#Maxwell McCabe-Lokos

[moviesludge]

Thanks for the recommendation and subsequent brain-haunt, @donnerpartyofone

[enterfilm]

LES CHAMBRES ROUGES (Pascal Plante, 2023)

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Red Rooms (Les chambres rouges) (2023) Pascal Plante

May 5th 2024

[cultfaction]

Red Rooms trailer released

Named after the highly disputed violent dark web spaces known as red rooms in online urban legends, RED ROOMS was inspired by the fans who inexplicably flock to serial killers throughout modern history and further motivated by the current state of cybersecurity and tech crimes. The film not only succeeds as one of the most chilling entries to the serial killer genre from the last decade —despite…

[thepeoplesmovies]

Watch The Chilling UK Trailer For Psychological Rhriller Red Rooms

Vertigo Releasing have unleashed the UK Trailer for Canadian dark psychological thriller Red Rooms. This was written and directed by Pascal Plante (Nadia, Butterfly). The film toured the festival circuit 2023 the past 12 months starting at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival with it’s premiere. Touring many other leading global festivals such as Fantasia Film Festival, Busan…

[1day1movie]

Stanleyville (2021) Maxwell McCabe-Lokos.

[zonetrente-trois]

LES CHAMBRES ROUGES | Bande-annonce officielle--- Kelly-Anne (Juliette Gariépy) se réveille chaque matin aux portes du palais de justice pour s’assurer une place au procès hyper-médiatisé de Ludovic Chevalier (Maxwell McCabe Lokos), un tueur en série duquel elle est obsédée. Au fil des jours, la jeune femme tissera des liens avec une autre groupie (Laurie Babin), ce qui l’extirpera momentanément de sa solitude étouffante. Mais à force de côtoyer les parents des victimes dans un procès qui s’enlise, Kelly-Anne a de plus en plus de difficulté à maintenir son équilibre psychologique et à assumer sa fixation maladive pour le bourreau. Elle tentera alors par tous les moyens de mettre la main sur l’ultime pièce du puzzle : la vidéo manquante du meurtre d’une des victimes avec qui elle a une inquiétante ressemblance.

[fathersonholygore]

[Brooklyn Horror Film Festival 2023] RED ROOMS & The Consumption of Contemporary Humanity

Red Rooms (2023) Directed & Written by Pascal Plante Starring Juliette Gariépy, Laurie Babin, Elisabeth Locas, Maxwell McCabe-Lokos, Natalie Tannous, Pierre Chagnon, & Guy Thauvette. Thriller ★★★★1/2 (out of ★★★★★) DISCLAIMER: The following essay contains SPOILERS! Turn back, lest ye be spoiled forever. Red Rooms is a film loaded with painfully relevant themes, as it takes on a slew of modern…

[fertileground]

red rooms, 2023 (dir. pascal plante)

[ramonaflow]

Noah Reid and Bahia Watson singing Smalltown Boy by Bronski Beat in The Archivists

[lostinmac]

Red Rooms (2023)

Dir. Pascal Plante

[randomrichards]

RED ROOMS:

An ennui model

Obsessed with murder trial

Her downward spiral

[anhed-nia]

I have been trying to figure out what to say about this movie since I saw it on the Brooklyn Horror Film Festival jury, and I keep running up against the embarrassing conclusion that it has been impossible for me not to take it personally. This happens occasionally, where something hits you so strongly right in your DNA that you can't even tell whether it's as good as you think it is; mercifully the quality of RED ROOMS is not in doubt, but it reminded me of my delusionally personal associations with the original SNOW WHITE. The Disney feature was one of the first movies I ever saw, and it seemed to communicate to me very directly about my options for living as a human female of the brunette variety: On one end of the spectrum there is the sickly virgin with her morbid beauty and her kinship with nature, and on the other end, the cannibalizing bitch goddess with her devious mind full of arcane knowledge (ok so the Wicked Queen is not actually dark-haired, but I assert that that cowl counts (and I want one)). As a little girl I thought, yes, this is a pretty good deal for me, either one of these assignments will do.

Pascal Plante's RED ROOMS offers a similar dichotomy, and it has proven very hard for me to avoid seeing its main characters as an Aspirational Self, and a disappointing Actual Self. Maybe RED ROOMS has a Magic Mirror quality, in fact maybe all films do, though they don't all speak so clearly and bluntly to every viewer.

Juliette Gariépy plays Kelly-Anne, a fashion model who is fixated on the high profile trial of Ludovic Chevalier (Maxwell McCabe-Lokos) who is accused of serial murder and traffic in the snuff films of his young female victims. Seated in a row of goth groupies, the expressionless Kelly-Anne is identified with their fascination with the case, and yet we have no idea what really motivates her. Implicitly, few people would have any idea what it is like to be Kelly-Anne; as her internet handle LadyOfShalott suggests, she lives alone in a luxury highrise with the computer as her only connection to the outside world. She emerges for fashion shoots marked by her dark, edgy brand, and to attend the Chevalier trial. Otherwise, her only regular human contact is with online poker competitors who are no match for her savant-like math expertise and apparent lack of feeling. She presents as a bit of a sociopath, which becomes worrisome as she uses her technological skills to stalk the bereaved mother of the only victim whose recorded murder has not yet surface. However, Kelly-Anne is ultimately unknowable, and not much like the other fangirls and -boys who appear day after day at the hearings. We find evidence of this in the arrival of Clementine (Laurie Babin).

In opposition to Kelly-Anne, Clementine is needy, ingratiating, and naively intrusive. The tiny girl is fueled by her fanatical belief that Chevalier is innocent, a conviction she assumes Kelly-Anne must share. In a moment of rare empathy, the model invites the urchin into her sanctuary and, after flirting with the notion of human friendship, she eventually reveals enough to totally shatter the young woman's illusions. Clementine is the perfect foil, providing us with a tool for interrogating Kelly-Anne's identity and motivation--and for me, she also provided a painful reminder of the difference between myself and what I claim to value. Kelly-Anne is like every William Gibson heroine I have ever attached myself to: beautiful and alien, yet more intelligent than beautiful, dangerously brilliant and purpose-driven, emotionally incompatible with normal people, voluntarily exiled to the fringes of society despite her social currency and financial power. It's hard to imagine what she does and does not feel, but perhaps her life is not so easy. Clementine doesn't see it, of course, finding Kelly-Anne's robotic perfection very amusing. Clementine is her opposite: pretty only in a childlike way, hopelessly unself-conscious, counterbalancing her ignorance with self-righteous fanaticism. I saw myself there, and while Clementine is appealing and sympathetic despite (or even because of) her foibles, it wasn't a great feeling. She is obsessed rather than focused, embroiled in adult matters she can't quite grasp, and incapable of understanding or engineering other people's perceptions of her. She and Kelly-Anne make a lovely odd couple, but true connection is not quite possible, and Clementine only ends up feeling embarrassed, and like she has something to apologize for.

Whatever filmmaker Pascal Plante's grander statements might be, about the cybernetic nature of modern life and the merchandising of other people's lives and deaths, laced through as they are with a peculiar Arthurian motif, I've had a hard time fully engaging with them only because of my own passionate investment in his characters and their perverse interpersonal dynamics. Maybe by October I will have matured enough to articulate a more robust argument about this in-any-case extremely great movie. In the meantime, I am haunted by the enviable unknowability of Kelly-Anne, and the tragic transparency of Clementine. For now I will just say that I love it when a male filmmaker seems to live out a fantasy through a female character. One of the reasons that I don't totally dis Rob Zombie is that I enjoy the way that he encourages personal identification with tough female protagonists represented by his wife Sheri Moon, genre heroines like Meg Foster and Karen Black, and in my personal favorite instance, young Taylor Scout Compton:

When I saw this grim, black-eyed portrait of Pascal Plante, with its stark resemblance to Kelly-Anne, I thought yes, this guy gets it, he wants to live through her just like the rest of us, even if her version of humanity is not ours.

PS Please enjoy Lord Alfred Tennyson's description of average Tumblr user the Lady of Shalott, depicted visually by John William Waterhouse:

[letterboxd-loggd]

Red Rooms (Les chambres rouges) (2023) Pascal Plante

January 28th 2024

[weathereyehorizon]

Countdown to Noah

What better way to celebrate Noahvember than a countdown to November 18th?! Please enjoy these little tidbits about the origins of Noah's songs.

Smalltown Boy

A cover of the 1984 song by Bronski Beat, performed by Noah and his co-stars, Bahia Watson and Maxwell McCabe-Lokos, for the TIFF 2020 short film The Archivists.

The film takes place in a dystopian future where art and cultural artifacts are illegal. Three musicians discover a degraded vinyl record and attempt to reimagine one of its songs.

Noah has mentioned an interest in looking for interesting and different ways to combine his music with his acting career as it relates to character.

He calls Smalltown Boy "a bit of a protest song and a bit of a survivor song", and describes the film's message as being about the lasting effect of arts and creativity. "It's not something you can eliminate. You can't get rid of the creative spirit."

Fun Fact! Despite doing an excellent job of acting the part, Noah does not actually play the violin.

Listen here.

Watch the film here (VPN needed outside of Canada).

Watch Noah speak about The Archivists here.

Read more about The Archivists here and here.

📷 Timelapse pictures and Big & Quiet Pictures

[kristenswig]

#223. Stanleyville - Maxwell McCabe-Lokos

2.5/5