Babysitter (2022) dir. Monia Chokri

Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person (Vampire humaniste cherche suicidaire consentant, dir. Ariane Louis-Seize) x VIFF 2023.

This is a surprisingly fresh take on teen vampires in the form of a low-key Quebecois coming-of-age indie comedy about trying to consume human blood and find victims ethically. Sara Montpetit and Félix-Antoine Bénard star as a 68-year-old undead woman in the body of a teenage girl and a depressed high schooler with suicidal tendencies. They form a sweet but strange bond as they try to earnestly help each other achieve their unconventional goals in life. Its exploration of the more mundane but annoying parts of vampiric life makes for an altogether humorous endeavour.

Screened at the 2023 Vancouver International Film Festival as part of the Altered States series and screening again at the VIFF Centre from Oct. 21–30.

someone who speaks french better than i do needs to add subtitles to some version of moroccan gigolos

watched this (on a bargain DVD) and added it to my "films not shown" blogpost:

Fabuleuses (Fabulous) - Canada 2019, Mélanie Charbonneau. Fabulous film about three young women, one is a successful influencer, one wants to be her, and one wants to be a professional cellist and objects to the whole influencer nonsense. I was very grateful that the young cellist plays the prelude of the fourth suite, not the one of the first which you'll here in every other movie that has ever included a cello. I only understood 10% of the dialogues in français québécois (some characters were more understandable than others), so may have to watch it again to see if I can decipher a bit more. I think part of the problem is that it is both heavily coloured by English and invaded by English vocab, but as both the English and the French part of the speech sound the same to me I struggle to keep up with the switches.

Cinéma : une augmentation des films jeunesse québécois par année

Les producteurs demandent de l’aide au gouvernement afin qu’au moins quatre films jeunesse québécois sortent au cinéma chaque année. En effet, cela permettrait de les mettre en compétition avec les œuvres d’animation américaines.

Crédit Photo : igorovsyannykov de Pixabay

Congratulations on 500 followers, babe! It's awesome that you're doing another ficlet fest. Here's my prompt:

Time: 1:30 a.m.

Location: Hollywood

Character: Alicia Zimmermann

Song lyrics: "Another name goes up in lights; you wonder if you'll make it out alive" from "The Lucky One" by Taylor Swift

Rating: T

HI BABE <3 I love this prompt, and I hope you like where it led me! There's never enough Alicia content, so I was really excited for the excuse to write some. 💜🦗

read the rest of the ficlets here!

🏒🏒🏒🏒

1:30am, hollywood

Alone in the back of a taxi, finally hidden from the view of the cameras, Alicia lets her head fall back against the headrest with a heavy sigh. 

It’s been a long time since award shows were fun, since after parties were anything other than an obligation pushed onto her shoulders by her agent. Tonight had been especially harrowing: enough meaningless small talk to make her want to tear her hair out, not enough food, and toast after drunken, incomprehensible toast. It was hard to believe that Alicia had ever liked the crush of people; that she had, at one point, craved this part of being an actress. More and more, her perfect idea of a late night features a warm body next to hers, a cup of chamomile, and a delightfully trashy romance novel—not backhanded compliments and uncomfortable shoes. 

Above all, Alicia is tired.

Tired of the run around, tired of the hustle, tired of spineless directors and co-stars that didn’t bother to learn their lines. Tired of constantly getting her picture taken, tired of being hounded by the press, tired of being critiqued on everything from her outfit to her choice of project. Tired of the endless travel, tired of remote filming locations, tired of never being in the same time zone as her apartment for more than a week at a time. There just has to be a way for her to have more control over her career. Surely she’s paid her dues by now.

At least her taxi driver isn’t trying to make conversation, or ask for an autograph—either option was liable to send Alicia over the edge tonight. She frowns as they pass a billboard for a new movie, starring some girl she’s never heard of. Blown up to larger than life, it’s impossible to miss the excitement in the starlet’s eyes, the yearning for more. Alicia feels tears gathering in the corner of her eye and looks away hurriedly—when was the last time she had felt like that?

She still loves acting, is the thing. Still loves throwing herself into a character, really connecting with their desires and fears, breathing life into someone who would otherwise just be words on a page. Still loves becoming someone new. But everything else that comes along with being an actress makes her want to scream.

Finally at her hotel, Alicia pays the driver and makes it up to her room in a haze of exhaustion and general torpor. She changes into pajamas and brushes her teeth on autopilot. It's only as she’s reaching over to turn the bedside light off when she notices the red blinking light of the answering machine. 

It’s probably her assistant. Maybe her agent. Both of them have been in constant contact on this press tour, keeping her in the loop on travel changes and adding more “quick appearances” to her schedule that end up being several hours and completely draining. But if she doesn’t check it, she’ll miss something important. With a defeated groan she checks the machine, tension leaching out of her when a man’s voice comes from the speakers instead of any of her all-female team’s strident tones. 

Hi, euh, hello, Alicia? This is Bob Zimmermann, we met last week at that terrible premiere?

Alicia actually finds herself grinning as Bob’s Quebecois accent and stumbling words spill out into her hotel room, his genuinely hesitant and careful words wrapping around her like a blanket. She didn’t know him from Adam at the premiere party, but a shared eye-roll during the director’s meandering thank you speech prompted her to wander over once it was done. The warmth in his brown eyes was reason enough to keep talking to him after introducing herself.

The message rambles a bit about how awful the movie was (he’s not wrong, it positively reeked of studio interference) and a bit about how his hockey team did this week before he clears his throat. The change in tone has her listening with bated breath. 

I know timing is going to be an issue for both of us, but I really enjoyed talking to you last week, and I’d love to take you to dinner and get to know you sometime— Sometime soon, eh?

He leaves the number of his hotel for the next two days and his pager number before saying goodbye. Still grinning, Alicia scribbles down both numbers and turns off the machine. She turns the light out and settles into bed with his voice echoing in her head and thinks. 

A single, unlooked-for message, the possibility of a date with an interesting man, and Alicia feels lighter. And more determined than ever to make some career changes — she wants to love her job again, just as much as Bob loves hockey. And she’s been around long enough, has enough clout, that she really thinks she can change her job to suit her desires. 

Resolved to sit down with her agent as soon as she’s in the same city again, she closes her eyes, replaying Bob's message in her mind as she drifts into sleep. 

Bonne nuit, Alicia.

This is an interview with Viggo in Danish, from 2023. (being Swedish, I understand most of it. And Viggo speaks Danish slowly, making it a LOT easier to understand). It's an interview about his film Falling, mostly, and about his parents getting old and sick.

I find it fascinating to just watch him; he's 65 years old, he looks great and he kind of still has the body language of little boy. A little shy, very thoughtful, very natural and quite adorable. If you're allowed to call a 65 yr old man adorable? Well, now I just did anyway. :)

Viggo is also a very good example of how different you can seem depending on what language you speak. I feel like he speaks and acts differently while speaking English, Spanish, Danish or French. I just listened to a podcast (at around 24 mins) with him in French and he mentioned himself that he does act differently depending on the language and that even his gestures can change. I think he speaks quite fast in Spanish, a lot faster than in both English and Danish. Spanish just is that kind of language, I guess? Temperamental. While Danish isn't. I guess he speaks French slowly, since it's not a language he speaks a 100 % (but still so very beautifully, and with a slight Quebecois tint).

Speaking a language is not just using words, after all, it's also a cultural expression. I feel that Viggo's talents for acting, also makes it easier for him to learn different languages and how you behave while speaking them. But he also said that he works quite hard at learning languages. I'm in awe of his language skills.

Viggo really is an endlessly fascinating, brilliant, beautiful, lovely man.

What are the Christmas holidays for if not for being cosy and snug and reading a book? It has been a very pleasant December for me, and I've really gotten to indulge my love of reading winter themed books in winter

The Bellybuttons

A quebecois bande desinee I’ve heard about and decided to pick up the first book of — I read this one in English. It was pretty amusing! At times quite funny as it does a gag-a-page format pretty well, but also at times deeply frustrating since the series is predominantly about Karine, who is a sweet, somewhat awkward teenaged girl, and the rather nasty popular girls she’s “friends” with. Karine acts as a foil and a general punching bag for most of the book. It does make her standing up for herself at the end of the album deeply satisfying. A worthwhile read if you enjoyed Mean Girls and would like that in a comic format.

Bookshops & Bonedust

A prequel to Legends & Lattes that I’ve been very eagerly anticipating! In this book Viv is just beginning her career as a mercenary but has been laidlow by a injury. Forced to stay behind in a seaside town while her leg heals, she gradually gets drawn into the lives of the various town residents, including a beleaguered ratkin who’s desperately trying to keep her little bookshop afloat. Add in a dash of baked goods and necromantic plots, and it’s a really fun read! If you haven’t read the original yet, I highly recommend both it and this one.

A Christmas Story

I love this movie and only just realized it was originally based off a series of radio stories that were adapted into print. If you are unfamiliar with the Christmas film, it follows the Parker family through a series of mundane misadventures on the build up to Christmas, including Ralphie’s desperate need to get a Red Ryder Carbine Action 200-shot Range Model air rifle for Christmas.

This book, A Christmas Story, collects a handful of stories from two different anthologies that were used when creating the iconic movie. It’s fun how many lines are word-for-word from the original stories; they’re all hilarious and the language is just fantastic. Hard to put down.

Every Heart a Doorway

A fascinating short story about a boarding school for the “chosen ones” who have returned from whatever magical world drew them in and then spat them back out. It’s a school of children who have learnt to survive in strange worlds built around strange, incomprehensible rules and who must now learn to re-adapt to the mundane world. They are all desperate to get back, to find their own doorways, and struggle with being trapped back in a world that doesn’t understand them. Things only get worse when the murders start.

Hogfather

One of my favourite Discworld novels. On the Discworld, it’s a boar-themed entity known as the Hogfather that travels around the world delivering presents to boys and girls on Hogwatchnight. Except this year something has happened. The Hogfather is nowhere to be found, and someone else has been forced to take his place. With Death now attempting to deliver holiday cheer, and his granddaughter reluctantly drawn into unravelling a plot on the Hogfather’s life, this is easily one of my favourite “Christmas” books to read. And the ending always hits me like a ton of bricks, it makes me really emotionally. Highly recommend the read, even if you’ve never touched a Discworld book before. As long as you like high fantasy and can suspend disbelief, it’s easy to jump into.

The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane

So, this book absolutely destroyed me. Would recommend. I love this author, and this novel did not disappoint. It’s about a hand-crafted, specially commissioned, porcelain rabbit doll named Edward Tulane. Edward Tulane, with his exquisite wardrobe and delicate features, is beautiful and precious and he knows it. He doesn’t care anything for the little girl who loves him and resents her family who patronizes him. Everything changes for Edward Tulane though when, during a sea voyage, he is thrown overboard and finds himself separated from his girl and lost to the black silence of the ocean floor…

Moominland Midwinter

Magical and chilling, this book really understands and articulates the other side of the winter season. The longest nights of the year, the darkness, the cold, the way the entire world sleeps and changes and becomes strange.

Moomins always hibernate through the winter, but this year little Moomintroll wakes up early. He finds himself completely alone in the middle of winter while his family sleeps around him. He’s forced to venture forth and learn about this dark, strange season, to find the friends he can and come to terms with the harsh strangeness of winter while waiting for the sun to return.

A Mouse Called Miika

A very middling book. There is a mouse who lives in the North Pole. He likes cheese. He has a very unpleasant friend. He gets magical powers of some sort or another. He tries to steal a very important cheese. I genuinely don’t remember the plot well enough to go in any more detail. If you’re desperate to read something Christmassy, it’s not bad, but I wouldn’t bother seeking it out.

Beezus and Ramona // Ramona and her Mother

You know, I’ve never in my life read a Ramona book. I’ve read and enjoyed other Beverly Cleary books, but never the Ramona series. I ended up reading Ramona and her Mother first and afterwards I picked up Beezus and Ramona just to see how the series began. I can… see why it’s popular, especially for the time. It’s a fun, silly, slice-of-life series about the wacky hijinks of Ramona Quimby, a rambunctious kindergartener. I can really, genuinely say though that this is not a series made for me. Ramona and her Mother I found agonizingly dull, with only a few interesting moments interspersed. Beezus and Ramona was a bit more interesting, but they made Ramona so incredibly annoying that I could hardly get through it. Maybe part of the blame lies in me listening to an audiobook for that one and the narrator using the single most grating voice I have eve heard in my life, but my god it drove me nuts. 

System Collapse

New Murderbot book! New Murderbot book!! Woohoo! If you haven’t read the Murderbot series, go start on All Systems Red and continue from there, you won’t regret it! The series follows a synthetic being known as a Security Unit — an artificial construct that isn’t meant to be self-aware or self-governing, except that they are. When Murderbot succeeds in hacking its governor module and gaining full control of itself, it briefly considers going on a murderous rampage… until it realizes it’s much more enjoyable to just download a lot of soap operas into its brain and get on with things. In this new book, Murderbot continues on a mission with ART’s crew and those from Preservation. Things are heating up as Barish-Estranza attempts to take control of the planet, new SecUnits have been deployed, and there may or may not be a rampant alien plague. Worse yet, something is wrong with Murderbot, related to [REDACTED]. If it can’t figure out how to fix what’s wrong soon, its humans may soon be in peril.

Heaven Official's Blessing v5

I continue to read Heaven Official’s Blessing! I continue to love it! The desperate scramble towards Mount Tonglu has been a blast. I’m getting Very Concerned about what may or may not be the return of the White Calamity though… whatever is going on and whatever it is, everything seems like it’s heating up to some serious bad news in the next book.

Twelve Doctors of Christmas

An alright anthology of Christmas-themed Doctor Who stories. If you want something Christmassy and you want Doctor Who, this delivers. It’s festive, light, and has a few pretty good stories in it. However I wouldn’t say it was my favourite Doctor Who short story anthology by a long shot. Time Lord Fairy Tales or 13 Doctors 13 Stories are both more impressive story collections imho

most realistic quebecois detective in film

On Tuesday night (18 April) a gang of us assembled to watch the film Saint-Narcisse (2020) by Canada’s perverse and provocative queercore (or should that be homocore?) renaissance man Bruce LaBruce. (The Guardian reviewer summarizes it as “a sluttily sacrilegious story of incest, witches and wayward monks” – so something for everyone!). The event was billed as “An Evening with Bruce LaBruce” and LaBruce himself (wearing an ultra-desirable Kenneth Anger / Lucifer Rising bomber jacket) was in attendance. He called Saint-Narcisse his homage to 1970s Quebecois cinema, which explains the gorgeous retro tones of orange, brown and gold. I also spotted echoes of Derek Jarman, Pasolini, Marianne Faithfull in Girl on a Motorcycle – and The Patty Duke Show! Pictured: Pal, myself and Fenella. (Bruce LaBruce used to be active on Tumblr. I suspect he left in disgust after @staff‘s homophobic “Adult Content” purge of December 2018!). 

17: Alanis Obomsawin // Bush Lady

Bush Lady Alanis Obomsawin 1985, Radio Canada (Bandcamp)

A review of the well-meaning things I meant to say about Alanis Obomsawin’s Bush Lady

“No matter how accomplished Obomsawin’s sole LP, 1988’s cult classic Bush Lady may be, it’s naturally overshadowed by her extensive work as a documentary filmmaker. Her searing Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance (available to stream for free from the National Film Board), covering the 1990 Oka standoff between local Indigenous land defenders, Quebec police, and the Canadian military, is a landmark. Her films are celebrated, broadcast on public television, and taught in schools.”

1.5/5—Book report quality. This is a not-very-slick way of admitting the only one of her movies I’ve seen in her most famous one. Also saying a director’s films are “celebrated, broadcast on public television, and taught in schools” in Canada sounds a lot like saying not many people have actually seen them.

“Her roots as a singer-songwriter predate her filmmaking, however. By the late 1950s, when she was in her twenties, she was performing and writing original songs in the Waban-Aki/Abenaki language, English, and French, but her recordings are sporadic prior to cutting this set at the CBC in the mid-1980s. The material was scantly issued at the time, and it probably found its widest listenership after a 2018 reissue by Constellation Records.”

2/5—Solid enough exposition, though it does beg the question why I didn’t just paste in the press release from the label.

“Bush Lady finds her singing and playing a handheld frame drum alongside a Quebecois chamber quartet. I was drawn to the record by ‘Odana,’ a melancholy fable about resisting colonial land grabs written in Abenaki by a tribal elder in the 1800s, which Obomsawin has presumably set to music of her own devising. Arranger Jean Vanasse and the quartet, likely trying to equate the song to a mode they were more familiar with, approach it like Nelson Riddle on Sinatra’s Only the Lonely. Nocturnal strings and woodwinds ripple around Obomsawin’s satiny vocal, lending the tragic folk tale the style of a blue ballad in an urban theatre.”

2.5/5—It took a while, but finally something about the music, an opinion even!

“There may be a bit of a feint in opening an album called Bush Lady with such a high-thread-count piece. ‘Odana’ lulls the non-Abenaki-speaking listener in with its soothingly westernized take on ‘Indian music,’ the lyrics’ message about stolen land masked by the unfamiliar tongue.”

2/5—Translation: “I am sort of embarrassed that the song I like best on this protest album is the one that sounds kind of like Nat King Cole, so I’ll change the subject to rhetoric.”

“But as the music segues into the theatrical 13-minute title track, its politics become explicit even to an English speaker. Obomsawin chants ritualistically over the insistent thump of her frame drum, interspersed with semi-spoken dialogue. She acts out characters: leering white men who harass and prey upon young Native girls; scornful, gossiping housewives; and finally the ‘Bush Lady’ herself, asking a white woman to care for her blonde mixed race child for fear it will be rejected by her own people. The recurring chant serves as a Greek chorus, a mournful counterpoint to the acrid sarcasm of the dialogue. The song undergoes a dramatic shift at the end when the fallen woman is visited by the spirit by her kokum (grandmother), who ushers her into paradise, accompanied by fluttering strings.”

3/5—Decent exegesis. But, dammit man, do you enjoy it or don't you?

“The track is a surprisingly good fit with reissuing label Constellation’s own catalogue. Like their cohort of Godspeed You! Black Emperor-adjacent projects, ‘Bush Lady’ is expansive and confrontational, fusing funereal cello and violin with blunt agitprop. When it works, it has a palpable force. Like agitprop though, the song isn’t subtle fare, and I have to admit the melodramatic conclusion (which is a harp or two away from a caricature of Christian heaven) feels a bit Wizard of Oz to me. I also don’t have a lot to say about the nearly side-length ‘Théo,’ a second drum-driven story song, this one sung in French. It is even more in a spoken word style than ‘Bush Lady,’ and as an Anglophone I can’t glean much despite another magnetic Obomsawin vocal.”

2.5/5—Reader, that must be one comfortable fence.

“I’m glad to have this reissue of Bush Lady in my collection for its transfixing A-side, and its significant overall historical interest. It’s well worth a listen for the curious.”

Overall review rating: 2.2142857142857142857142857142857/5, or 5 CLICK THE LINK TO WATCH HER FILMS FOR FREEs out of 5.

watching origami in french is so much better than watching it with subtitles

Rules: Make a new post. No cheating! You’re starring in a movie with the last person you saved in your camera roll. The last song you've listened to is the title. Who/what is it?

I was tagged by: @thetightwhiteshirt (THANK YOU FOR TAGGING ME???)

So it's La Zarra (iconique Quebecois queen, flipping the bird on national telly) and the film title is 'Inextinguishable/Undying' in Finnish.

Sums up my music tastes lately tbh (runs away and hides)

Tagging: @daughterofoctoberr @ex0rin @yasisworld

I hate how ppl interpret Jack and Holster's relationship. They are friends and they're also both absolutely bitches to each other because they know how to push each other's buttons and they have poor restraint bc its turned into a competition (and they're both ridiculously competitive). Holster is Jack's type except he's obnoxious on purpose bc its funny. Jack is Holster's type but that doesn't matter bc Jack chirps him too much. Holster likes to think he has a thick skin, but Jack proves him wrong and he hates it. He'd do almost anything for Jack, but that's also true of all his friends (with the exception of Ransom, for whom its not an almost). He and Ransom canonically filmed Jack's ass without permission, and Jack was probably like "what is wrong with you two" and left it at that. R&H are connoisseurs of Jack x Parse fanfic, likely unaware that there was anything to that relationship for real. Jack will never let Holster live down whatever happened with Esther, but only bc Holster has moved on in every way except for this chirping. Holster can never tell if Jack is affected by his chirps bc Holster is awful at reading expressions and Jack doesn't emote as obviously as other people do. They hooked up once but both of them have forgotten abt it somehow. Holster is aware that he's Jack's type, but it doesn't matter bc they aren't friends (even though they are). Jack has never flirted with Holster on purpose and Holster would never flirt with Jack directly bc its easier to talk about his ass to other people than to admit he cares about Jack. He sometimes dreams about dating Jack and wakes up irrationally angry at him. Jack sometimes dreams about Holster but it's always competitive. One time he had a dream where they were contestants on Jeopardy, but he woke up before finding out who won and spent the whole morning smugly proud of his history knowledge and annoyed at Holster's pop culture knowledge. Jack would probably have hooked up with Holster for the first time again if he'd asked, but Holster is proud of himself for never having tried to hook up, even if he sometimes thinks about how he probably wouldn't know how Jack's body fits against his, or the texture of jack's skin, or how long Jack lasts. He dismisses these thoughts because he would remember sleeping with Jack, right? How could someone forget that? Holster once told Jack that if they were trapped in a timeloop, Jack could rely on him. Jack has no idea what the hell that means. Ransom is the only person who knows about the JackHoltz hookup. Shitty probably thought it happened more than once, but is completely wrong about when it would have been. Jack and Holster originally thought theyd bond over being jewish, but Jack speaks hebrew in a quebecois accent and Holster can't stand it. Alicia Zimmermann sometimes asks Jack about the "nice jewish boy on the team" and Jack hasn't put together that she means Holster. Holster is a better singer than Bitty but his taste in music is a lot of showtunes, and Jack doesn't understand. Jack once punched Holster in the nose by accident and Holster was low-key turned on by it. Jack didn't learn most of his teammates' first names until a couple months into his sophomore year, but Holster is the only one who knows. Holster thinks Jack should dress a little more slutty, but he's only told this to Bitty (who agreed wholeheartedly). Ever since Jack proposed to Bitty, Holster exclusively calls him Mr. Bitty bc he knows how much Jack loves tying his identity to the man he loves

Non-Anglo Movies You Should Watch 1/∞: J’ai tué ma mère (2009; I Killed My Mother), dir. Xavier Dolan

Country: Canada

Language: French

Genre: Coming-of-Age Drama, Romance

Summary: A loosely autobiographical film about Hubert Minel, a 16-year-old, gay Quebecois teen at odds with his single mother Chantale. The movie beautifully captures the anxieties of a mother-son relationship.