Reel North, in partnership with the Thompson Public Library, will be kicking off its Basement Bijou monthly Saturday night films Jan. 9 at 7 p.m. with the double feature C.R.A.Z.Y. and Taking Woodstock.
Tickets are $5 per person and the doors for the Basement Bijou Room open at6:30 p.m.
C.R.A.Z.Y., a coming-of-age movie, is a 2005 French-language film with English subtitles directed by Jean-Marc Vallée. C.R.A.Z.Y. tells the story of Zac, played by Marc-André Grondin, who is born prematurely on Christmas Day 1960 in the Beaulieu clan, a tightly knit, devoutly Roman Catholic working-class family in Montreal.
The film focuses primarily on Zac, the sexually confused son, who is obsessed with David Bowie as a teenager and resists his father's efforts to make him a macho sportsman.
Zac is his father's favourite, and while he's a homophobe, the character played by Michel Côté is also a music lover who worships Charles Aznavour and Patsy Cline.
Zac's path is a rocky one mapped out all the way to adulthood with sex, drugs and rock'n'roll set against a glam-rock soundtrack and the background kitsch of Formica, flared pants and small-town suburbia.
The second film up, Taking Woodstock, can only mean it is 1969 again and Elliot Tiber, a down-on-his-luck interior designer in Greenwich Village has to move back upstate in New York to help his parents run their dilapidated Catskills motel, the El Monaco.
The bank is about to foreclose; his father wants to burn the place down, but hasn't paid the insurance; and Elliot is still figuring how to come out to his parents. When Elliot hears that a neighbouring town has pulled the permit on a hippie music festival, he calls the producers, thinking he could drum up some much needed business for the motel. Three weeks later, 500,000 people are on their way to his neighbour's farm in White Lake, N.Y., and Elliot finds himself swept up in a generation-defining experience that would change his life, and popular culture, forever.
Ang Lee, who won an Academy Award for his 2005 film Brokeback Mountain, directs Taking Woodstock, made almost 40 years after the event in 2008 and released last year.
Elliot, played by Demetri Martin, is a semi-closeted New York City painter who returns to the Catskills in the summer of 1969 to help his crotchety Russian Jewish immigrant parents (Henry Goodman and Imelda Staunton) revive their fleabag motel. When the nearby town of Wallkill pulls the plug on the Woodstock festival, Elliot steps in, bringing peace, mud, flower children, the cream of late-1960s' rock 'n' roll and a dose of enlightenment to his parents' backyard.
For five months in 2008 Lee set up his base camp to make Taking Woodstock in New Lebanon, N.Y. on the Massachusetts border in Columbia County, about 140 miles north of New York City, and transforming the present-day Valley Rest Motel into the El Monaco, which served as a base camp for the organizers of the Woodstock festival in 1969.
The film crew let the grass grow long, strewed weeds and wildflowers, added mismatched multicoloured paint to the room doors, even touched up trees in the yard to give them a mossy, overgrown feel. And they resurfaced the exterior of the Valley Rest with several layers of peeling, contrasting paint.
After the shoot was finished, the crew, of course, spruced the Valley Rest Motel up again to its 2008 look.
