker's The Moviegoer

There are generally 2 types of fiction readers: Those that want a good solid story in the plot sense, and those that are looking for something else.

The story lovers are often into epic tales. Harry Potter's stories would fit here, but so would most of Steinbeck's books (certainly the big ones). Those looking elsewhere, on the other hand, are suspicious of plot. They aren't sold on stories that wrap up so neatly at the end.

I, for one, like both types. Then again I'm a Gemini.  So I'm fucked.

The story lover in me loves East of Eden, The Fountainhead, A Fine Balance.

The other in me loves The God of Small Things, Haruki Murakami and The Catcher in the Rye.

All this to recommend Percy Walker's The Moviegoer. But only to that other kind of reader. Cause I'm not sure I have the foggiest notion what the book's about, and I only just finished reading it a couple weeks ago. And while not fully comprehending where you're following the protagonist or why can be mildly irritating, it's also what makes the book rather mystifying and pretty uniquely amazing.

Roger Ebert, the reviewer, once said that Citizen Kane is his all-time favourite film cause no matter how many times you watch it you can never quite solve the mystery of the film. I have a strong feeling I'll be rereading The Moviegoer in the near future, cause I have no idea, and the plot wasn't clear or with much purpose, and yet the meandering nature of the story, and the utterly lovely paragraphs of description that Walker gives, mmm... yeah, I could wade in those waters again.

Like nothing I've ever read.

Oh, and it won the National Book Award the year after it was published - 1962.
So I'm not totally alone on this.

Toronto on a Cold Night (is there any other kind?): New Photo by Mr. Parkal

Thanks to Ajeeth Parkal (again) for sharing this pic. The guy works on TV shows for a living but this moody photo of Toronto on a cold night could be right out of a movie I'd like to see.