Année : 2004

At 2pm this afternoon, I met a fellow Yulblogger at the corner of Mont-Royal and St-Denis. We exchanged greetings, then he gave me the movie Takedown – based on the book about the arrest of hacker Kevin Mitnick – and we parted.

Because of poor test screenings, the movie was only released in France. I had been wanting to see it for months, without any luck. Thanks to a chance meeting at the last Yulblog, I was finally going to be able to see this controversial movie.

I came back home tonight (after seeing a great movie), and decided to do a bit of reading about Takedown to refresh my memory. That’s when I found out that the news came out yesterday that nearly 6 years after it was filmed, Takedown will finally be released in America as a DVD at the end of September. Talk about weird timing.

« The film languished without a US release date amid rumors of poor test screenings and a re-shot ending. Perhaps hoping to recoup some of their losses, Miramax finally released the movie to French theatres in March, 2000, as Cybertraque. It was generally panned by critics: a reviewer for the newspaper Le Monde noted the film’s problems in translating a virtual manhunt to the action-adventure genre. « Can the repeated image of faces sweating over keyboards renew the principles of the Hollywood thriller?, » the paper asked. »

I wonder why they decided to distribute the movie in America now? I’m dreaming there might be a current surge of interest in hacker movies…

Maintenant que j’ai deux v�hicules (auto et scooter) et que j’habite en dehors de l’�le de Montr�al, je ne prends presque plus le m�tro et �a me manque un peu.

Je pourrais toujours copier ce fichier audio sur un cd et le faire jouer dans la bagnole! La qualit� de l’enregistrement est �tonnante. On peut m�me entendre les gens bavarder en fran�ais.

Tiens maintenant que j’y pense, mon job de r�ve serait de faire la voix qui annonce les stations de m�tro: « Prochaine station, Mont-Royal ».

(lien trouv� chez Montreal City Weblog)

As I was waiting for a call that never came (the one during which the producer will give me feedback on the new version of my screenplay), I decided to read my aussie friend’s script, the one she sent me a week ago by e-mail. (We went to film school together in San Francisco. She now teaches film in Sydney.)

I’m sitting at my desk, reading away, while Spiff the cat is sleeping in the sun on the most comfortable chair in the room, when I discover that my friend has named one of the characters after me (same last name). I laughed out loud at the irony: I also gave her last name to a secondary character in my screenplay!

I wonder how our friendship will survive this: The character she named after me is a French canadian clairvoyant lesbian with a spooky side and the character I named after her is a macho small-time Mafioso with a bad sense of humour. I swear, her and I really do care very much about each other. We do!