JazzFest: For the Record

  

 

   A few days ago, within the Montreal Jazz festival, I had the opportunity to attend For the Record: Baz Luhrmann in Concert, a wonderfully entertaining musical tribute centering around four of the director's films: Strictly Ballroom (92) , Romeo + Juliet (96), Moulin Rouge! (01) and The Great Gatsby (13). And as a matter of fact, I also happened to see For the Record last year. At that time, their show joyfully celebrated the works of Quentin Tarantino.

   Baz Luhrmann is an Australian filmmaker known for often choosing great and tragic love stories, from the likes of Shakespeare and Fitzgerald, and transforming them into high-voltage cinema. Shoving into them as much jazzy music, lively colors and over-the-top acting as possible. Tarantino is also a post-modern director. He is mostly known for known for glamorizing violence and mixing genres. But it's his very inspired dialogues and original musical choices that earned him For the Record's attention.

   The troop is composed of about half a dozen costumed performers, coming all the way from Los Angeles. They deliver a well balanced mix of singing, dancing and acting. All while being accompanied by musicians placed at the back of the stage. Some are better dancers or singers than the others, but their parts in the shows are attributed accordingly.

  Similarities between the movies are used to switch from one set of characters to another, but often while keeping the same song. For instance, "Stuck in the Middle With You" is played out as a duet between a criminal and a sitting victim, covering scenes from both Reservoir Dogs (92) and Pulp Fiction (94) at the same time. And while most songs are very upbeat and meant to maintain a  cheerful atmosphere, some sequences lean a lot heavier on emotional content. In fact, I can recall being moved to the brink of tears by their rendering of "Over the Love" from Luhrmann's The Great Gatsby (13).

   Though I will admit I was a lot more familiar with Mr. Tarantino's filmography, I genuinely loved both shows, and I can't really say which was my favorite. One doesn't need to have seen all the films to appreciate the shows, they stand strong on their own. But their hard work seems to shine more if you really know where they're coming from.

    For the Record runs for about two hours, including a fifteen minutes intermission. The admission prices gravitate around $60. But it's really worth it.
   

   

Inside Out

   Ever since Toy Story (1995), Pixar has been the world's front-runner when it comes to digital animation. About once every one or two years for the past 20 years, the studio led in part by John Lasseter, releases a new film. Their worst are still enjoyable family entertainment, while their best are unquestionable masterpieces. After seeing it twice this week, I'm happy to say, that Inside Out falls into the second category. In fact, it might even be their finest work to date.

   The film was directed by Pete Docter, the genius behind Pixar's Up (2009) and Monster's Inc (2001). He had the idea watching his young daughter grow up... He asked himself what was going on inside her head...

   And so this film mostly takes place inside the head of an 11 year-old girl, Riley. The five beings in charge of her life are named after emotions: Joy (Amy Poehler), Sadness (Phyllis Smith), Fear (Bill Hader), Anger (Lewis Black) and Disgust (Mindy Kaling). Her memories are code-colored according to the emotion responsible, and she has about half a dozen of core-memories, which are the foundations of her interests in life.

   But on top of watching the crimes and misdemeanors of her emotions, we get to see their concrete impacts on the girl's life. She started growing up in Minnesota and everything was going all too well. But one day, her gets a new job, and the family moves to San Francisco. She has to leave her neighborhood and her friends, but she's mostly excited to start her new life. Of course, that's before Sadness gets in the way, and does a few crucial mistakes involving the core-memories that shatter Riley's happiness, leaving her on a downfall towards depression. And it's up to Joy to save Riley's well-being and stop her from acting on a senseless idea implanted by Anger....

   Joy's journey goes through all of Riley's mind. And most of the pleasure of watching this films is contemplating how its creators represented abstracts concepts. Her memories are stored in a maze with a shape that evokes the brain's convolutions. It's actually very well thought out, notice how the short term memories are transported into long term memories only while the girl is asleep... And her dreams are made in a Hollywood-like studio, with written scripts and sometimes talentless actors, so her inner companions react to nightmares the same way we do about scary movies. There's even a hilarious sequence involving Miss Unicorn, her mind's Marilyn Monroe.

   Perhaps children will be more appealed by it, but Pixar has proven many times before to have a way of giving the parents so many subtle winks, it's hard not to fall in love under it's charm no matter how old you are or what genre you're into. Younger children will be excited for these colorful characters to go on an adventure, while a grown-up could prize himself for catching a blink-and-you'll-miss-it reference to Roman Polanski's Chinatown. Everybody is a winner. Still, working on a project that is only conceptualized with the abstract is insanely hard. The film took more that five years to make, and demanded multiple rewrites and combinations of characters. The emotions were finally created based on specific shapes. For instance, Sadness's appearance is meant to resemble a star, while Fear looks like a raw nerve and so on.

   All that shows that Riley is powerless when it comes to her imagination or ambitions, which are fueled by her emotions. She acts like a soulless puppet, under the command of immature beings that live in her head. Twice in the movie, and always played out for comedy, we get to take a peek in her parent's mind. Even if mom and dad were not exactly on the same wavelength, I was surprised to see how well an adult's emotions are organized and working together as a team to attain a common goal. Maybe growing up is actually getting all the voices inside our head to say the same thing.

Insidious: Chapter 3

   The collaboration between director James Wan and screenwriter/actor Leigh Whannell is responsible for some of the most fertile horror flicks in recent memory. Their first, the blood-soaked Saw (2004), about a dying serial killer who preys on those ungrateful of being alive, spawned six sequels. Dead Silence (2007) was a disappointment, With Insidious (2011), they set  up a new franchise that has now recently become a trilogy. Surprisingly enough, this one is relatively bloodless, more akin to Paranormal Activity (2007) and The Exorcist (1973), it relies almost entirely on darkness and ghoulish figures crawling out of it to scare its audiences. Wan directed the first two films, but because of a scheduling conflict, Insidious: Chapter 3 became Leigh Whannell's first directorial effort.

    This time, Whannell sets the story a few years before the Lambert haunting and before Elise Rainier (Lin Shaye) was the strong and confident psychic we knew her to be. We follow the struggle of Quinn Brenner (Stephanie Scott), a high school senior and aspiring actress who lives with her father (Dermot Mulroney) and her younger brother (Tate Berney). Quinn has been trying to connect with her deceased mother ever since she died from breast cancer a little more than a year prior. That's when she asks for help from a recluse psychic with a familiar face, to us anyways. Living in her poorly lit house with her dog and the memories of her husband. Elise accepts to converse with Quinn for a moment, but quickly shuts her off and tells her she swore never to get back into that business, and for good reasons. She leaves her only with a warning: "If you call out to one of the dead, all of them can hear you."

   A malevolent entity in the shape of a man who can't breathe then starts to torment and terrify Quinn, and when Elise finally agrees to help, she has to face her own demons, literally. And Lin Shaye is then given a rarely layered role for an actress in a horror movie, going from an insecure and fearful hermit to a courageous and capable ghost hunter. She's definitely the most interesting character the trilogy had to offer us and giving her more room to shine was a very good decision. Her performance is the best thing about this movie.

   At one point in the film, Quinn is hit by a car, leaving her with two broken legs. She is then bound to a wheelchair. And her being unable to move or defend herself from her otherworldly assailant provide much of the tension. Film critic Christie Lemire pointed out the resemblance with Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window (1954), and she's right. All Quinn can do is watch and wait for terrible events to occur - just like us

   Whannell also drew inspiration from respected classics such as Poltergeist (1982) and The Shining (1980). But without forgetting what made the first two films so popular among it's target audience in order to give them what they wanted without necessarily repeating himself. And so every Insidious film is fundamentally different from the others while staying true to the characters and respecting the rules of the universe they're developing into. They are also loyal to the shadowy and unapologetic visual style James Wan first established with his cinematographer John R. Leonetti in the first Insidious. A trademark that can also be found all over Wan's excellent The Conjuring (2013), and it's mediocre spinoff Annabelle (2014), which was directed by Leonetti.

   That being said, imagine a scene that takes place in a haunted room, if it's from a horror film, the director will first try to convince you nothing is there. Yet he doesn't want you to know you're being shown the room, otherwise you might get suspicious. So he might try to distract you with something, it's often just characters talking casually. Then, you might be shown some specific parts of the room subconsciously one or two more times, but they will always look safe. Now your guard is down and before you know it, a shadow passes by. Add some loud eerie sound at that very moment and you've got yourself a jump scare. That's one of the most generic and overused scare formulas ever, and I can't think of any effective horror film that doesn't use it at least once. The problem is not using it as much as using it wrong because scares must be earned and remembered. For instance, a cat jumping out of a closet might make you jump for a second, but only out of plain reflex, there is no fear in that. On the other hand, the ghosts of murdered twin sisters pleading you to come play with them forever and ever and ever could leave a lingering sting.

   Some clever moments in the Insidious films, especially the first one, will lead you to think these filmmakers know this, but most of the time, you can tell in advance if a scene is played out for character development, or just to scare the living daylights out of you. And while great movies manage to do both at the same time, here it's often the second option.

 

   Whannell is known for adding chilling twists in his stories, and I believe they work well because they involve details that were hiding in plain sight all along. In Saw (2004), the character you assumed to be dead the entire time starts talking at the end. And look no further than Dead Silence (2007) to find the exact opposite. The Insidious films also have their share of twists and turns, but in a very interesting way, and because the three films work better when watched as a whole, they serve to make the other films even more horrifying you originally thought they were. Why? Oh, I wouldn't dare to tell...

    

The best photographs I brought back from Spain

On June 5, I went to Barcelona and to a few smaller cities nearby, discovering a part of the world that was still unknown to me. At that point, all I knew about the area was from one of Woody Allen's romantic movies... Armed with a camera for a solid nine days, I tried to capture my share of beauty from one of the most impressive cities on Earth. Back home, I went through nearly two thousand shots, selected a few dozens, improved them with Lightroom, and then chose the ten I felt were my proudest achievements. I listed them in chronological order... Enjoy!

Day 1: Smoking Alone

Motorbiking is one of the most popular means of transportation, so one must not be surprised to see a young lady holding a helmet, but it's the way she stands in the shadows, closing her lips on a cigarette that I found oddly beautiful. I never talked to her, though.

Day 2: Forever and Always

This one was taken during a wedding ceremony held at the Sagrat Cor, a Roman Catholic church on the top of Mount Tibidabo, in the city of Barcelona. The elderly couple united here in the same shadow happens to be the bride's parents. I like to think the car on the upper half represents both their tender past and their daughter's very near future.

Day 2: Funny How?

I came across these two seniors comfortably observing a game of pétanque not so far from the Arco de Triunfo. One of them struggled to hide a smile while the other wondered what in the hell was so funny. I'm sure I'll never know, and honestly, I don't need to.

Day 2: TRIPL3T

 

 The FC Barcelona won the Champions League Final, gloriously completing their sweep of the three major trophies in European soccer, the other two being the Lliga and the Copa. The joyous riot was intense, and I went straight into it to get a few shots. In the likes of 2 AM, these two gentlemen walked up to me and requested a picture together. The background is slightly blurry, but we can still see the smoke of the lit flares and one very enthusiastic (and very drunk) fan perched in a tree in the upper right corner. It was a night to be remembered.

Day 3: Standing Guard

The view from the entrance of the National Art Museum of Catalonia is absolutely magnificent. I took the blue and a lot of tourists out of it, leaving us with a sky and a city that look like they are slowly fading away in front of the observer.

 Day 4: Forbidden Access

This is a rock on the other side of the ten-feet stonewall separating Tossa de Mar's beach from the rest of the shore. To have the pleasure of contemplating, you have to, as you can probably guess, climb said stonewall, which still involves some degree of physical risk when you're not carrying a camera. But hell, it's worth it.

 Day 5: Rocking Gigolo

The most colorful man I've encountered in Europe was crooning rock songs in Park Guell and hitting on every woman he could see, and so without giving the shadow of a damn about their husbands. Between two "Yeahs" and a "Motherfucker", I gave him an Euro to show my appreciation and then seized the opportunity to immortalize him from up close. If I suspect he was not totally sober at the time our roads met, he surely was happy to be alive.

Day 7: Mountain Abbey

The Monastery of Montserrat was constructed a millennium ago and is peacefully resting high in the mountains. A visit through it blurs the line between pilgrimage and tourism. If you are willing to do so, there is a trail the the mountain to get to the top of it, which brings me to the next picture.

Day 7: Piece of Heaven

That's the only picture of myself on this list, which also means it's the only picture that I did not directly take. It was taken by my good friend Catherine, with whom I had to do a three hour hike through the mountain of Montserrat to get to this point.

Day 8: Maiden on the Beach

On the not-really-that-fade beach of Sitgès appeared an undressed beauty that caught my eye. It's always as if she was posing for me, I love it.

Introduction

Boris Lemontov:  Why do you want to dance? [Vicky thinks for a short while]
Victoria Page: Why do you want to live?
[Lermontov is suprised at the answer]
Boris Lemontov: Well I don't know exactly why, er, but I must.
Victoria Page: That's my answer too.

This is wonderful bit of dialogue was taken from Powell and Pressburger's The Red Shoes (1948). It speaks to me because because for some people, creating is as important as breathing. They are true artists, and I'm afraid our world would be unlivable without them. I look up to them, and even if I'm not always creating or admiring creations, I always wish that I was.

Personally, I enjoy a good dance as much as the next guy, but my passion is cinema. I read about it, I watch everything the medium has to offer, and someday, I intend on making a living out of my contributions to it's world. For the moment, I'm more of a student, and a photographer. Sometimes, I approach screenwriting and film criticism, but always with caution.


On this very experimental blog, you will be able to attain my thoughts on many films, some new releases as well as classics. I hope you find what you are looking for.



MG