Rush 7: Bass Ackwards

 Bass Ackwards includes the use of montage and L-cutting in various scenes. In the very first scene and throughout the beginning, there is an interesting use of Linas's childhood footage being mixed in with the conversation between Linas and the girl, then cutting to a short montage of more vintage home movies of Linas as a child. The movie then sets up Linas's life through a montage of how he lives now. He gets woken up by one of the people he is staying with, he is shown filming a wedding video (which also uses montage, changing from Linas's camera's viewpoint to an outside eye), he quietly enters the house, phones his girlfriend and is caught masturbating on the toilet by the woman he is living with. He and the guy he is staying with play racquetball and have a chat in the sauna afterward where Linas is asked to move out. The next scene shows Linas setting up in a hotel room to meet his married girlfriend. All of these scenes are very short and are bound together to set up Linas's background for the movie. In about ten minutes, we understand what Linas's life has been like in the recent past and why certain incidents (getting kicked out, prompting him to work at an alpaca farm where he discovers the VW short bus) lead him to travel across country for the rest of the film.

Montage is such an easy yet effective way to set up a characters background in a short amount of time. Many films may not want to answer questions about a character at the very beginning of the film so they instead incorporate background throughout the film. Linas Phillips probably decided that Bass Ackwards would be better if we knew about Linas's life before he embarks on his journey. I think we needed to see how his life really wasn't going anywhere and it made sense for him to drive cross-country and pretty much roll with the punches as they come. It is somewhat similar to what we see in the Ulysses 2.0 script. Alex is seen working his construction job at the beginning and the idea that he deals pot is brought up, which he gets fired for. I'm not sure how these clips are being put together but I think it would be interesting to see a use of montage to possibly set up some of his background. Maybe it wouldn't work for the overall feel of the film to include a montage at the beginning so perhaps it could be used elsewhere.

Throughout Bass Ackwards, montage is also used to show Linas's long journey. There are many clips of him driving and visiting places, stopping and slowing down to show his interactions with specific people. This type of montage might be more appropriate for Ulysses 2.0. We could use it to clip in parts of the story that may not use dialogue but could still use telling visually. I'm not sure what these may be but maybe you or some of the other students have ideas.

A thing I found interesting from a costumer's viewpoint, was how Linas's red and cream-colored sweater showed up in various ways. We see it on Linas at the alpaca farm, Jim uses it as a pillow when he strangely enters Linus's van and proceeds to take a nap, and again on Linas through the rest of the film (like when he meets the mother-son duo and ends up eating & staying with them & playing with the boy). This technique of using a distinctive costume piece could also be used in Ulysses 2.0, maybe to set up time (like someone wearing  the same thing throughout the day) or character (a piece of clothing that someone wears repeatedly as a favorite item). That was just something I noticed and it may be something to discuss.