I was reading my regular Tuesday newspaper when I stumbled onto a really bizarre story that took place last Saturday night. I tried to find the article in English but apparently no Canadian newspapers picked up on this weird story. It deals with the film Baise Moi (Rape Me), which was presented at Cannes and the Toronto Film Festival. It's a controversial French film that deals with two bank robbing women who use men for sex then violently kills them. The two lead actresses of the film are former French Porn stars. The film is sure to be rated NC-17 when it comes out in The States. So here's the bizarre story of what happened last Saturday night:
Film Terrorism
Tuesday, October 18, 2000
MONTREAL (Journal De Montreal) - Indignant at what he saw on the screen of the Parisien Cinema, where he was watching the film Rape Me (Baise Moi), an individual erupted in the projection room to seize the reel and then fled, after multiple threats to those around him.
This occurred last Saturday night around 10:45, and the person responsible for these acts is still the focus of a police investigation.
The forty people present in Screening room 3 of the Parisien cinema on Sainte-Catherine St. will never see the complete film. The film abruptly stopped 5 minutes before the end.
The scatter-brained individual, in addition to yelling threats, left the projectionist stupefied by mutilating the invaluable equipment to seize the reel.
"It is the first time that such an incident has ever occurred on our premises, " says Isabelle Dessureault, spokesman of Famous Players, which presented this film in four theaters of the greater Montreal area. "It is even more surprising, when you know that accessing the projection booth is not an easy thing."
With the film print in hand, the suspect, still indignant, made a scene in the lobby before jumping on his bicycle to escape on Sainte-Catherine St. Employees followed him as he escaped. They found part of the film shredded in a nearby parking lot.
"He threatened to put a bomb in the cinema if we ever were to play this film again, " said Armand Lafond from Remstar, distributor of Rape Me for the province of Quebec.
"He's an Arabic-speaking person who did not like to see the acts of vengeance that the women in the film do to men", adds Mr. Lafond.
Distributed in Quebec by Remstar, Rape Me was scheduled to leave theatres this week. But that does not have anything to do with the incident of last Saturday night, according to Ms. Dessureault.
(Translated into English from an article by Bertrand Desjardins in Le Journal de Montreal.)
Bedazzled Review
Sometime ago, I had the pleasure of reading the shooting draft script of Bedazzled and it made me laugh so hard, you cannot imagine. The test screening results surprised me a little along with the fact that the film's release was pushed back two months. Maybe they fixed the problems because 'Q-Brick' sure seem to have liked this movie:
"When a picture reaches cult status, as it has for fans of the 1967 comedy classic, Bedazzled, the director is likely to be treading on holy ground by attempting a re-make. But I think the late Peter Cook who co-wrote and co-starred in the original with Dudley Moore would have found such a notion pretty silly. Cook loved to make fun of pretentiousness but even more, he enjoyed tweaking the nose of organized religion and the hypocrisy he saw in Britain's churches.
Director Harold Ramis has retained the original's thematic elements...a nebbish loser, Elliot Richards (Brendan Fraser) is granted a series of wishes by the devil (Elizabeth Hurley). All Elliot wants is to simply have Alison, the girl of his dreams (Frances O'Connor) but damned if the wishes don't keep misfiring. Rather than using the film's plot to send up the religious establishment, Ramis and co-writers, Larry Gelbart and Peter Tolan have chosen to make a broader, audience-friendly series of comedy sketches. Thanks to the casting of Brendan Fraser, they get away with it.
In Brendan Fraser, Hollywood has found their all-purpose, multi-task talent who is so right for this kind of film. His goofy appeal and ambidextrous acting gifts are what make Bedazzled work. As his Elliot stumbles from one wish to the next, Fraser is allowed to inhabit a parade of comically diverse types. And he does so with obvious delight and lots of scene-stealing energy. He throws such much comic brilliance at the audience that some of it's bound to stick. You will probably have a couple of sequences that are your favorites, mine were the strutting Colombian drug lord and the ferociously ignorant NBA star.
I was really surprised by Elizabeth Hurley as the seductive Princess of Darkness. The woman has genuine screen presence. One is caused to wonder why Hurley wasted so much time leading around her ex-boyfriend instead of acting. She can make a living doing this.
Australian actress Frances O'Connor is also impressive on two counts. She has the thankless task of playing romantic straight man to Elliot's antics. O'Connor textures each of her 'Alison's' making them very real and just out of Elliot's reach. She also deftly handles a variety of accents never betraying her Aussie roots. And just a side note.... am I the only person who thinks that she eerily resembles 70's actress Jessica Harper (female lead of Phantom of the Paradise)?
The new version lacks the wry subversiveness of the original and it has an uneven, hurried feel to it. I wonder if Ramis and his film editor Craig Herring wouldn't have liked a little more time in front of the Avid to smooth out the film's rough edges. Though the new Bedazzled is a departure from the '67 version both in style and intent, I don't want to complain too loudly. Along with the rest of the audience, I DID have a good time. There are parts of this picture that are absolutely laugh-out-loud. So enjoy."
(Review provided by 'Q-Brick'.)
Stay tuned...
That's all folks...
DeadPool
