Tag: Movies

Posted on by

Ripley – A Portrait

In 2014, the cast of the 1986 film, Aliens reunited at the Calgary Comic and Entertainment Expo. There were autograph signings, photo ops, and a stand-alone event one night where the cast was interviewed, and shared stories in front of an audience of thousands.

Because I was working at my booth, selling my funny looking animal prints, I missed it.

For one reason or another, sci-fi and fantasy movie fans have one favorite franchise.

For some it’s Star Wars, others it’s Star Trek, Lord of the Rings, the Marvel Universe and many others. While I can take or leave the Lord of the Rings, I enjoy those others and have seen them multiple times. Then again, I’ve seen all of the Scorsese’s stuff multiple times, too.

I just love movies.

Even though television writing has improved in leaps and bounds in recent years, and I’ve got many shows I like, I’d choose movies over TV every day of the week.

I’ve been a fan of the Alien movie franchise for most of my life, although I can’t remember when I first saw the original movies but I know it wasn’t in a theatre. I do know that the gateway movie for me, however, was James Cameron’s Aliens.

Over the years, I’ve owned the box sets in multiple formats and have watched them often. I own all six on Blu-Ray and digital and enjoy each movie on its own and as part of the whole. I could rate them in order of preference, but I’m not a militant fan-boy about it. They’re still just movies.

You won’t find me on a forum anywhere arguing continuity errors, or debating the Ridley Scott vision of the canon vs. James Cameron’s. I didn’t get angry when Prometheus and Covenant went off in a truly unexpected direction, because I’m just a fan along for the ride. They don’t owe me anything and truth be told, I like those latest movies, too.

I don’t have shelves full of toys and action figures…OK, I have one xenomorph figure, and I also have the poster for Alien: Covenant beside my desk, but simply because I love the art.

H.R. Giger’s Alien design and art wasn’t part of why I started liking these movies, but it certainly is today.

It’s fun escapism and for whatever reason, this franchise resonates with me. I can quote more lines from Aliens than from any other movie, much to the eye-rolling annoyance of my wife.

For reasons I need not explain, I’ve been pretty low the past couple of months. Lost a big chunk of my newspaper clients, the licensing momentum I was looking forward to building upon this year has been crippled,  the Calgary Expo was cancelled, along with two trips to Vancouver Island this spring and summer, and until recently, I haven’t been able to see my friends.

I haven’t slept well in quite some time and my back is killing me, both directly related to my inability to deal with stress. It’s been a shitty year so far, as it has been for everyone.

I have little motivation to paint happy animals right now, because I’m just not feeling it.

Even before the virus-that-shall-not-be-named ruined everything, I’ve fallen down in the dumps creatively from time to time. It happens to all artists.

While it usually occurs at the end of the calendar year, when the darkness and cold of winter sets in, this year it’s spring, usually my most upbeat and productive time of year. It’s a feeling that everything I’ve ever painted sucks and there’s no hope for it to get better. I’m a hack, kidding myself about my skills, might as well throw in the towel and give up this foolishness. Anyone who creates anything knows this feeling at some point.

What has worked in the past to help me shake the blues is to paint a portrait of a movie character I like. It gives me a break from the commercial stuff, reminds me why I like painting, and has no financial pressure or deadline attached to it. With a few exceptions, most of the portraits in my Character gallery were painted for my own enjoyment.

Canadian Geographic Magazine commissioned me to paint Rick Hansen in 2018, and a couple paintings have attracted attention after I posted them on Twitter years ago, most notably Martin Sheen and Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield. The latter sent me two tweets from the International Space Station about my work, a surreal experience.  But, I don’t really expect the subject will see the portrait I paint of them.

So even though I’ve been focused on keeping my finances secure during all of this, trying to maximize revenue, my mood has been steadily declining and I needed a break.

I figured my skills might finally be good enough to attempt a painting of my favorite movie action hero, Ellen Ripley, played by Sigourney Weaver in multiple films.

My buddy Derek once asked me if she was a movie crush and no, it was never about that. What I admired about the character was that she was a regular person, put to the test. Step up or buckle, and most likely die.

At a time when women in action movies were usually just damsels in distress, T&A accessories for the men who would ultimately save them, Ripley became a leader who held it all together and kicked some ass, even though she didn’t want the hero role.

Say what you want about James Cameron and the stories about him being difficult to work for, but he’s always written great roles for strong independent women. Sarah Connor in Terminator, Rose in Titanic, Lindsey in The Abyss, Neytiri and Grace in Avatar, and Ripley in Aliens.

True, Ridley Scott birthed the Ripley character in the original Alien movie, but it was Cameron who allowed Sigourney Weaver to turn her into a badass.

Interesting side note about James Cameron’s creative skills, it was his hands drawing the portrait of Rose in the movie Titanic. He was drawing right handed for those scenes but is actually left handed. He also drew all of the sketches in Jack’s portfolio for that film.

Throughout this painting, I found myself rushing it at times and having to stop myself. This wasn’t a deadline, I had all the time in the world, and the whole point was to enjoy it, get lost in it, and to improve my skills with the work.

While watching the movie again to find reference, I had a lot of options. I could have painted her with the pulse rifle in the action hero pose, the alien eggs around her, ready to start firing. Maybe in the power loader suit doing battle with the Alien Queen, or standing outside on the planet after they realized they were stranded on LV-426, right after Newt says, “They mostly come at night. Mostly.”

I know, I’m descending into nerdy stuff here. Bear with me.

Ultimately when I choose to paint a character, there’s usually a look I see on screen, combined with the right lighting and I just know that’s it.

This painting is from a scene close to the end. The colony has been blown up, the drop ship has returned to the Sulaco in orbit and Ripley is telling Bishop that he did okay. Seconds later, the Alien Queen emerges from the landing gear, tears Bishop in two and starts looking for revenge.

It’s at that moment, Ripley looks up at the Queen in disbelief, but realizes once again that it’s either step up or run and hide. That’s the moment I painted.

Not long after, Ripley steps out into the light in the power loader and says one of the most memorable lines in movie history.

“Get away from her, you bitch!”

The two hardest parts of any painting is starting and finishing. Getting those first lines of the sketch down, convincing myself, “I can do this,” while a louder voice in my head says, “No, you can’t.”

Eventually I come to a moment when I have to say, “This is the best I’ve got right now” and call it finished, while that other voice is saying, “well your best ain’t much.”

It happens on every single painting.

In between those moments, however, it’s like working clay, smoothing out the curve of a cheekbone, lightening a shadow that’s too dark, choosing colours, angles, highlights, a hair here, another there, and putting in the hours, all in search of an accurate likeness and bringing a vision to life.

A likeness in a portrait isn’t about getting the features right, it’s about the relationship between those features as well. I could paint the eyes perfectly, but if the nose is too far away from them, or the angle of the mouth is wrong, the whole thing falls apart.

It’s a balancing act, zooming in and out, squinting, painting tweaks here and there, flipping the canvas and reference back and forth to see what I’m not seeing, shutting it down and walking away, only to open it again the next day and instantly see something I need to fix.

Finally I had to call it done; knowing that a year from now, I’ll look at this and think I could do a better job of it. But that’s art for you; it’s the epitome of the cliché about the journey vs. the destination.
As for the whole cast coming to Calgary that year, my priority was my booth, not signatures and photo-ops. The video of the interview session in the corral was put online later on, so I still got to watch all of that after the fact. I enjoy behind-the-scenes stories of movie making, especially ones I’ve enjoyed for years.

I did share an elevator with Lance Henriksen, who played the android Bishop, at the Palliser Hotel that week, twice in fact. I didn’t embarrass myself, and simply said it was nice to see him and I hoped he enjoyed Calgary.

Shonna and I and our friend Michelle were having a late dinner one night in the lounge, when almost the entire cast of Colonial Marines from Aliens came in to have a drink together. Peppered around the room were other celebrity guests. It was quite the surreal environment, but in true Canadian fashion, nobody approached or bothered them, mindful that they deserved their downtime too.

I never did see Sigourney Weaver or Bill Paxton that week, but I was fine with that. Had I the skills to have painted this portrait then, I might have lined up to have Ms. Weaver sign it, but that would have been an exceptional circumstance.

At the end of the Expo that year, while everybody began tearing down, a voice came over the loudspeaker. I don’t know if it was live or recorded earlier, but Bill Paxton recited some of his most famous lines from Aliens, including Hudson’s “Game Over, Man”, with intentional overacting.

After five long days, the vendors and staff exhausted, weary and wanting to go home, the place went nuts with cheers and applause. That’s one of my favorite memories from Expo, and a little bitter sweet. Paxton died four years later at 61, complications from surgery to repair a damaged heart valve.

I don’t know what I’m going to paint next, will need to give it a bit to see if this portrait shook loose the creative cobwebs, but I’m glad I made the time.

Cheers,
Patrick

___

© Patrick LaMontagne
Follow me on Instagram @LaMontagneArt
Sign up for my newsletter which features blog posts, new paintings and editorial cartoons, follow this link to the sign up form.

Posted on by

Where’s the Camera?

When I was in my early twenties, at the end of my five years in the Reserves, I had the opportunity to work as a paid extra on the movie Legends of the Fall.

It was a fantastic experience, full of great stories. I’ve written about this before, here’s the link if you’re interested.

If the story is moving and you’re captivated, a good movie should allow you to suspend your disbelief. Sure, there might be continuity errors from time to time, and we all know that the science behind a lot of movies is pretty loose. But a good story should keep you interested, a willing participant in the fantasy delivered on screen.

Even movies based in reality will stretch and squash the truth to tell a better story. We welcome the lie because even with amazing real-life stories, the movie version will be better.

People will say they want to know how the magician performs his illusions, but it’s almost always disappointing when you do. The fun lives in the fantasy and when that’s gone, it’s just a trick.

When filming began on Legends of the Fall, there were about 1000 extras. It might have been 600-700, but it was a lot. As it was a First World War epic drama, we were all young men, each in period uniform. We filmed each night, all night long, and while there was plenty of downtime on set, it was exciting when the cameras were rolling.

After the first few days, the main army was sent home, and there were 60 of us left for the next two weeks, all of whom required military experience. The reason was that we fired authentic Lee Enfield rifles in successive scenes and even blank rounds can kill if used irresponsibly.

The main battlefield looked as you would imagine. Mud everywhere, large craters, uneven terrain, burnt trees, and rows of barbed wire fence, with meandering trenches along either side. For the first few nights, all we did was run back and forth across the field, an army whose only enemy was time and money.

We did quite a few rehearsal runs, choosing our routes to minimize collisions, or tripping on obstacles in the way. Before each run, an Assistant Director would walk down the line, pointing to every second, third or fourth man and say, “Dead.”

This meant that at some point during your run, from one side of the field to the other, you were to fall and stay still. No theatrics, no crying out, drop and don’t move. If you weren’t supposed to die, but you tripped and fell, or an explosion went off near you, you were to consider yourself dead, resurrected only when the director yelled, “Cut!”

A few from the larger group were kicked off the set for goofing around. One guy ran across the front of the camera, looked right into the lens and gave a big smile. They dismissed him.

There were huge stadium-style lights on stands, pointed toward the field. We filmed all night long but it was almost like daylight. When you see a night scene in a movie, it’s quite bright so that the camera can see everything. Sometimes they’ll add a deep blue filter to the camera so that a scene filmed during the day looks like night. One of the giveaways for that trick is a landscape scene where you can see shadows or light details in the distance.

In those battlefield scenes, with the cameras on a hill, facing east, all the viewer would see is an army running across a field. There’s smoke, explosions, yelling, screaming, and it looks like chaos.

But that’s not what we saw.

Take another camera, position it on the eastern edge of the field and turn it west, and you’d see another army of production people, lights, tents, vehicles, cameras, and activity just behind the camera. You would also see several figures in bright orange jumpsuits, sitting in front of built-up mud mounds all over the battlefield. In front of them were control boards, their job to set off the pyrotechnics while we ran around them.

If the main actors were involved in any of the scenes, you would see a sawdust trail in the mud, the path they were supposed to run, and the rest of us were to avoid.

When I watch a movie today, if the pace is slow and my mind wanders away from the illusion, I’ll often think about how it was made and ask myself, “Where’s the Camera?”

They film quite a few movies around here in Canmore and Banff. A favourite is The Edge with Alec Baldwin and Anthony Hopkins. I watched it again recently and there are many scenes where they’re supposed to be lost in the wilderness, far from civilization. But if you’re from around here, knowing the true locations is amusing.

One particular scene was filmed just around the corner from where we live, in an open field called Indian Flats. In the movie, they’d just killed a bear, were exhausted and wondering if they were going to make it back to civilization. The mountains loom high above them, and it looks like extreme wilderness.

If the camera were raised just ten feet higher or turned 45 degrees left, however, you would see Highway 1A right beside them, the TransCanada less than a kilometre away, the light industrial area of Canmore and no shortage of local infrastructure.

It’s not something we think about while watching the movie, because we’re invested in the lie. We want to be entertained.

A side effect of that long-ago experience is that I find myself asking the same question in other areas of life as well, where the lie is not so obvious or welcome.

Where’s the camera? What am I not seeing?

While we recently killed our cable because we found we were primarily watching streaming services, I hadn’t been a fan of reality TV for this very reason. When you see people arguing, a scary suspense-filled moment, or a near-death experience on one of these shows, it gives you a whole new perspective when you start thinking about the camera and crew filming the scene. Suddenly, it seems more like a bad performance, not scary at all, and nobody is even remotely close to injury or death. The insurance people would hate that.

These shows not only film conflict, but they try to instigate it. It’s entertainment, but not reality.

The same can be said for all of the selfies and carefully curated images and videos posted on social media.

One of the most visited locations around here is Moraine Lake, near Lake Louise. It gets so busy in the summer that they periodically close the road and limit traffic, because there are so many people up there, taking photos of the Valley of the Ten Peaks.

It’s easy for one person to stand near the edge of the water, take a photo and have it look like they’ve just completed this arduous hike and are in this serene location all by themselves. But move the camera back thirty feet, and you’d see hundreds of other people taking the same photo, right beside a parking lot full of cars and buses.

You’re likely familiar with the beach feet photo, where someone takes a picture of their own feet stretched out before them on a towel or deck chair, the beach and ocean filling the rest of the scene. The caption usually reads, The Good Life or Lost in Paradise.

Meanwhile, move the camera back twenty feet, and they’re one of many people on a crowded beach, at an all-inclusive resort complete with loud music, gangs of drunken college kids and screaming children who’ve had too much sun.

Did you know that you can take a perfect picture of the Sphinx and pyramids while standing in front of a Pizza Hut in Cairo? It’s right across the street. It’s now become an online gag to take the photo from inside the Pizza Hut to capture the scene with the logo on the window. Google ‘pyramids Pizza Hut’ and you’ll see.

My favourite would have to be the one where somebody shows themselves at the gym, or in a contemplative moment looking out at the ocean, or sitting in a Zen-like lotus pose trying to convince you that they’re one with the universe. It becomes completely ridiculous when you consider that they had to set the camera/phone up, put it on a timer, rush back to pose to show you how Zen and peaceful they are before they check the photo, decide they look fat in that one and try it all over again.

Add in photo filters to change the weather or light, some feature manipulators, and a softening filter to make you look younger, which most of the time makes you look plastic.

These exercises in camera trickery happen for two reasons. One, to convince others that our best-laid plans are even better than they appear, and two, to make us feel a little better about our own lives that aren’t quite measuring up to unrealistic expectations.

And while we’re making ourselves feel better, we’re making others feel worse, and they do the same in return when they post their own staged photos. No wonder we’re all so miserable, angry and dissatisfied with life.

Whether it’s movies, reality TV, social media, the news, politics, or any other information we’re fed daily, realize that it’s all designed to sell you something. It could be a product, an experience, or an illusion, but simply put, it’s a manipulation.

A friend’s vacay pics making you jealous? Ask yourself how much time they spent snapping and uploading filtered photos instead of enjoying where they were. They were probably looking at their phone more on vacation than they do at home.

The perfect family Christmas dinner photo? The credit cards are all maxed, the turkey’s overcooked, Grandpa’s drunk and being racist again, and the dog just threw up under the table.

The politician blaming everything on his opponent and promising you he’ll fix all that ails you? That always changes right after the election, no matter who is in power. The same middle-class family he posed with at that campaign rally now can’t make ends meet, because that same politician eliminated their jobs in his first budget.

Now with deep fake technology and other software, a photo or video is no more evidence of truth or fact than a nosy neighbour gossiping over the back fence.

Fake news works because we choose to believe it.  It’s designed to spread because it plays on our bias. When one person believes one of these lies, they share it with others, and as Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels once said, “Repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth.”

With a new year upon us, I would make a simple suggestion. No matter what you read, see, hear, or experience, take a moment to consider that you do not see the whole picture, especially if it’s something you want to believe. That should be your first clue.

Ask yourself if the camera is showing you something real.

Ask yourself what it’s not showing you.

Then ask why.

© Patrick LaMontagne
@LaMontagneArt
If you’d like to receive my newsletter which features blog posts, new paintings and editorial cartoons, follow this link to the sign up form.