Samedi, j’ai fait un rallye dans Paris. Un rallye c’est un peu comme une chasse au trésor où à chaque étape il faut résoudre une énigme pour aller à l’étape suivante. Plus on répond aux énigmes plus on avance et plus on gagne de points. Le gagnant n’étant pas l’équipe première arrivée mais l’équipe ayant le plus de points.

Cette année il y avait 6 équipes sur le terrain. La mienne, c’était la Bicolor Team, la meilleure évidemment : celle qui est arrivée dernière ! Parce que la Bicolor Team, c’est l’équipe de la bonne humeur et de la non prise de tête. C’est aussi l’équipe qui est partie du mauvais endroit, qui a tourné pendant 2h et à vraiment commencé son rallye à 14h20 très précisément. Et ça, ça n’a pas de prix !

Ce qui compte au final, c’est que nous avons passé une très bonne journée, entrecoupée de grosses crises de fou rire et de pauses « planteur » bien méritées, mais surtout l’association Pokanel a pu réunir les fonds dont elle avait besoin pour l’opération d’une petite fille là-bas à Madagascar. Eh oui, on en revient toujours à ça, des assoc’ qui ont besoin d’argent mais c’est quand bien plus fun de donner aussi un peu de soi dans la bonne humeur en plus d’avoir donné un chèque.

Le prochain rallye sera une chasse au trésor de nuit, aux alentours d’Halloween. Plus d’information à venir bientôt sur le blog de Pokanel.

Un swap, c’est un échange de colis sur un thème donné en suivant les règles imposées par l’organisatrice/teur. Dans ce cas, j’ai participé au swap Sherlock Holmes organisé par Filippa. Et t c’est avec Nasjuice que j’ai fait l’échange. Et franchement, elle ne s’est pas foutue de moi la bichette

Je n’avais pas menti, elle a déchiré ma binôme ! Des livres, des goodies, des bonbons qui piquent, un vrai régal pour les yeux ! Reprenons donc dans l’ordre :

- Des livres :

The Sign of Four, The Hound of the Baskerville, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle : dans des éditions flashy qui font pétiller les yeux;

The Case notes of Sherlock Holmes, Dr John Watson : un superbe ouvrage qui relate les cas racontés dans les livres avec les indices utilisés dans l’histoire : des lettres, des photos, des notes, c’est super chouette !

- Du manger :

des bonbons qui piquent, un truc de guedin ! Des bonbons inconnus de moi qui plus est, puisque alsaciens ! Évidemment, je suis accro mais c’est pas demain que j’en remangerai (pas la peine de préciser qu’ils n’ont pas durer j’imagine ? );

du chocolat noir, comme j’aime;

du thé dans une belle boîte aux couleurs britanniques (que j’ai oublié de photographier) (et que j’ai terminée au passage).

- Des goodies de folie ! :

des photos de sherlock BBC, des marque-pages à l’effigie des héros, un marque-page loupe (!), un flacon contenant des « gélules » en rappel de A Study in Pink, un bac glaçons en forme de… cervelle !, des stickers Baker Street, des affichettes « Keep calm and », des petites gommes aux couleurs british;

un portrait d’Irene Adler encadré et dessiné juste pour moi, une très jolie attention;

Les saisons 1 et 2 de Sherlock BBC en DVD;

La BO de la s1 de Sherlock BBC.

Et voilà ! Je crois n’avoir rien oublié. Merci beaucoup Nasjuice, tu t’es éclatée sur ce coup-là et ça a fait mouche : les paquets personnalisés avec des quotes de la série, dès l’ouverture du colis j’étais déjà séduite, et la suite n’a été qu’un enchaînement de Oh! et de Ah!

Les concerts se suivent et ne se ressemblent pas, après la musique actuelle suédoise, un peu de gros son américano-écossais. Il faut savoir varier le plaisirs Il y a 7 ans, dernière apparition du groupe, j’étais déjà à l’Olympia, et ce fut un de mes concerts les plus « costauds » puisque pour la première fois de ma vie j’ai dû demander à être évacuée de la fosse (environ au 2eme rang) : trop de monde, trop écrasée, trop chaud, j’ai faibli… Craignant de subir la même chose cette fois-ci, je m’étais mieux préparée afin de ne pas me sentir mal. Et ce concert  a été complétement différent !

Une fosse non pas calme mais « civilisée », un 2ème rang qui respirait, des fans hystériques mais pas trop, limite on aurait pu s’ennuyer ! Mais en fait, j’ai super apprécié, je me suis excitée sur les gros morceaux, comme les autres, mais dans l’ensemble, les gens étaient là pour voir le groupe, absent depuis si longtemps. Et les hommages rendus entre les morceaux reflètent bien l’ambiance générale de ce concert : à 3 reprises, si je ne m’abuse, Shirley a été interrompue avant son petit discours entre-titres et la salle entière hurlait sifflait et applaudissait, c’était fort, c’était beau et tous les membres du groupe étaient touchés.

La setlist était parfaite, les titres du nouvel album déboîtent en live, bref, un top concert

SETLIST:

1. Supervixen
2. Temptation Waits
3. Shut Your Mouth
4. Queer
5. Metal Heart
6. Stupid Girl
7. Why Do You Love Me
8. The World Is Not Enough
9. #1 Crush
10. Cherry Lips (Go Baby Go!)
11. Blood for Poppies
12. Battle In Me
13. Milk
14. Man On a Wire
15. I Think I’m Paranoid
16. Bad Boyfriend
17. Only Happy When It Rains
18. Push It
19. (Rappel)Automatic Systematic Habit
20. The Trick is to Keep Breathing
21. Vow

Me voilà donc embarquée à la Maroquinerie, autant dire le bout du monde depuis chez moi pour découvrir de la musique suédoise mais surtout revoir Frida Hyvö nen sur scène. Frida je l’aime, Frida elle pop, Frida, elle wizz et Frida, elle a une cape dorée sur scène. Aussi, elle chante bien et le piano lui sied plutôt pas mal.

La soirée à commencé avec 3 demoiselles réunies sous le nom de Promise & the Monster. Je pourrais faire de très mauvais jeux de mots sur ce nom par rapport à ce que j’ai vu hier, mais je ne le ferai pas. Disons simplement que ça n’était pas mauvais, mais c’était chiant… Une chanteuse à la jolie voix cristalline, du xylophone, de la flûte traversière, je me suis vue au milieu d’une clairière près d’un lac d’où s’envoleraient majestueusement quelques cygnes blancs, les jeunes filles évaporées assises en rond, des biches dans le fond pour le tenir compagnie… Je me suis donc ennuyée ferme, c’est dommage.

Alerte photos pourries,  en intérieur mon appareil montre toutes ses faiblesses, de plus par respect pour les personnes sur scène, je prends des photos sans flash. C’est un peu artistique du coup…

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Après ce moment de repos est venu le tour de Jennie Abrahamson et là tout de suite on se réveille. J’ai beaucoup aimé, j’ai même reconnu une chanson, je suis incapable de savoir d’où je la connais. En tout cas, c’est une belle découverte. Et puis son clavier est rouge, je l’aime donc encore plus.

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Et enfin le piano qui dormait en fond de scène est avancé, il est 22h, Frida va arriver. Et c’était bien, avec des chansons du nouvel album que je ne connais pas encore, des chansons d’avant qu’on aime, du rappel en veux-tu en voilà,  des histoires en chansons, des chansons en histoire, tout ce que j’aime chez Frida, avec une pointe de mélancolie en plus qui ne m’a pas déplu.

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If there was one thing I really did not think I would do when I woke up this morning, it IS Easter egg hunting in London. But that is one of the magical things a city like London can provide. Actually, I almost didn’t leave home today, and then I changed my mind and decided to go research for my upcoming blog posts about the best burgers in London ( coming up real soon! ). Unfortunately, I arrived two minutes too late at the restaurant : the kitchen had just closed, and would not reopen for hours. Since I was in the vicinity of Borough Market and with the sun shining like never before, I decided to just walk and enjoy myself basking in the Spring.

Reaching the Southbank side of Hungerford Bridge ( also called Golden Jubilee Bridges for your erudition ), I noticed Eggs a go-go and took a few pictures. In the moments that followed, I remembered I already had a photograph from the giant egg placed in Canary Wharf ( I took it two weeks ago ), and I am not exactly sure why but somewhere in my head an idea took shape : I was going to challenge myself and find as many of these eggs as humanly possible between then ( 3:30pm ) and sunset ( 7:30pm ).

I gave myself four hours and a couple of rules : I was only allowed to walk ( no buses, no Tube ) and could not use ANY help ( no asking people, no internet connection, no map ). After that I started walking fast. I am used to walking and I enjoy going through London in that way A LOT, but I must admit that the last hour felt like the world was ending. Not only were my legs getting tired, but the sunlight was expiring and my phone’s battery was running out ( and without the phone, no pictures ). As Fate would have it, the phone died while I was taking a picture of the very last egg I found.

Still, I am proud. I hurt, but I am proud. 55 eggs. Considering that there are altogether about 200 eggs scattered in London, I found more than 1/4 of them in four hours on my own with a phone for pics and legs to carry me. Patting my shoulder. I won’t bother trying to find the other eggs, and sadly I am not yet sufficiently wealthy to buy one of these ( if you are interested, the eggs are on auction ), but I am happy : for a few hours I actually felt a buzz in my head, the same kind of rush I feel when I gamble money on coin machines ( I am a good boy, I am! ). It was a great chase playing against the clock, looking up and down at every turn in every street of the city. I kind of felt like a child again, back to the times where I was hunting the house for chocolates, something like 20 years ago… how refreshing to do this again, and how exciting to do it in the great playground that are the sunny streets of London.

What a great way to make the city a whole new kind of exciting for a limited period of time! Plus, if you do wish to play your money on this egg-hunt ( you can win £100,000, but you have to text a password for each egg found ), know that the money will go to a charity for children.

I am going to say this again : I LOVE LONDON.

Next time a hunt like this is organised in London, I WILL fully participate. And win. That’s a promise. But in the meantime, you can enjoy all the pictures from this crazy chase. xx

Parfois, Paris se retrouve à Londres (et vice et versa), pour visiter, pour jouer à la fangirl, pardon, aller au théâtre, ou profiter de la ville, tout simplement. La semaine dernière je trainais donc mes bottes dans cette ville que j’aime tant et dont il me reste encore tant à découvrir ! Ce séjour s’est retrouvé sous le signe de la  verdure, un peu par hasard, mais ce fut délicieux. Holland Park, Kensington, Regent’s Park (il n’y a pas de photos de ces  2 derniers, parfois je préfère juste profiter que mitrailler) et bien sûr une visite à ma future demeure secondaire (tertiaire ? celle de mes vieux jours ? celle de mes vieux rêves ?) le long de Regent’s Canal, près de Camden, un lieu que j’affectionne tout particulièrement.

Today has been a great day. Today I won a draw to attend an advance screening of The Cabin in the Woods at Vue Leicester Square, courtesy of Film4FrightFest. An email was waiting in my inbox with the good news, unfortunately you had to reply before 1pm to confirm your ticket and I only got around to checking my emails a couple of hours too late. Picture me close to tears. Thankfully, a pleading email did the trick and I did get to attend the screening, which is very lucky given that the room was completely full. So thank you FrightFest : this isn’t news but I love you.

I’ll try to be as non-spoilerific as possible in my review and will stay relatively vague as to what happens, but obviously if you wish to stay a virgin regarding this movie you may want to avoid reading any further. Just know that this movie is awesome and easily ranks in my top 10 of the best horror movies ever made. That may be the excitement speaking – the day has been a roller-coaster – but still : very good movie. Please go see it when it comes out. It’s a movie worth the theatre ticket ( says the guy who hasn’t paid to see the movie ).

Before getting to it, I am going to give you some quick background so you can have an idea of where I am coming from while reading my review. That might make my opinions clearer somehow. I am a huge Buffy fan ( for those of you who may wonder where that comes from, Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard, the two masterminds behind The Cabin in the Woods, both worked on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the former as the show’s creator as well as a writer and director throughout the series seven seasons, the latter as a writer of some of the best episodes from the series’ final year ).

I have hardly ever been a fan of anything in my life, but I am a huge Buffy fan. There were SMG posters all over my bedroom. I collected the Inkworks trading cards, and the folders to put them in. Only last year I impersonated Buffy for a quick photo session in a small graveyard by a church in the middle of a lost English village. I have a bedbug prop from Tom Lenk’s show. Yeah, that kind of nut.

That said, I am not a Joss Whedon fanboy although I greatly admire the man. I loved Buffy, Angel and Firefly but disliked Doctor  Horrible and didn’t care at all for Dollhouse. Whedon is a very intelligent artist who tackle challenging notions and vital topics with the hope to help change things in our often unfair and sometimes cruel society, and he is someone who shows incredible respect for his viewers – as opposed to someone like say, JJ Abrams who seems to create tv shows for the sole purpose of moving his career forward ( seriously, I will never forgive the man for letting Alias die a slow miserable mediodre death for three years after two truly amazing first seasons… that IS disrespect for the viewer, but who cares, it got him MI3, yay him *sarcasm* ).

I also happen to be a horror movie enthusiast. From Hammer movies to Alien, from something as incredible as The Haunting ( 1963 of course ) to something as poor as Catacombs ( THAT twist! ), from something as gory as the Saw series to the metafest of Scream, I thoroughly enjoy the genre. Except maybe Damned By Dawn, that one is shameful. I find horror movies entertaining and more often than not I find them challenging. They show you monsters, but most of the time they make you think about how human beings have actually become the true monsters. It’s a good lesson to learn and accept before we can hope to change things for the better.

So. After MUCH ADO, let’s talk about this.

Five friends leave town and head for a cousin’s retreat in the woods. Shit finds them. Nothing original here so far it would seem according to my description, but don’t be fooled and instead be ready for some mind-blowing action : « Shit finds them » never got THAT clever and THAT twisted.

The first thing I have to say regarding this movie is that it more than completely satisfied my needs as a Buffy/horror movie geek. Seriously, there are Buffy callbacks all over the place. I swear there is a moment when I was expecting the camera to turn around to reveal Rudolf Martin… ( you’ll understand when you see the movie ). I dare anyone who has seen Buffy to watch this movie without thinking once, twice, up to a bagazillion times about the Initiative. You will never watch « Primeval » ( Season 4 ) again after this. In fact, The Cabin in the Woods felt like Joss Whedon was so happy to finally have a decent budget to play with that he basically remade Buffy season 4 as a horror movie.

It’s actually funny if you think that season 4 is considered to be a very uneven Buffy season by fans and critics alike with the real problem being the handling of The Initiative plot, a military operation based under campus that never looked serious in the context of the show. It did not feel real in that world. Soldiers and researchers were acting and talking like buffoons, and it made the whole season quite muddy. Here in The Cabin in the Woods the « military underground » part of the movie ( not spoiling much here, there are many hints of this in the trailer ) is dealt with very seriously, the special effects are fantastic, and when the shit hits the fan in the last act, it feels VERY real, VERY scary, VERY beaucoup de crazy, and above all VERY entertaining.

There is also A LOT of meta. Although the characters ( good acting by the way, Kristen Connolly is perfect and the rest of the cast does a decent job ) are not at all self-aware, the movie itself is beating the Scream series to a pulp in regards to references to horror, although none of these references are actually acknowledged as such in the dialogue. There are obvious nods to horror landmarks like Hellraiser, Evil Dead, Cube and The japanese Ring/Grudge series, but at several points in the movie you will be hit by something like ten to thirty references IN THE SAME SHOT. What is even better in what is already heaven for a horror nerd is that in the middle of all this assimilation of the horror genre happening in this one movie, Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard still manage to create their own thing. It’s like they decided to include E-V-E-R-Y-T-H-I-N-G horror had ever done before and have the movie digest it all in order to rise above it. The Cabin in the Woods really is a re-invention of the genre, and in this re-invention they also create stunning monster designs which you will not forget anytime soon.

In the end this movie is not the comedy/parody of horror that you think it’s going to be after the first 30 minutes or by looking at the trailer. The moment it turns into real horror is so sudden it almost feels completely out of context for a few seconds, because you have been used to jokes and humour for quite a few scenes by then. That is before you realise the movie has finally started : the tone and humour weren’t there to parody horror, they were there to take your guard down while offsetting its own upcoming violence. By mixing the tones so dramatically in its second half hour, the movie helps you prepare for anything and everything. Which is a good thing, because anything and everything does happen.

If I had to sum this up in quite a short paragraph, I’d say this : The Cabin in the Woods is a horror movie that stands proudly on its own, that has its own very satisfying mythology. It acknowledges everything that has been done in horror before and throws this « everything » in a story that has its own direction. A very Joss Whedon direction. There isn’t a twist, there are many. This is the most entertaining movie I have seen in a while. This is a clever movie, a very clever movie, a great future horror classic that requires many, many viewings. Which means I will pay for my ticket when it comes out in the UK on April 13th.

Also, and I will conclude on this, when I already thought this movie was the best thing ever after ninety minutes and nearing its end, the ultimate horror reference unexpectedly showed up, and that’s when I knew I was in love with this movie. Possibly with Joss Whedon. After that, there was another Buffy moment – seriously I swear, they took the whole line from « The Gift » without changing a word – followed by a very pleasing misanthropic one.

Roll credits.

Got home.

Wrote this.

Please go and see this movie. And thank me for the advice.

Ok, so now that I have seen a movie that gets released next month, and hoping to ride on my good fortune, I have to ask… where is the draw for MDNA?

Je succombe moi aussi, et je poste la vidéo de My Little Paris, elle a déjà tourné partout, mais  c’est vrai qu’elle est très juste. Et puis la meilleure façon de raconter Paris c’est encore de laisser parler les Parisiens.  (et ça m’apprendra à négliger ce blog, j’aurais pu poster ça bien avant)

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