MIDNIGHT POUTINE
June 26, 2010
Blue Sunshine: Le centre psychotronique de Montréal
Vendredi passé, je suis allé à la première de « Cannibal Girls » et à la grande ouverture de Blue-Sunshine et du Miskatonic insitute. Le film d'horreur canadien met en vedette Eugene Levy dans son premier rôle au grand écran et n'est réalisé par nul autre qu'Ivan Reitman (qui sera par la suite connu pour son box-office « Ghostbusters »). « Cannibal Girls » fut fort en hémoglobine et en humour et aura sans nul doute charmé l'audience et mit le coup d'envoi à un établissement qui a désormais un futur prometteur.
Certes, l'équipe du Blue-Sunshine doit faire avec les moyens du bord, leur salle de projection ne pouvant accueillir qu'un nombre restreint de spectateurs, puisqu'il se trouve dans le salon de la résidence des organisateurs. Toutefois, cette contrainte aura donnera un effet convivial aux représentations et aux autres événements.
Et d'autres événements il y en aura. Le calendrier sur le site Internet du centre est déjà plein à craquer. Leur collaboration plus que naturelle avec le festival Fantasia semble y être pour quelque chose, mais c'est aussi à cause du Miskatonic institute que tant d'activités se trouvent au programme.
Le Miskatonic est un centre pour l'éducation cinématographique de la jeune génération (entre 14 et 29 ans) afin de l'initier au genre d'horreur. Des ateliers sont disponibles au centre, mais sont aussi offerts partout au Canada sur demande.
Ainsi, expositions, vernissages, musique et, bien sûr, projection de films du style Grindhouse et de série B seront au programme. - Emmanuel Delacour
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HOUR
June 24, 2010
Cereal killer
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|
Blue Sunshine opens with a Canadian cult classic, and awesome
snacks
Good news: The bright lights of Montreal have lured
yet another DIY movie luminary to our fair city. Kier-La Janisse, film
writer and freelance film-fest programmer extraordinaire, hails most
recently from Winnipeg, where she ran several innovative film projects:
Big Smash! Film Collective, a nonprofit that runs screenings of cult
films, the Plastic Paper animation festival, and the Miskatonic
Institute of Horror Studies. But the time had come to take her multiple
projects to the next level.
Montreal's good living conditions, cheap rent and general awesomeness called out to Janisse and she left the 'Peg for these shores a couple of weeks ago. Though she's barely landed, she and business partner David Bertrand are already about to open their little cinema, Blue Sunshine, with a new digital restoration of Ivan Reitman's Canadian cult horror/comedy classic Cannibal Girls.
"I wanted to get to the point of taking the next step, which is to open a permanent venue. I do a lot of screening events, and in the end, the setup and teardown aspects of this kind of production really start to take it out of you," she says. "Montreal seemed like a good place to live and start this kind of thing."
Janisse and Bertrand found the space on Craigslist - it's a 50-seat screening room that already existed, to which they added a projectionist booth so they could isolate the 16mm projector, built some blinds for the skylights, and voila, Montreal has a new little dark room to watch movies in.
Blue Sunshine bills itself as "Montreal's newest psychotronic screening room," taking its name from the Jeff Lieberman film from 1976, in which bad acid might be to blame for a string of bizarre murders (there are currently no plans to screen the film) and heavily inspired by Michael Weldon's "Psychotronic Movie Guide."
Janisse defines "psychotronic" film as any "cult, weirdo" kind of movie that, while not referring directly to B-movie or trash cinema, "does encompass strange documentaries, sci-fi, music films and other oddities - movies at the junction of trash and art."
As far as her curatorial mandate goes, Janisse explains: "There is a lot of strange stuff that we will screen, but we probably aren't the screening venue that will play a documentary about yoga." Further sweetening the pot, Janisse is also curating an extensive collection of sugary cereals, to be available on an all-you-can-eat basis for $5.
Blue Sunshine will be open three nights a week, showing overlooked and underscreened music documentaries, trash and genre films, and avant-garde and art works. In the first couple of months, they'll screen La Brune et moi, a little-seen French punk mock-doc from the '70s starring Anoushka, as well as Return to Waterloo, Kinks frontman Ray Davies' directorial debut, and a seamy documentary in memory of Gary Coleman: Diff'rent Strokes: When the Laughter Stopped. They'll also team up with the folks at Fantasia in July for a master class on adapting H.P. Lovecraft for the screen, with director Stuart Gordon (Re-Animator, Edmond). Good stuff. - Melora Koepke
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MONTREAL MIRROR
June 24, 2010
Cult Sunshine
Fans of cult cinema will get a long-needed boost this weekend with the opening of Blue Sunshine (3660 St-Laurent), a screening room dedicated to the finest in underground film. Founded by Kier-La Janisse, a programmer who’s honed her craft in similar venues from Austin to Winnipeg (she’s now working with Fantasia and as the Mirror’s newest film critic) and writer David Bertrand.
“Our goal is to screen films that have never screened theatrically in Montreal—including at festivals—and that are not commercially available on DVD via the usual outlets,” explains Bertrand. The opening films are tax-shelter era Ivan Reitman horror spoof Cannibal Girls (Friday, June 25, 8:15 p.m.) and Trent Harris’s Beaver Trilogy (Saturday, June 26, 8:15 p.m.), an indescribably unique project in which Harris made a documentary about a small town outsider, then remade it twice with Sean Penn and Crispin Glover in the respective leads.
Along with trash classics and avant-garde rarities, the programming includes music films and strange TV artefacts (including When the Laughter Stopped, a movie-of-the-week about the travails of the Diff’rent Strokes cast, July 9), with workshops and art shows thrown in for good measure. For a complete list of the events to come, check out blue-sunshine.com. - Malcolm Fraser
Original link: http://www.montrealmirror.com/2010/062410/artsweek.html
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RICK TREMBLES' MOTION PICTURE PURGATORY
June 24, 2010
Amazing cartoon review of Blue Sunshine's opening film Cannibal Girls, as illustrated by the Montreal Mirror's one-and-only Rick Trembles!
See it (in sparkling full colour) here: Anthropophaginian Canadians!
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ION MAGAZINE
June 21, 2010
Blue Sunshine
ION contributor David Bertrand recently moved to Montreal to open up a
movie theatre with Canada’s cult cinema queen, Kier-La Janisse. Blue
Sunshine is billed as a “psychotronic screening room” and the plan is to
have screenings three nights a week. Thursdays will feature rare music
films, Fridays will feature bizarro trash and cult films and Saturdays
will be dedicated to avant-garde and art cinema. The space will also be
home to the Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies. One of the first
things they have lined up is master class in adapting H.P. Lovecraft for
the screen taught by Stuart Gordon
(The Re-Animator). Amazing! Oh, and we highly recommend you see the
movie Blue
Sunshine. It’s about people who do bad LSD, lose their hair and go
on murderous rampages. - Michael Mann
Original link: http://www.ionmagazine.ca/category/movies/
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