DECEMBER 17, 2024
“Music makes the world go round” – this should be the motto of this amazing short made by Michael Bofshever, a film where music is not something in the background to stimulate our background senses, but comes on the main stage and changes the whole course of the story.
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Usually, movies regarding musical or artistic topics are very hard to make and the accuracy has to be faultless. ‘Echo Park Blues’ is clearly one of those movies where everything stands for itself.
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From the beginning we have to say that everything about this movie is impressive. The cinematography is really good, with no flaws in the construction of the movie. The casting is brilliant and the score…oh well, it is a movie about blues, so the score is unique.
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What struck us the most were some shots that really put this movie on the exquisite movies map. First, it the shot where the saxophone player plays at the metro and then travels alone in the subway – the singularity of the bluesman seen in the songs is actually the loneliness in real life. Also, the scene where the two ex lovers compose a song together is really powerful; at first, the woman is not very open minded about this idea, but as the movie goes by and as memories have the tendency to come back like a boomerang, she changes her mind, being able to cope with her ex-colleague in order to make another masterpiece. The last shot of 'Echo Park Blues' (and we will take it as a whole because we cannot dive the song), is purely brilliant. Even though the saxophone player struggles to reunite with his former band members, they are all at first not very thrilled to do so, but in the end, they end up together, playing from the bottom of their hearts, and one can easily spot that by looking at their faces whilst performing.
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'Echo Park Blues' has the full potential to become a big hit if transformed into a feature, and that is because this field of music is very wide and provides many interpretations. Who knows, maybe in some years we will be able to see a feature depicting this topic, being at least as good as this one.
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Review written by Vlad A.G