MUSIC - Coldplay Concert (i.e. the greatest night ever)

My friends Jenny and Cecilia and I bought the tickets early in the year and after several months of waiting, the night was finally here. We arrived at Allianz Stadium about 2pm and there was already 200+ people waiting. We joined the queue and spent the next three and a half hours in the scorching sun. After several attempts of entertainment, from charades to eating, our patience was rewarded with an amazing spot near the stage:

and xylobands!

First up were The Pierces who were really good live. They played We Are Stars, Secret, You'll Be Mine and some other songs but not 3 Wishes which is my favourite song from them. Jenny hated them though ("WHY ARE THEY EVEN CALLED THE PIERCES?") but I thought they were pretty good. Except one of the guitar players was :| for the whole time. That was really distracting.

Next were the Temper Trap and they were great as well. I love love love love love Rabbit Hole and I'm so glad I got to hear it live, I can never get tired of that song.

Finally Coldplay came on and god damn they were amazing.

this being their first song last night, you can imagine how the rest of the show was like

I felt like a spoilt child at Christmas, so much happened during their performances.

In the first couple of songs, these crepe paper butterflies started shooting out and filled the whole stadium. For a few magical moments, the only thing you could see was this:

It was so beautiful, you cannot fathom how surprised I was when they first came out. The moshpit is seriously the best place to be.

Later on, these colourful giant balloon balls were released and bounced on top of the crowds. I managed to whack one towards the stage hehe.

The security guards had to pop them later though :(

There were so many lasers and fireworks and flashing lights. Honestly, I felt disappointed afterwards, not because of the concert itself, but because I had to get back my less vibrant reality. My favourite performances of the night would have to be Charlie Brown, Viva La Vida, Paradise, Fix You and Hurts Like Heaven.

This is definitely not my last Coldplay show. In the future, if you ever get the chance to go, don't hesitate. And get there early.

MUSIC - My HSC Playlist

Frank Ocean: (quite a lot of him actually)
Missing You So

Lost


Novacane


Swim Good


Calvin Harris ft. Example:
We’ll Be Coming Back


Psy:
Right Now


Florence and the Machine:
Howl

and now to actually get studying.

MOVIE - Les Amours Imaginaires (2010)

Les Amours Imaginaires (Heartbeats) is a French movie that I had been wanting to watch for the past year and finally had the pleasure of doing so after my exams. Directed, written, edited by Xavier Dolan, he plays the protagonist Francais, a young man that falls for the new guy in town, Nick, at the same time that his good friend Mary does.

That's pretty much it, plot-wise. However, the movie does not depict the conventional love triangle and some scenes were uncomfortable to watch. No, not because of the acting (I quite enjoyed the performances of Dolan and Monia Chokri who plays Mary), but how much the movie reminds you the embarrassment that almost comes hand in hand with infatuation.

The competition between Mary and Francis is never explicitly said, but the undercurrent sensations of jealousy and lust are prevalent and the fact that the protagonists are unaware of all this, of how all their emotions are blanketed across their faces for the world to see allows us to reflect on our past infatuations. The movie illustrates how such lust can consume us, influencing how we act, how we perceive the world and the relationships present in our lives.

Les Amours Imaginaires is gorgeous, of which can easily be mistaken as the stylized preteniousness of any conventional French film and I must admit that thought did cross my mind. However, Dolan in this interview, raises an interesting point:

"The film is about the way we magnify people when we’re in love -- walking down the street feeling like we’re floating, hence the slow motion, the music, the costumes, the colors. A lot of people said it was a case of style over substance, but being in love is often a case of style over substance."

I feel that this movie and its stylistic devices felt less awkward than it did for Dolan's first film J'ai tué ma mère and Les Amours Imaginaires was more fluid in general, however I found more depth within J'ai tué ma mère and thus was able to connect to it more. Nevertheless, both films are fantastic and I look forward to eventually watching Laurence Anyways.

(x)

MOVIE - Scene Stealing Speeches

When I like a movie, there's usually one exceptional scene or speech that stands out, as if the whole movie was just built up to that particular moment. Here are some examples:


"Say a bomb goes off in a marketplace, you know, detonated by some suicidal zealot who hates I dont know - you know, fruit or vegetables or local handicrafts - viscera and gobbets of flesh and wet hanks of hair and teeth and splinters of bone are just shooting through airborne sprays of blood like on those soft drink commercials where the lemon splices splash through the arc of soda in some slow-motion orgasm of what it means to be refreshing. And every time it happens, it gets less tragic, not more.... 

I mean, we're just.. we're just fucked beyond all measure."

• The New Tenants (2009)

“If you really want to do this with your life you have to believe that you’re necessary. And you are. People want to live like this in their cars and their big fucking houses that they can’t even pay for? Then you’re necessary. The only reason they all get to continue living like kings is because we’ve got our fingers on the scales in their favor. I take my hand off and the whole world gets really fucking fair really fucking quickly and nobody actually wants that. They say they do but they don’t. They want what we have to give them, but they also want to play innocent and pretend they have no idea where it came from. That’s more hypocrisy than I’m willing to swallow. Fuck them. Fuck normal people.”

• Margin Call (2011) [here]

"It wasn't just the baby that died that day. Something inside Sick Boy was lost and never returned. It seemed that he had no theory with which to explain a moment like this... nor did I. Our only response was to keep on going and 'fuck everything'. pile misery upon misery, heap it up on a spoon and dissolve it with a drop of bile, then squirt it into a stinking, puerile vein and do it all over again. Keep on going, getting up, going out, robbing, stealing, fucking people over. Propelling ourselves with longing towards the day that it would all go wrong, because no matter how much you stash, or how much you steal you never have enough. No matter how often you go out and rob and fuck people over, you always need to get up and do it all over again. "

• Trainspotting (1996)

"I ask this... If there should be an assassination, I would hope that five, ten, one hundred, a thousand would rise. I would like to see every gay lawyer, every gay architect come out - - If a bullet should enter my brain, let that bullet destroy every closet door... And that's all. I ask for the movement to continue. Because it's not about personal gain, not about ego, not about power... it's about the "us's" out there. Not only gays, but the Blacks, the Asians, the disabled, the seniors, the us's. Without hope, the us's give up - I know you cannot live on hope alone, but without it, life is not worth living. So you, and you, and you... You gotta give em' hope... you gotta give em' hope."

• Milk (2008)

Reading these makes me want to re-watch the movies again, but I don't have enough time to :(
I think what makes these excerpts so great is that they depict the real essence of the movie and by reading these, you're transported back into the movie without actually watching it. Movies can go by so quickly and so much within it can go unappreciated, so I suppose this blog post is a way for me to remember them.

Cannes Film Festival 2012

is happening at the moment! Oh how I wish to be watching a film now, but the HSC awaits me. Nevertheless, I've been watching some of the film trailers and I'm looking to forward to watching these one day:

Un certain regard

Laurence Anyways (no surprise there lol) - trailer

• I skimmed through this review, it's pretty mixed but I loved J'ai tué ma mère so I'm still going to check this out.

Antiviral - trailer

Mystery - trailer

I haven't had a chance to see the trailers of the ones in the competition yet, but hopefully I will soon. Also, Ewan McGregor is part of the jury this year! I'm looking forward to reading the results later on.

MUSIC - Movie Soundtrack Recommendations

Samskeyti - Sigur Rós (Mysterious Skin)

In context, this song is heartbreaking. Every time I listen to this, I remember exactly how I felt during the last scene of the movie. I don't listen to this much because I want to retain that feeling, I don't want it to diminish.

Johanna - Jamie Campbell Bower (Sweeney Todd)

Easily my favourite song from my favourite Tim Burton movie.

Born Slippy - Underworld (Trainspotting)

The tone this song sets in the final scene of Trainspotting is one of the main reasons why I really liked the movie so much. The film itself was great, but the ending was what stuck out to me at most. ("So why did I do it? I could offer a million answers - all false. The truth is that I'm a bad person. But, that's gonna change - I'm going to change.")

Man Or Muppet (The Muppets)

I had no idea that Jim Parsons was in The Muppets so this gave me a huge surprise. Needless to say, I was grinning the whole way through this song.

Hope you're having a good weekend!

MOVIE - Howl (2010)

Howl is an experimental film that combines both animation and cinema, portraying the life of poet Allen Ginsberg (played by James Franco) and the 1957 obscenity trial of his poem 'Howl'. I've had the film's IMDB page bookmarked for over a month and finding myself with time today, I decided to watch it.

Admittedly, I don't know much about Allen Ginsberg or his poems but subsequent to this film, I have a desire to enlighten myself and read Howl (of which a good portion of it was read and analysed in the movie). I think that my lack of understanding or knowledge about the Beat Generation impeded on my experience of watching Howl, a movie I enjoyed but have no intention of watching again.

There are a couple things that I especially liked, one of them being when Allen talks about prophecy:

“At the moment of composition you don’t necessarily know what it means; it comes to mean something later. After a year or two, the meaning becomes clear ... which takes time like a photograph developing slowly. What prophecy actually is, is not knowing whether the bomb will fall in 1942, it’s knowing and feeling something which someone knows and feels in a hundred years, and maybe articulating it in a hint that they will pick up on in a hundred years.”

And while he says this, he's looking at a painting and experiencing this while we, the audience, are viewing the film itself. So here, this idea of prophecy, that an emotion can transcend through different mediums and times, is displayed on various levels, not only with the character in a film, but with the actual audience of the film itself.

The courtroom scenes stand out to me, particularly Jon Hamm's character as a lawyer defending the literary validity of the poem.This to me was the most memorable part of the movie.

"The battle of censorship will not be finally settled by your honor’s decision, but you will either add to liberal-educated thinking, or by your decision you will add fuel to the fire of ignorance. Let there be light. Let there be honesty. Let there be no running from non-existent destroyers of morals. Let there be honest understanding."

With that, I'll end this blog post with the trailer for Howl, of which I watched after the movie.