list http://www.spout.com/ Recent community activity around My Winnipeg on Spout Copyright 2005-9 Spout, LLC Spout RSS http://www.spout.com/images/SpoutLogoRSS.jpg http://www.spout.com/ 136 30 http://www.spout.com/films/My_Winnipeg/347299/default.aspx Title: My Winnipeg
Year: 2008
Director: Guy Maddin
Plot: Visionary Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin pays tribute to his beloved hometown with this goodbye letter and self-described "docu-fantasia" that is equal parts transcendental rumination, historical chronicle, and personal portrait. In the first segment, Maddin's camera drifts dreamlike through crowded trains as a floating kielbasa hangs from the ceiling and the director/narrator ponders just why the city boasts the most sleepwalkers per capita of any major international city. Later, the viewer is treated to images of numerous historical monuments in the city as they learn about such key historical events as the Winnipeg General Strike, the defeat of the Winnipeg Jets, and even the Golden Boy pageant scandal and a racetrack tragedy that found numerous horses sent to an icy death. As the third and final segment gets underway, the director draws inspiration from filmmaker William Castle to present pivotal -- and often traumatic -- events from his childhood that left an indelible mark while simultaneously serving to mold his unique vision of his beloved Winnipeg. ~ Jason Buchanan, All Movie Guide
Times Tagged: 19
Number of Lists: 16
Number of blog posts: 13
Number of discussion threads: 4
SpoutRating: 4
]]>Tue, 05 May 2009 01:27:55 GMTMy Winnipeg2008Guy MaddinVisionary Canadian filmmaker <a href="http://www.spout.com/players/P___100698/default.aspx" style='text-decoration:underline'>Guy Maddin</a> pays tribute to his beloved hometown with this goodbye letter and self-described "docu-fantasia" that is equal parts transcendental rumination, historical chronicle, and personal portrait. In the first segment, Maddin's camera drifts dreamlike through crowded trains as a floating kielbasa hangs from the ceiling and the director/narrator ponders just why the city boasts the most sleepwalkers per capita of any major international city. Later, the viewer is treated to images of numerous historical monuments in the city as they learn about such key historical events as the Winnipeg General Strike, the defeat of the Winnipeg Jets, and even the Golden Boy pageant scandal and a racetrack tragedy that found numerous horses sent to an icy death. As the third and final segment gets underway, the director draws inspiration from filmmaker <a href="http://www.spout.com/players/P____84457/default.aspx" style='text-decoration:underline'>William Castle</a> to present pivotal -- and often traumatic -- events from his childhood that left an indelible mark while simultaneously serving to mold his unique vision of his beloved Winnipeg. ~ Jason Buchanan, All Movie Guide19Tag Target (>10)161344http://www.spout.com/ProductImages/s347299.jpghttp://www.spout.com/films/My_Winnipeg/347299/default.aspxFilm http://www.spout.com/groups/Filmgaming/Re_DVD_Box_Set_Giveaway/563/38674/1/ShowPost.aspx Post By: mercurial
Post To: Filmgaming
Post Date: 12/21/2008 3:54:17 PM
Body: Savage Grace - "I just . . . What was . . . I like Julianne Moore but that was . . . Why in God's name did you tell me this was a good movie!" House Bunny - "Oh, it reminds me of my college days! The cute outfits, the socials, the hazing . . . I mean, bonding between sisters." My Winnipeg - "Uh huh, just what I always told you . . . Canada is just full of weirdos." The Dark Knight - "That Harvey Dent character . . . If I was twenty years younger . . . and of course wasn't married to your father . . . you know what I mean . . . he's so charismatic . . . brooding . . . oh, stop staring at me like that, I love you father!" Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist - "That's just blasphemous! Jesus smoking a cigarette! And why in God's name would you want to name your band after punching donkey's? I mean, that's just cruel!"
]]>Sun, 21 Dec 2008 20:54:17 GMTmercurialFilmgaming12/21/2008 3:54:17 PM Savage Grace - "I just . . . What was . . . I like Julianne Moore but that was . . . Why in God's name did you tell me this was a good movie!" House Bunny - "Oh, it reminds me of my college days! The cute outfits, the socials, the hazing . . . I mean, bonding between sisters." My Winnipeg - "Uh huh, just what I always told you . . . Canada is just full of weirdos." The Dark Knight - "That Harvey Dent character . . . If I was twenty years younger . . . and of course wasn't married to your father . . . you know what I mean . . . he's so charismatic . . . brooding . . . oh, stop staring at me like that, I love you father!" Nick &amp; Norah's Infinite Playlist - "That's just blasphemous! Jesus smoking a cigarette! And why in God's name would you want to name your band after punching donkey's? I mean, that's just cruel!" http://www.spout.com/blogs/karina/archive/2008/12/17/38486.aspx Post By: Karina
Post To: Karina on SpoutBlog
Post Date: 12/17/2008 12:01:43 PM
Body: As I hinted at a bit yesterday when I posted about some of the best undistributed films of the year, I have a love/hate relationship with the idea of movie ranking. The idea that any of us––critic, blogger, professional, amateur…to the extent that any of those words mean anything anymore––could be indisputably “correct” in our individual execution of such an activity is insane; and of course, any attempt to draw each of our subjective takes on The Year in Movies into a consensus waters down everything that makes an individual list idiosyncratic and thus interesting. But in the end, I do believe that what’s valuable about these activities is valuable enough to outweigh what’s annoying: if you read this blog regularly and have come to draw a bead on my tastes in relation to your own, maybe seeing a list of my favorite New York theatrical releases of 2008 will help jog your memory about films you meant to see (or avoid), and now that many of these are available on DVD, maybe you’ll make it happen (or not). My full ballot is posted at indieWIRE now. I chose not to rank the titles from 1-10, but they did reel out of my brain in a particular order, and that has to mean something. Below the jump, my theatrical favorites, with links back to previous coverage, and notes on where/how each film can currently be seen. A Christmas Tale Reviewed on November 11, 2008: “A Christmas Tale reunites [Emanuelle] Devos and [Mathieu] Amalric as an oil and water romantic unit, as if giving their doomed lovers from Kings the last chance that narrative logic wouldn’t previously let them have.  Devos is a sideline character in Christmas, but an important one: her unfathomably calm tolerance of Henri’s uncontrollable impulse for destruction is an emblem of Desplechin’s unique humanism.” Where can you see it? It’s currently in limited release, and on IFC On Demand. Synecdoche, NY Reviewed on October 23, 2008: “[It's] about the fear of death, the impossibility of romance in the absence of longing, the instinct to project our desires on to others and to seek answers about ourselves in mirror images. In other words, as theater director Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman) says of his own life’s work, ‘It’s about everything.’” Where can you see it? Currently on about 100 screens nationwide, it should be out on DVD in the spring. Build a Ship, Sail to Sadness Reviewed briefly on February 7, 2008: “Laurin Federlein’s highly-improvised, Hi8-sourced, sorta-doc/sorta-musical…is the kind of balls-out, so independent it’s essentially handmade work of art that’s notably missing from festivals like Sundance.” I also discussed it on this episode of FIlmCouch. Where can you see it? Good question. It screened for one week in New York almost a year ago. Now, Netflix has a page for it…which says its DVD release date is unknown. My Winnipeg Reviewed on June 13, 2008: “One could be generous, and praise [Guy] Maddin for effectively tapping into the muddied logic of the small town in endless winter, where physical numbness from the inhuman external elements often leads to a kind of booze-aided intellectual numbness. There, so many frigid anti-socials rock a kind of mutual indifference that, when it gets really bad, borders on inhumane (I’ve never been to Winnipeg, but I did spend three winters in Chicago). One could also recalibrate that as a pejorative: you could just say that Maddin directs like a drunk.” Where can you see it? A UK DVD is already out; Amazon suggests that a US version is on its way. Woman on the Beach I never reviewed Hong Sang Soo’s release, which opened at the very beginning of 2008 after the indieWIRE Critics’ Poll declared it the best undistributed film of 2007. But Manohla Dargis did: “As usual in Mr. Hong’s films, everyone will consume too much alcohol, insults will be exchanged, and confessions will be made. A man and a woman will have fumbling, embarrassed and terribly sad sex, the memory of which will haunt them and the story and probably you. Only the rooms will be shabby, never the sentiment.” Where can you see it? New Yorker will release a new DVD on December 30. Rachel Getting Married Reviewed on October 3, 2008: “[Anne] Hathaway’s vulnerability in this tricky role is stunning, but slyly so: as a viewer you can loathe her presence, as some of the personalities in the film speace seem to, and then with a single cut realize that she’s gone from a scene and not only miss her, but actually, actively worry about where she is and what she’s up to.” See also notes on The Liberal Guilt Thing. Where can you see it? On 150 screens after nearly three months in release, if Hathaway gets her expected Best Actress nomination the release will likely expand. La France Reviewed on July 9, 2008: “It’s a musical with just one song, performed by non-performers in a handful of mutations throughout the film. And it’s a love story, soaked in romantic delusion but ultimately fatalist in regards to the actual odds that love can overcome existential crisis….Is this France––or was it? An empty space on which the lonely and lost draw their own impossibly romantic fantasies, only to wander towards inevitable disappointments with heads and hearts infected by the deceptively simple beauty of pop?” Where can you see it: There is a French DVD. Again, Netflix has a page, but it’s unclear when there will be a US release for them to do something with it. Mister Lonely Reviewed on March 16, 2008: “Making movies just seems to be an extension of [Harmony Korine's] primary goal of slipping in and out of identities, of nailing us before we can nail him. I know this, and yet I throw up my hands and give in to it, because with Mister Lonely, the process and the product seem to fuse. Consider me suckered. Where can I see it? It’s available on DVD. Flight of the Red Balloon I saw Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s dreamy take-off on the children’s short The Red Balloon once in 2007 and once in 2008, but somehow I’ve never written about it. That’s okay, because Andrew O’Hehir has: Where can I see it? It’s on DVD. Encounters at the End of the World I caught Werner Herzog’s travelogue some time after Paul reviewed it at its Telluride premiere, so I didn’t publish my own review, but over the months I’ve become convinced that, in producing a not-very-thinly-veiled work of autobiography about insanity and the human instinct to conquer unknown worlds and make them their own, Herzog has wittingly or not made a companion film to his friend Harmony Korine’s Mister Lonely. More on that theory in 2009, perhaps. Where can I see it? It’s on DVD. Originally posted on:SpoutBlog » Karina Longworth
]]>Wed, 17 Dec 2008 17:01:43 GMTKarinaKarina on SpoutBlog12/17/2008 12:01:43 PMAs I hinted at a bit yesterday when I posted about some of the best undistributed films of the year, I have a love/hate relationship with the idea of movie ranking. The idea that any of us––critic, blogger, professional, amateur…to the extent that any of those words mean anything anymore––could be indisputably “correct” in our individual execution of such an activity is insane; and of course, any attempt to draw each of our subjective takes on The Year in Movies into a consensus waters down everything that makes an individual list idiosyncratic and thus interesting. But in the end, I do believe that what’s valuable about these activities is valuable enough to outweigh what’s annoying: if you read this blog regularly and have come to draw a bead on my tastes in relation to your own, maybe seeing a list of my favorite New York theatrical releases of 2008 will help jog your memory about films you meant to see (or avoid), and now that many of these are available on DVD, maybe you’ll make it happen (or not). My full ballot is posted at indieWIRE now. I chose not to rank the titles from 1-10, but they did reel out of my brain in a particular order, and that has to mean something. Below the jump, my theatrical favorites, with links back to previous coverage, and notes on where/how each film can currently be seen. A Christmas Tale Reviewed on November 11, 2008: “A Christmas Tale reunites [Emanuelle] Devos and [Mathieu] Amalric as an oil and water romantic unit, as if giving their doomed lovers from Kings the last chance that narrative logic wouldn’t previously let them have.  Devos is a sideline character in Christmas, but an important one: her unfathomably calm tolerance of Henri’s uncontrollable impulse for destruction is an emblem of Desplechin’s unique humanism.” Where can you see it? It’s currently in limited release, and on IFC On Demand. Synecdoche, NY Reviewed on October 23, 2008: “[It's] about the fear of death, the impossibility of romance in the absence of longing, the instinct to project our desires on to others and to seek answers about ourselves in mirror images. In other words, as theater director Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman) says of his own life’s work, ‘It’s about everything.’” Where can you see it? Currently on about 100 screens nationwide, it should be out on DVD in the spring. Build a Ship, Sail to Sadness Reviewed briefly on February 7, 2008: “Laurin Federlein’s highly-improvised, Hi8-sourced, sorta-doc/sorta-musical…is the kind of balls-out, so independent it’s essentially handmade work of art that’s notably missing from festivals like Sundance.” I also discussed it on this episode of FIlmCouch. Where can you see it? Good question. It screened for one week in New York almost a year ago. Now, Netflix has a page for it…which says its DVD release date is unknown. My Winnipeg Reviewed on June 13, 2008: “One could be generous, and praise [Guy] Maddin for effectively tapping into the muddied logic of the small town in endless winter, where physical numbness from the inhuman external elements often leads to a kind of booze-aided intellectual numbness. There, so many frigid anti-socials rock a kind of mutual indifference that, when it gets really bad, borders on inhumane (I’ve never been to Winnipeg, but I did spend three winters in Chicago). One could also recalibrate that as a pejorative: you could just say that Maddin directs like a drunk.” Where can you see it? A UK DVD is already out; Amazon suggests that a US version is on its way. Woman on the Beach I never reviewed Hong Sang Soo’s release, which opened at the very beginning of 2008 after the indieWIRE Critics’ Poll declared it the best undistributed film of 2007. But Manohla Dargis did: “As usual in Mr. Hong’s films, everyone will consume too much alcohol, insults will be exchanged, and confessions will be made. A man and a woman will have fumbling, embarrassed and terribly sad sex, the memory of which will haunt them and the story and probably you. Only the rooms will be shabby, never the sentiment.” Where can you see it? New Yorker will release a new DVD on December 30. Rachel Getting Married Reviewed on October 3, 2008: “[Anne] Hathaway’s vulnerability in this tricky role is stunning, but slyly so: as a viewer you can loathe her presence, as some of the personalities in the film speace seem to, and then with a single cut realize that she’s gone from a scene and not only miss her, but actually, actively worry about where she is and what she’s up to.” See also notes on The Liberal Guilt Thing. Where can you see it? On 150 screens after nearly three months in release, if Hathaway gets her expected Best Actress nomination the release will likely expand. La France Reviewed on July 9, 2008: “It’s a musical with just one song, performed by non-performers in a handful of mutations throughout the film. And it’s a love story, soaked in romantic delusion but ultimately fatalist in regards to the actual odds that love can overcome existential crisis….Is this France––or was it? An empty space on which the lonely and lost draw their own impossibly romantic fantasies, only to wander towards inevitable disappointments with heads and hearts infected by the deceptively simple beauty of pop?” Where can you see it: There is a French DVD. Again, Netflix has a page, but it’s unclear when there will be a US release for them to do something with it. Mister Lonely Reviewed on March 16, 2008: “Making movies just seems to be an extension of [Harmony Korine's] primary goal of slipping in and out of identities, of nailing us before we can nail him. I know this, and yet I throw up my hands and give in to it, because with Mister Lonely, the process and the product seem to fuse. Consider me suckered. Where can I see it? It’s available on DVD. Flight of the Red Balloon I saw Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s dreamy take-off on the children’s short The Red Balloon once in 2007 and once in 2008, but somehow I’ve never written about it. That’s okay, because Andrew O’Hehir has: Where can I see it? It’s on DVD. Encounters at the End of the World I caught Werner Herzog’s travelogue some time after Paul reviewed it at its Telluride premiere, so I didn’t publish my own review, but over the months I’ve become convinced that, in producing a not-very-thinly-veiled work of autobiography about insanity and the human instinct to conquer unknown worlds and make them their own, Herzog has wittingly or not made a companion film to his friend Harmony Korine’s Mister Lonely. More on that theory in 2009, perhaps. Where can I see it? It’s on DVD. Originally posted on:SpoutBlog » Karina Longworth http://www.spout.com/blogs/spoutblog/archive/2008/12/17/38485.aspx Post By: SpoutBlog
Post To: SpoutBlog on spout.com
Post Date: 12/17/2008 12:01:26 PM
Body: As I hinted at a bit yesterday when I posted about some of the best undistributed films of the year, I have a love/hate relationship with the idea of movie ranking. The idea that any of us––critic, blogger, professional, amateur…to the extent that any of those words mean anything anymore––could be indisputably “correct” in our individual execution of such an activity is insane; and of course, any attempt to draw each of our subjective takes on The Year in Movies into a consensus waters down everything that makes an individual list idiosyncratic and thus interesting. But in the end, I do believe that what’s valuable about these activities is valuable enough to outweigh what’s annoying: if you read this blog regularly and have come to draw a bead on my tastes in relation to your own, maybe seeing a list of my favorite New York theatrical releases of 2008 will help jog your memory about films you meant to see (or avoid), and now that many of these are available on DVD, maybe you’ll make it happen (or not). My full ballot is posted at indieWIRE now. I chose not to rank the titles from 1-10, but they did reel out of my brain in a particular order, and that has to mean something. Below the jump, my theatrical favorites, with links back to previous coverage, and notes on where/how each film can currently be seen. A Christmas Tale Reviewed on November 11, 2008: “A Christmas Tale reunites [Emanuelle] Devos and [Mathieu] Amalric as an oil and water romantic unit, as if giving their doomed lovers from Kings the last chance that narrative logic wouldn’t previously let them have.  Devos is a sideline character in Christmas, but an important one: her unfathomably calm tolerance of Henri’s uncontrollable impulse for destruction is an emblem of Desplechin’s unique humanism.” Where can you see it? It’s currently in limited release, and on IFC On Demand. Synecdoche, NY Reviewed on October 23, 2008: “[It's] about the fear of death, the impossibility of romance in the absence of longing, the instinct to project our desires on to others and to seek answers about ourselves in mirror images. In other words, as theater director Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman) says of his own life’s work, ‘It’s about everything.’” Where can you see it? Currently on about 100 screens nationwide, it should be out on DVD in the spring. Build a Ship, Sail to Sadness Reviewed briefly on February 7, 2008: “Laurin Federlein’s highly-improvised, Hi8-sourced, sorta-doc/sorta-musical…is the kind of balls-out, so independent it’s essentially handmade work of art that’s notably missing from festivals like Sundance.” I also discussed it on this episode of FIlmCouch. Where can you see it? Good question. It screened for one week in New York almost a year ago. Now, Netflix has a page for it…which says its DVD release date is unknown. My Winnipeg Reviewed on June 13, 2008: “One could be generous, and praise [Guy] Maddin for effectively tapping into the muddied logic of the small town in endless winter, where physical numbness from the inhuman external elements often leads to a kind of booze-aided intellectual numbness. There, so many frigid anti-socials rock a kind of mutual indifference that, when it gets really bad, borders on inhumane (I’ve never been to Winnipeg, but I did spend three winters in Chicago). One could also recalibrate that as a pejorative: you could just say that Maddin directs like a drunk.” Where can you see it? A UK DVD is already out; Amazon suggests that a US version is on its way. Woman on the Beach I never reviewed Hong Sang Soo’s release, which opened at the very beginning of 2008 after the indieWIRE Critics’ Poll declared it the best undistributed film of 2007. But Manohla Dargis did: “As usual in Mr. Hong’s films, everyone will consume too much alcohol, insults will be exchanged, and confessions will be made. A man and a woman will have fumbling, embarrassed and terribly sad sex, the memory of which will haunt them and the story and probably you. Only the rooms will be shabby, never the sentiment.” Where can you see it? New Yorker will release a new DVD on December 30. Rachel Getting Married Reviewed on October 3, 2008: “[Anne] Hathaway’s vulnerability in this tricky role is stunning, but slyly so: as a viewer you can loathe her presence, as some of the personalities in the film speace seem to, and then with a single cut realize that she’s gone from a scene and not only miss her, but actually, actively worry about where she is and what she’s up to.” See also notes on The Liberal Guilt Thing. Where can you see it? On 150 screens after nearly three months in release, if Hathaway gets her expected Best Actress nomination the release will likely expand. La France Reviewed on July 9, 2008: “It’s a musical with just one song, performed by non-performers in a handful of mutations throughout the film. And it’s a love story, soaked in romantic delusion but ultimately fatalist in regards to the actual odds that love can overcome existential crisis….Is this France––or was it? An empty space on which the lonely and lost draw their own impossibly romantic fantasies, only to wander towards inevitable disappointments with heads and hearts infected by the deceptively simple beauty of pop?” Where can you see it: There is a French DVD. Again, Netflix has a page, but it’s unclear when there will be a US release for them to do something with it. Mister Lonely Reviewed on March 16, 2008: “Making movies just seems to be an extension of [Harmony Korine's] primary goal of slipping in and out of identities, of nailing us before we can nail him. I know this, and yet I throw up my hands and give in to it, because with Mister Lonely, the process and the product seem to fuse. Consider me suckered. Where can I see it? It’s available on DVD. Flight of the Red Balloon I saw Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s dreamy take-off on the children’s short The Red Balloon once in 2007 and once in 2008, but somehow I’ve never written about it. That’s okay, because Andrew O’Hehir has: Where can I see it? It’s on DVD. Encounters at the End of the World I caught Werner Herzog’s travelogue some time after Paul reviewed it at its Telluride premiere, so I didn’t publish my own review, but over the months I’ve become convinced that, in producing a not-very-thinly-veiled work of autobiography about insanity and the human instinct to conquer unknown worlds and make them their own, Herzog has wittingly or not made a companion film to his friend Harmony Korine’s Mister Lonely. More on that theory in 2009, perhaps. Where can I see it? It’s on DVD. Originally posted on:SpoutBlog
]]>Wed, 17 Dec 2008 17:01:26 GMTSpoutBlogSpoutBlog on spout.com12/17/2008 12:01:26 PMAs I hinted at a bit yesterday when I posted about some of the best undistributed films of the year, I have a love/hate relationship with the idea of movie ranking. The idea that any of us––critic, blogger, professional, amateur…to the extent that any of those words mean anything anymore––could be indisputably “correct” in our individual execution of such an activity is insane; and of course, any attempt to draw each of our subjective takes on The Year in Movies into a consensus waters down everything that makes an individual list idiosyncratic and thus interesting. But in the end, I do believe that what’s valuable about these activities is valuable enough to outweigh what’s annoying: if you read this blog regularly and have come to draw a bead on my tastes in relation to your own, maybe seeing a list of my favorite New York theatrical releases of 2008 will help jog your memory about films you meant to see (or avoid), and now that many of these are available on DVD, maybe you’ll make it happen (or not). My full ballot is posted at indieWIRE now. I chose not to rank the titles from 1-10, but they did reel out of my brain in a particular order, and that has to mean something. Below the jump, my theatrical favorites, with links back to previous coverage, and notes on where/how each film can currently be seen. A Christmas Tale Reviewed on November 11, 2008: “A Christmas Tale reunites [Emanuelle] Devos and [Mathieu] Amalric as an oil and water romantic unit, as if giving their doomed lovers from Kings the last chance that narrative logic wouldn’t previously let them have.  Devos is a sideline character in Christmas, but an important one: her unfathomably calm tolerance of Henri’s uncontrollable impulse for destruction is an emblem of Desplechin’s unique humanism.” Where can you see it? It’s currently in limited release, and on IFC On Demand. Synecdoche, NY Reviewed on October 23, 2008: “[It's] about the fear of death, the impossibility of romance in the absence of longing, the instinct to project our desires on to others and to seek answers about ourselves in mirror images. In other words, as theater director Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman) says of his own life’s work, ‘It’s about everything.’” Where can you see it? Currently on about 100 screens nationwide, it should be out on DVD in the spring. Build a Ship, Sail to Sadness Reviewed briefly on February 7, 2008: “Laurin Federlein’s highly-improvised, Hi8-sourced, sorta-doc/sorta-musical…is the kind of balls-out, so independent it’s essentially handmade work of art that’s notably missing from festivals like Sundance.” I also discussed it on this episode of FIlmCouch. Where can you see it? Good question. It screened for one week in New York almost a year ago. Now, Netflix has a page for it…which says its DVD release date is unknown. My Winnipeg Reviewed on June 13, 2008: “One could be generous, and praise [Guy] Maddin for effectively tapping into the muddied logic of the small town in endless winter, where physical numbness from the inhuman external elements often leads to a kind of booze-aided intellectual numbness. There, so many frigid anti-socials rock a kind of mutual indifference that, when it gets really bad, borders on inhumane (I’ve never been to Winnipeg, but I did spend three winters in Chicago). One could also recalibrate that as a pejorative: you could just say that Maddin directs like a drunk.” Where can you see it? A UK DVD is already out; Amazon suggests that a US version is on its way. Woman on the Beach I never reviewed Hong Sang Soo’s release, which opened at the very beginning of 2008 after the indieWIRE Critics’ Poll declared it the best undistributed film of 2007. But Manohla Dargis did: “As usual in Mr. Hong’s films, everyone will consume too much alcohol, insults will be exchanged, and confessions will be made. A man and a woman will have fumbling, embarrassed and terribly sad sex, the memory of which will haunt them and the story and probably you. Only the rooms will be shabby, never the sentiment.” Where can you see it? New Yorker will release a new DVD on December 30. Rachel Getting Married Reviewed on October 3, 2008: “[Anne] Hathaway’s vulnerability in this tricky role is stunning, but slyly so: as a viewer you can loathe her presence, as some of the personalities in the film speace seem to, and then with a single cut realize that she’s gone from a scene and not only miss her, but actually, actively worry about where she is and what she’s up to.” See also notes on The Liberal Guilt Thing. Where can you see it? On 150 screens after nearly three months in release, if Hathaway gets her expected Best Actress nomination the release will likely expand. La France Reviewed on July 9, 2008: “It’s a musical with just one song, performed by non-performers in a handful of mutations throughout the film. And it’s a love story, soaked in romantic delusion but ultimately fatalist in regards to the actual odds that love can overcome existential crisis….Is this France––or was it? An empty space on which the lonely and lost draw their own impossibly romantic fantasies, only to wander towards inevitable disappointments with heads and hearts infected by the deceptively simple beauty of pop?” Where can you see it: There is a French DVD. Again, Netflix has a page, but it’s unclear when there will be a US release for them to do something with it. Mister Lonely Reviewed on March 16, 2008: “Making movies just seems to be an extension of [Harmony Korine's] primary goal of slipping in and out of identities, of nailing us before we can nail him. I know this, and yet I throw up my hands and give in to it, because with Mister Lonely, the process and the product seem to fuse. Consider me suckered. Where can I see it? It’s available on DVD. Flight of the Red Balloon I saw Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s dreamy take-off on the children’s short The Red Balloon once in 2007 and once in 2008, but somehow I’ve never written about it. That’s okay, because Andrew O’Hehir has: Where can I see it? It’s on DVD. Encounters at the End of the World I caught Werner Herzog’s travelogue some time after Paul reviewed it at its Telluride premiere, so I didn’t publish my own review, but over the months I’ve become convinced that, in producing a not-very-thinly-veiled work of autobiography about insanity and the human instinct to conquer unknown worlds and make them their own, Herzog has wittingly or not made a companion film to his friend Harmony Korine’s Mister Lonely. More on that theory in 2009, perhaps. Where can I see it? It’s on DVD. Originally posted on:SpoutBlog http://www.spout.com/groups/Community_Recommendations/Re_Collaboration_Best_Films_of_2008/643/38152/1/ShowPost.aspx Post By: mercurial
Post To: Community Recommendations
Post Date: 12/9/2008 6:30:49 PM
Body: Liked these (in no particular order): Cloverfield Incredible theatrical experience. Might be hampered watching at home. Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist Cutesy teen flick. Had a great 80's feel to it. Hamlet 2 Perverse and just plain hilarious throughout. Great original music. House Bunny I'm a sucker for Anna Faris and she plays a ditzy Playmate perfectly. The Dark Knight A comic geek's wet dream. My Winnipeg Immensely creative, original film. A flurry of emotions in a bizarre little package. WALL-E Heartbreakingly sentimental love story; action packed galactic adventure. Iron Man Another comic geek's wet dream. And Robert Downey Jr. Nuff said. The Fall Just insanely wondrous film. Deserves the comparisons to The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. Speed Racer Seizure inducing fanboy fun. Savage Grace Frightening 'Based on a True Story' film. Amazing performances. The Strangers Nothing new, but executed perfectly. Dark, abysmal terror. My Blueberry Nights Subtle, nuanced performances and beautiful direction. Packed with emotion. Miss Pettigrew Lives For a Day Carefree, fanciful period flick. Amy Adams and Frances McDormand are a perfect slapstick duo on screen. Jumper Big budget Sci-Fi blockbuster without all the annoying garnishes. Watching the Detectives Made for cinephiles about cinephiles. Hokey fun. Movies that might be on my list that I haven't seen yet: Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead The Curious Case of Benjamin Button The Spirit Doubt The Wrestler The Brothers Bloom Revolutionary Road Repo! The Genetic Opera Humboldt County Just Buried Milk Australia Rachel Getting Married W. Fear(s) of the Dark Synecdoche, New York Zack and Miri Make a Porno Towelhead Vicky Cristina Barcelona The Wackness Brideshead Revisited Glass: A Portrait in Twelve Parts
]]>Tue, 09 Dec 2008 23:30:49 GMTmercurialCommunity Recommendations12/9/2008 6:30:49 PMLiked these (in no particular order): Cloverfield Incredible theatrical experience. Might be hampered watching at home. Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist Cutesy teen flick. Had a great 80's feel to it. Hamlet 2 Perverse and just plain hilarious throughout. Great original music. House Bunny I'm a sucker for Anna Faris and she plays a ditzy Playmate perfectly. The Dark Knight A comic geek's wet dream. My Winnipeg Immensely creative, original film. A flurry of emotions in a bizarre little package. WALL-E Heartbreakingly sentimental love story; action packed galactic adventure. Iron Man Another comic geek's wet dream. And Robert Downey Jr. Nuff said. The Fall Just insanely wondrous film. Deserves the comparisons to The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. Speed Racer Seizure inducing fanboy fun. Savage Grace Frightening 'Based on a True Story' film. Amazing performances. The Strangers Nothing new, but executed perfectly. Dark, abysmal terror. My Blueberry Nights Subtle, nuanced performances and beautiful direction. Packed with emotion. Miss Pettigrew Lives For a Day Carefree, fanciful period flick. Amy Adams and Frances McDormand are a perfect slapstick duo on screen. Jumper Big budget Sci-Fi blockbuster without all the annoying garnishes. Watching the Detectives Made for cinephiles about cinephiles. Hokey fun. Movies that might be on my list that I haven't seen yet: Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead The Curious Case of Benjamin Button The Spirit Doubt The Wrestler The Brothers Bloom Revolutionary Road Repo! The Genetic Opera Humboldt County Just Buried Milk Australia Rachel Getting Married W. Fear(s) of the Dark Synecdoche, New York Zack and Miri Make a Porno Towelhead Vicky Cristina Barcelona The Wackness Brideshead Revisited Glass: A Portrait in Twelve Parts http://www.spout.com/blogs/smooth_j/archive/2008/11/2/36886.aspx Post By: Smooth_J
Post To: Smooth_J Blog
Post Date: 11/2/2008 9:45:42 PM
Body: After various failed attempts at catching a showing of this at local independent film theaters, I finally found the DVD on sale on Candian Amazon.com (whoda thought?). Being a huge Guy Maddin fan, I cannot explain my anticipation for this film. It is a difficult one to get into--you plunge instantly into Maddin's wonderful and bizarre psyche, and you do not leave until the snow stops blowing on the soundtrack and the credits roll to the film's haunting instrumental music. His trademark patchwork, kaleidoscopic style of editing and plotting is evident from this point, although it is slightly more restrained; only in select sequences does he harken to the silent film, frenzied montage style of his previous work. This is a more focused Maddin, albeit a more reflective and meditative one. His power of observation and his peculiar outlook and comparisons are demonstrated mostly through his poetic, longing narration (which he records himself, a very personal touch). In a library of almost uncomfortably intimate films, this is by far his most personal. Every emotion that Maddin feels is felt by the viewer; every event that is described is visualized brilliantly as well. It is a film of uncanny power, and it is ambitious in its delivery--how is it possible to pull off a documentary on a city's history/his own personal languishment? Maddin manages the difficult task perfectly, infusing every aspect of his character used in his films thus far, and including parts untouched as of yet; it is a passage into his mind, and it is a hypnotizing experience. If you are not a fan of Maddin, the film may be too much; it is surrealist and incredibly strange, and difficult to stomach if you are not in agreement of his very unique sensibilites. It also helps to have background on his previous films and on his general story, because it increases your understanding of the movie as a whole. However, it is highly recommended. From its dreamy opening to Maddin's heartbreaking final lament, it is an impelling film, deeply nostalgic and quietly powerful.
]]>Mon, 03 Nov 2008 02:45:42 GMTSmooth_JSmooth_J Blog11/2/2008 9:45:42 PMAfter various failed attempts at catching a showing of this at local independent film theaters, I finally found the DVD on sale on Candian Amazon.com (whoda thought?). Being a huge Guy Maddin fan, I cannot explain my anticipation for this film. It is a difficult one to get into--you plunge instantly into Maddin's wonderful and bizarre psyche, and you do not leave until the snow stops blowing on the soundtrack and the credits roll to the film's haunting instrumental music. His trademark patchwork, kaleidoscopic style of editing and plotting is evident from this point, although it is slightly more restrained; only in select sequences does he harken to the silent film, frenzied montage style of his previous work. This is a more focused Maddin, albeit a more reflective and meditative one. His power of observation and his peculiar outlook and comparisons are demonstrated mostly through his poetic, longing narration (which he records himself, a very personal touch). In a library of almost uncomfortably intimate films, this is by far his most personal. Every emotion that Maddin feels is felt by the viewer; every event that is described is visualized brilliantly as well. It is a film of uncanny power, and it is ambitious in its delivery--how is it possible to pull off a documentary on a city's history/his own personal languishment? Maddin manages the difficult task perfectly, infusing every aspect of his character used in his films thus far, and including parts untouched as of yet; it is a passage into his mind, and it is a hypnotizing experience. If you are not a fan of Maddin, the film may be too much; it is surrealist and incredibly strange, and difficult to stomach if you are not in agreement of his very unique sensibilites. It also helps to have background on his previous films and on his general story, because it increases your understanding of the movie as a whole. However, it is highly recommended. From its dreamy opening to Maddin's heartbreaking final lament, it is an impelling film, deeply nostalgic and quietly powerful. http://www.spout.com/groups/Criterion_Collection/Re_Criterion_Predictions/115/32134/1/ShowPost.aspx Post By: Smooth_J
Post To: Criterion Collection
Post Date: 7/4/2008 3:55:19 PM
Body: [quote user="leeroy711"] I definately think (and hope) at some point they release Z. This is one that came finally made it to dvd in (I'm guessing) a very limited release. The only place you can find a copy is online and the asking price is usually around $35-45. There isn't much to speak of when in regards to special features. This is one of my favorite films and I'm reduced to finding it at the library everytime I want to watch it. I wouldn't mind paying the $30+ for it if it were criterion though. [/quote] I've been meaning to see that, but I really can't find it anywhere reasonably priced, so I really hope your right about a Criterion release. A couple of films that I feel definitely deserve and most likely will receive Criterion release because of currently crappy DVD releases are the Bunuel and Dali collaborations Un Chien Andalou and L'age d'Or. They're both amazing films, very influential, and Criterion's got a good collection of Bunuel released (have yet to see any of them though) I'd think at some point they may present both of these short(er) films as a package deal. And, considering their upcoming release of Guy Maddin's Brand Upon the Brain (can't wait!!), I have a feeling that they'll release at least a couple more of his films, possibly depending on the success of BUTB. My best guesses would be some more of his short films (a couple are on the BUTB release) and maybe some of his older stuff that has bad or out of print releases, such as Careful. I'm hoping for a release of My Winnipeg, because that looks amazing, but I'll really take any release for that.
]]>Fri, 04 Jul 2008 19:55:19 GMTSmooth_JCriterion Collection7/4/2008 3:55:19 PM[quote user="leeroy711"] I definately think (and hope) at some point they release Z. This is one that came finally made it to dvd in (I'm guessing) a very limited release. The only place you can find a copy is online and the asking price is usually around $35-45. There isn't much to speak of when in regards to special features. This is one of my favorite films and I'm reduced to finding it at the library everytime I want to watch it. I wouldn't mind paying the $30+ for it if it were criterion though. [/quote] I've been meaning to see that, but I really can't find it anywhere reasonably priced, so I really hope your right about a Criterion release. A couple of films that I feel definitely deserve and most likely will receive Criterion release because of currently crappy DVD releases are the Bunuel and Dali collaborations Un Chien Andalou and L'age d'Or. They're both amazing films, very influential, and Criterion's got a good collection of Bunuel released (have yet to see any of them though) I'd think at some point they may present both of these short(er) films as a package deal. And, considering their upcoming release of Guy Maddin's Brand Upon the Brain (can't wait!!), I have a feeling that they'll release at least a couple more of his films, possibly depending on the success of BUTB. My best guesses would be some more of his short films (a couple are on the BUTB release) and maybe some of his older stuff that has bad or out of print releases, such as Careful. I'm hoping for a release of My Winnipeg, because that looks amazing, but I'll really take any release for that. http://www.spout.com/blogs/karina/archive/2008/6/13/31211.aspx Post By: Karina
Post To: Karina on SpoutBlog
Post Date: 6/13/2008 12:00:52 PM
Body: Guy Maddin’s Winnipeg is a dreamland patchwork of half truths and exaggerations, a standard-issue suburban incubator carved into blank screen fields of snow so blinding white they seem almost hot, on which Maddin has projected a secret life. He was commissioned to make My Winnipeg, an ostensible non-fiction portrait of his hometown commissioned by The Documentary Channel, but the city itself is only of concern to him insofar as it’s an extension of and metaphor for his psyche. He casts the project as his attempt to come to terms, once and for all, with his fever stream of memories (real and fabricated) inextricably intertwined with the places and spaces where he grew up. The question of “real” doesn’t matter. While Darcy Fehr, the actor hired to be his (younger, improbably attractive) stand-in, nods off next to a bottle on a moving train, the real Maddin, our narrator, informs us of his designs on Winnipeg: “I must leave it! I’ll film my way out!” “Sleepwalking, sleepchugging.” This is how Maddin’s voiceover at one point describes the peculiarly narcoleptic denizens of Winnipeg moving through their days and nights. The phrase is an apt descriptor for the tone of the film: it’s not just groggy, it’s intoxicated, often frustratingly so. One could be generous, and praise Maddin for effectively tapping into the muddied logic of the small town in endless winter, where physical numbness from the inhuman external elements often leads to a kind of booze-aided intellectual numbness, where so many frigid anti-socials rock a kind of mutual indifference that, when it gets really bad, borders on inhumane (I’ve never been to Winnipeg, but I did spend three winters in Chicago). One could also recalibrate that as a pejorative: you could just say that Maddin directs like a drunk. One specific drunk, actually. Rarely allowing one image stand on its own for more than ten frames or so before dissolving in something new to see, generally dictated more by pattern than a linear thought, Maddin unravels his yarn in psychedelic, kaleidoscopic layers that seem a few years advanced down the timeline from his usual silent era influences. He’s basically playing at being a Busby Berkeley for the chronically depressed and/or cheerfully repressed. “The forks, the lap, the fur,” Maddin moans, conflating the topography of his hometown with his mother’s birth canal and the comic-violent car accident that may or may not have involved the dissolution of his sister’s virginity. Maddin can’t quite remember how it all went down, and, determined to sort one or two things out before giving up the ghost town for good, he rents his childhood home, hires actors to play his mother and siblings, an proceeds to mount deadpan recreations of the boyhood memories by which he’s most haunted. The reenactments star aged noir siren Ann Savage as Maddin’s mother, here recast as the female lead of Ledge Man, Winnipeg’s (fictional) only local television production. Ledge Man, Maddin tells us, comes on every afternoon, and his mother never misses a chance to see herself on the small screen. Every episode is roughly the same: a young man (played by Darcy Fehr, the actor who sleeps as Maddin in the train sequences) stands on a ledge outside his mother’s window, threatening to end it all; the proud, resilient old bat spends the length of the episode talking him into coming in. As Mrs. Maddin, Savage watches herself as Mama Ledge Man with wide, glazed eyes, enraptured over her own power over the boy. In his voiceover, Maddin refers to her simply as “Mother,” and when it comes time to direct her, he’s sure she’s playing a power game. “Just to show me who’s boss, she’ll transpose a line,” he sneers. “Anything to flub a take.” That Oedipal tug-of-war (and Maddin’s masochistic resignation to it: “Her lap, a magnetic pull, a direction from which I can’t turn for long…”) is the closest thing My Winnipeg’s blur of personal history and fake history has to a connecting narrative string. The further Maddin drifts from the family reenactments, the more tenuous that string becomes, and though the latter half’s memorials to Winnipeg’s dying landmarks and “game playing reveries lost in time” offer both melancholic beauty and a few good jokes, after a short 80 minutes it feels like we’ve seen two films. A review of My Winnipeg published earlier this week ruined a good 24 hours of my life. I sat at the bar that night and railed: “This is it––contrarianism has gone too far!!!” My friends rolled their eyes a bit but humored me. Yes, I’ve seen My Winnipeg three times since in premiered at Toronto last fall and consider myself an unabashed (though not uncritical) Guy Maddin fan. But I didn’t care that the review was negative; I cared that it suggested that even contemplating My Winnipeg as something worth contemplating is a waste of time. “[N]o aggravated efforts of either elevation or condemnation are warranted here,” sniffed Reverse Shot’s Andrew Tracy, in a review that nonetheless devoted over 900 words to Winnipeg, most given over to skepticism regarding Maddin as a critically beloved character. The actual complaints offered were, as promised, less than strenuously argued. One gripe had to do with Maddin’s sexually ambiguous filmic mode of address, and the supposedly incongruous fact that in real life, he apparently only likes to fuck women. This makes him the only artist––as far as I know, ever––to either work out anxieties and alternate, amorphous desires in their work rather than in their real worlds, or to employ a politicized stylistic mode out of context. What follows is a condemnation of Maddin’s use of “cheap irony” at the expense of “serious irony”, the refusal to say anything either political or deeply critical about sexuality, the fact that “for all the polymorphous perversion on display throughout his films, there is little about the Maddin oeuvre that genuinely touches upon the erotic.” In short: Maddin doesn’t mean it. But whose to say that farce is necessarily insincere? If My Winnipeg succeeds in painting home as where the heart of wildly narcissistic delusion is, it’s largely because it deflates that delusion just enough by using a collage of self-indulgent lies and confession and tastes curated to personal preference not as a defense mechanism, but as an offense. Originally posted on:SpoutBlog » Karina Longworth
]]>Fri, 13 Jun 2008 16:00:52 GMTKarinaKarina on SpoutBlog6/13/2008 12:00:52 PM Guy Maddin’s Winnipeg is a dreamland patchwork of half truths and exaggerations, a standard-issue suburban incubator carved into blank screen fields of snow so blinding white they seem almost hot, on which Maddin has projected a secret life. He was commissioned to make My Winnipeg, an ostensible non-fiction portrait of his hometown commissioned by The Documentary Channel, but the city itself is only of concern to him insofar as it’s an extension of and metaphor for his psyche. He casts the project as his attempt to come to terms, once and for all, with his fever stream of memories (real and fabricated) inextricably intertwined with the places and spaces where he grew up. The question of “real” doesn’t matter. While Darcy Fehr, the actor hired to be his (younger, improbably attractive) stand-in, nods off next to a bottle on a moving train, the real Maddin, our narrator, informs us of his designs on Winnipeg: “I must leave it! I’ll film my way out!” “Sleepwalking, sleepchugging.” This is how Maddin’s voiceover at one point describes the peculiarly narcoleptic denizens of Winnipeg moving through their days and nights. The phrase is an apt descriptor for the tone of the film: it’s not just groggy, it’s intoxicated, often frustratingly so. One could be generous, and praise Maddin for effectively tapping into the muddied logic of the small town in endless winter, where physical numbness from the inhuman external elements often leads to a kind of booze-aided intellectual numbness, where so many frigid anti-socials rock a kind of mutual indifference that, when it gets really bad, borders on inhumane (I’ve never been to Winnipeg, but I did spend three winters in Chicago). One could also recalibrate that as a pejorative: you could just say that Maddin directs like a drunk. One specific drunk, actually. Rarely allowing one image stand on its own for more than ten frames or so before dissolving in something new to see, generally dictated more by pattern than a linear thought, Maddin unravels his yarn in psychedelic, kaleidoscopic layers that seem a few years advanced down the timeline from his usual silent era influences. He’s basically playing at being a Busby Berkeley for the chronically depressed and/or cheerfully repressed. “The forks, the lap, the fur,” Maddin moans, conflating the topography of his hometown with his mother’s birth canal and the comic-violent car accident that may or may not have involved the dissolution of his sister’s virginity. Maddin can’t quite remember how it all went down, and, determined to sort one or two things out before giving up the ghost town for good, he rents his childhood home, hires actors to play his mother and siblings, an proceeds to mount deadpan recreations of the boyhood memories by which he’s most haunted. The reenactments star aged noir siren Ann Savage as Maddin’s mother, here recast as the female lead of Ledge Man, Winnipeg’s (fictional) only local television production. Ledge Man, Maddin tells us, comes on every afternoon, and his mother never misses a chance to see herself on the small screen. Every episode is roughly the same: a young man (played by Darcy Fehr, the actor who sleeps as Maddin in the train sequences) stands on a ledge outside his mother’s window, threatening to end it all; the proud, resilient old bat spends the length of the episode talking him into coming in. As Mrs. Maddin, Savage watches herself as Mama Ledge Man with wide, glazed eyes, enraptured over her own power over the boy. In his voiceover, Maddin refers to her simply as “Mother,” and when it comes time to direct her, he’s sure she’s playing a power game. “Just to show me who’s boss, she’ll transpose a line,” he sneers. “Anything to flub a take.” That Oedipal tug-of-war (and Maddin’s masochistic resignation to it: “Her lap, a magnetic pull, a direction from which I can’t turn for long…”) is the closest thing My Winnipeg’s blur of personal history and fake history has to a connecting narrative string. The further Maddin drifts from the family reenactments, the more tenuous that string becomes, and though the latter half’s memorials to Winnipeg’s dying landmarks and “game playing reveries lost in time” offer both melancholic beauty and a few good jokes, after a short 80 minutes it feels like we’ve seen two films. A review of My Winnipeg published earlier this week ruined a good 24 hours of my life. I sat at the bar that night and railed: “This is it––contrarianism has gone too far!!!” My friends rolled their eyes a bit but humored me. Yes, I’ve seen My Winnipeg three times since in premiered at Toronto last fall and consider myself an unabashed (though not uncritical) Guy Maddin fan. But I didn’t care that the review was negative; I cared that it suggested that even contemplating My Winnipeg as something worth contemplating is a waste of time. “[N]o aggravated efforts of either elevation or condemnation are warranted here,” sniffed Reverse Shot’s Andrew Tracy, in a review that nonetheless devoted over 900 words to Winnipeg, most given over to skepticism regarding Maddin as a critically beloved character. The actual complaints offered were, as promised, less than strenuously argued. One gripe had to do with Maddin’s sexually ambiguous filmic mode of address, and the supposedly incongruous fact that in real life, he apparently only likes to fuck women. This makes him the only artist––as far as I know, ever––to either work out anxieties and alternate, amorphous desires in their work rather than in their real worlds, or to employ a politicized stylistic mode out of context. What follows is a condemnation of Maddin’s use of “cheap irony” at the expense of “serious irony”, the refusal to say anything either political or deeply critical about sexuality, the fact that “for all the polymorphous perversion on display throughout his films, there is little about the Maddin oeuvre that genuinely touches upon the erotic.” In short: Maddin doesn’t mean it. But whose to say that farce is necessarily insincere? If My Winnipeg succeeds in painting home as where the heart of wildly narcissistic delusion is, it’s largely because it deflates that delusion just enough by using a collage of self-indulgent lies and confession and tastes curated to personal preference not as a defense mechanism, but as an offense. Originally posted on:SpoutBlog » Karina Longworth http://www.spout.com/blogs/spoutblog/archive/2008/6/13/31210.aspx Post By: SpoutBlog
Post To: SpoutBlog on spout.com
Post Date: 6/13/2008 12:00:44 PM
Body: Guy Maddin’s Winnipeg is a dreamland patchwork of half truths and exaggerations, a standard-issue suburban incubator carved into blank screen fields of snow so blinding white they seem almost hot, on which Maddin has projected a secret life. He was commissioned to make My Winnipeg, an ostensible non-fiction portrait of his hometown commissioned by The Documentary Channel, but the city itself is only of concern to him insofar as it’s an extension of and metaphor for his psyche. He casts the project as his attempt to come to terms, once and for all, with his fever stream of memories (real and fabricated) inextricably intertwined with the places and spaces where he grew up. The question of “real” doesn’t matter. While Darcy Fehr, the actor hired to be his (younger, improbably attractive) stand-in, nods off next to a bottle on a moving train, the real Maddin, our narrator, informs us of his designs on Winnipeg: “I must leave it! I’ll film my way out!” “Sleepwalking, sleepchugging.” This is how Maddin’s voiceover at one point describes the peculiarly narcoleptic denizens of Winnipeg moving through their days and nights. The phrase is an apt descriptor for the tone of the film: it’s not just groggy, it’s intoxicated, often frustratingly so. One could be generous, and praise Maddin for effectively tapping into the muddied logic of the small town in endless winter, where physical numbness from the inhuman external elements often leads to a kind of booze-aided intellectual numbness, where so many frigid anti-socials rock a kind of mutual indifference that, when it gets really bad, borders on inhumane (I’ve never been to Winnipeg, but I did spend three winters in Chicago). One could also recalibrate that as a pejorative: you could just say that Maddin directs like a drunk. One specific drunk, actually. Rarely allowing one image stand on its own for more than ten frames or so before dissolving in something new to see, generally dictated more by pattern than a linear thought, Maddin unravels his yarn in psychedelic, kaleidoscopic layers that seem a few years advanced down the timeline from his usual silent era influences. He’s basically playing at being a Busby Berkeley for the chronically depressed and/or cheerfully repressed. “The forks, the lap, the fur,” Maddin moans, conflating the topography of his hometown with his mother’s birth canal and the comic-violent car accident that may or may not have involved the dissolution of his sister’s virginity. Maddin can’t quite remember how it all went down, and, determined to sort one or two things out before giving up the ghost town for good, he rents his childhood home, hires actors to play his mother and siblings, an proceeds to mount deadpan recreations of the boyhood memories by which he’s most haunted. The reenactments star aged noir siren Ann Savage as Maddin’s mother, here recast as the female lead of Ledge Man, Winnipeg’s (fictional) only local television production. Ledge Man, Maddin tells us, comes on every afternoon, and his mother never misses a chance to see herself on the small screen. Every episode is roughly the same: a young man (played by Darcy Fehr, the actor who sleeps as Maddin in the train sequences) stands on a ledge outside his mother’s window, threatening to end it all; the proud, resilient old bat spends the length of the episode talking him into coming in. As Mrs. Maddin, Savage watches herself as Mama Ledge Man with wide, glazed eyes, enraptured over her own power over the boy. In his voiceover, Maddin refers to her simply as “Mother,” and when it comes time to direct her, he’s sure she’s playing a power game. “Just to show me who’s boss, she’ll transpose a line,” he sneers. “Anything to flub a take.” That Oedipal tug-of-war (and Maddin’s masochistic resignation to it: “Her lap, a magnetic pull, a direction from which I can’t turn for long…”) is the closest thing My Winnipeg’s blur of personal history and fake history has to a connecting narrative string. The further Maddin drifts from the family reenactments, the more tenuous that string becomes, and though the latter half’s memorials to Winnipeg’s dying landmarks and “game playing reveries lost in time” offer both melancholic beauty and a few good jokes, after a short 80 minutes it feels like we’ve seen two films. A review of My Winnipeg published earlier this week ruined a good 24 hours of my life. I sat at the bar that night and railed: “This is it––contrarianism has gone too far!!!” My friends rolled their eyes a bit but humored me. Yes, I’ve seen My Winnipeg three times since in premiered at Toronto last fall and consider myself an unabashed (though not uncritical) Guy Maddin fan. But I didn’t care that the review was negative; I cared that it suggested that even contemplating My Winnipeg as something worth contemplating is a waste of time. “[N]o aggravated efforts of either elevation or condemnation are warranted here,” sniffed Reverse Shot’s Andrew Tracy, in a review that nonetheless devoted over 900 words to Winnipeg, most given over to skepticism regarding Maddin as a critically beloved character. The actual complaints offered were, as promised, less than strenuously argued. One gripe had to do with Maddin’s sexually ambiguous filmic mode of address, and the supposedly incongruous fact that in real life, he apparently only likes to fuck women. This makes him the only artist––as far as I know, ever––to either work out anxieties and alternate, amorphous desires in their work rather than in their real worlds, or to employ a politicized stylistic mode out of context. What follows is a condemnation of Maddin’s use of “cheap irony” at the expense of “serious irony”, the refusal to say anything either political or deeply critical about sexuality, the fact that “for all the polymorphous perversion on display throughout his films, there is little about the Maddin oeuvre that genuinely touches upon the erotic.” In short: Maddin doesn’t mean it. But whose to say that farce is necessarily insincere? If My Winnipeg succeeds in painting home as where the heart of wildly narcissistic delusion is, it’s largely because it deflates that delusion just enough by using a collage of self-indulgent lies and confession and tastes curated to personal preference not as a defense mechanism, but as an offense. Originally posted on:SpoutBlog
]]>Fri, 13 Jun 2008 16:00:44 GMTSpoutBlogSpoutBlog on spout.com6/13/2008 12:00:44 PM Guy Maddin’s Winnipeg is a dreamland patchwork of half truths and exaggerations, a standard-issue suburban incubator carved into blank screen fields of snow so blinding white they seem almost hot, on which Maddin has projected a secret life. He was commissioned to make My Winnipeg, an ostensible non-fiction portrait of his hometown commissioned by The Documentary Channel, but the city itself is only of concern to him insofar as it’s an extension of and metaphor for his psyche. He casts the project as his attempt to come to terms, once and for all, with his fever stream of memories (real and fabricated) inextricably intertwined with the places and spaces where he grew up. The question of “real” doesn’t matter. While Darcy Fehr, the actor hired to be his (younger, improbably attractive) stand-in, nods off next to a bottle on a moving train, the real Maddin, our narrator, informs us of his designs on Winnipeg: “I must leave it! I’ll film my way out!” “Sleepwalking, sleepchugging.” This is how Maddin’s voiceover at one point describes the peculiarly narcoleptic denizens of Winnipeg moving through their days and nights. The phrase is an apt descriptor for the tone of the film: it’s not just groggy, it’s intoxicated, often frustratingly so. One could be generous, and praise Maddin for effectively tapping into the muddied logic of the small town in endless winter, where physical numbness from the inhuman external elements often leads to a kind of booze-aided intellectual numbness, where so many frigid anti-socials rock a kind of mutual indifference that, when it gets really bad, borders on inhumane (I’ve never been to Winnipeg, but I did spend three winters in Chicago). One could also recalibrate that as a pejorative: you could just say that Maddin directs like a drunk. One specific drunk, actually. Rarely allowing one image stand on its own for more than ten frames or so before dissolving in something new to see, generally dictated more by pattern than a linear thought, Maddin unravels his yarn in psychedelic, kaleidoscopic layers that seem a few years advanced down the timeline from his usual silent era influences. He’s basically playing at being a Busby Berkeley for the chronically depressed and/or cheerfully repressed. “The forks, the lap, the fur,” Maddin moans, conflating the topography of his hometown with his mother’s birth canal and the comic-violent car accident that may or may not have involved the dissolution of his sister’s virginity. Maddin can’t quite remember how it all went down, and, determined to sort one or two things out before giving up the ghost town for good, he rents his childhood home, hires actors to play his mother and siblings, an proceeds to mount deadpan recreations of the boyhood memories by which he’s most haunted. The reenactments star aged noir siren Ann Savage as Maddin’s mother, here recast as the female lead of Ledge Man, Winnipeg’s (fictional) only local television production. Ledge Man, Maddin tells us, comes on every afternoon, and his mother never misses a chance to see herself on the small screen. Every episode is roughly the same: a young man (played by Darcy Fehr, the actor who sleeps as Maddin in the train sequences) stands on a ledge outside his mother’s window, threatening to end it all; the proud, resilient old bat spends the length of the episode talking him into coming in. As Mrs. Maddin, Savage watches herself as Mama Ledge Man with wide, glazed eyes, enraptured over her own power over the boy. In his voiceover, Maddin refers to her simply as “Mother,” and when it comes time to direct her, he’s sure she’s playing a power game. “Just to show me who’s boss, she’ll transpose a line,” he sneers. “Anything to flub a take.” That Oedipal tug-of-war (and Maddin’s masochistic resignation to it: “Her lap, a magnetic pull, a direction from which I can’t turn for long…”) is the closest thing My Winnipeg’s blur of personal history and fake history has to a connecting narrative string. The further Maddin drifts from the family reenactments, the more tenuous that string becomes, and though the latter half’s memorials to Winnipeg’s dying landmarks and “game playing reveries lost in time” offer both melancholic beauty and a few good jokes, after a short 80 minutes it feels like we’ve seen two films. A review of My Winnipeg published earlier this week ruined a good 24 hours of my life. I sat at the bar that night and railed: “This is it––contrarianism has gone too far!!!” My friends rolled their eyes a bit but humored me. Yes, I’ve seen My Winnipeg three times since in premiered at Toronto last fall and consider myself an unabashed (though not uncritical) Guy Maddin fan. But I didn’t care that the review was negative; I cared that it suggested that even contemplating My Winnipeg as something worth contemplating is a waste of time. “[N]o aggravated efforts of either elevation or condemnation are warranted here,” sniffed Reverse Shot’s Andrew Tracy, in a review that nonetheless devoted over 900 words to Winnipeg, most given over to skepticism regarding Maddin as a critically beloved character. The actual complaints offered were, as promised, less than strenuously argued. One gripe had to do with Maddin’s sexually ambiguous filmic mode of address, and the supposedly incongruous fact that in real life, he apparently only likes to fuck women. This makes him the only artist––as far as I know, ever––to either work out anxieties and alternate, amorphous desires in their work rather than in their real worlds, or to employ a politicized stylistic mode out of context. What follows is a condemnation of Maddin’s use of “cheap irony” at the expense of “serious irony”, the refusal to say anything either political or deeply critical about sexuality, the fact that “for all the polymorphous perversion on display throughout his films, there is little about the Maddin oeuvre that genuinely touches upon the erotic.” In short: Maddin doesn’t mean it. But whose to say that farce is necessarily insincere? If My Winnipeg succeeds in painting home as where the heart of wildly narcissistic delusion is, it’s largely because it deflates that delusion just enough by using a collage of self-indulgent lies and confession and tastes curated to personal preference not as a defense mechanism, but as an offense. Originally posted on:SpoutBlog http://www.spout.com/groups/Trailer_Park/My_Winnipeg/567/29710/1/ShowPost.aspx Post By: mercurial
Post To: Trailer Park
Post Date: 5/21/2008 9:51:09 PM
Body: Not having seen any of Guy Maddin's films, I definitely want to make the extra effort to check some of them out after watching the trailer for his latest film My Winnipeg. http://www.apple.com/trailers/independent/mywinnipeg/trailer/ Looks amazing.
]]>Thu, 22 May 2008 01:51:09 GMTmercurialTrailer Park5/21/2008 9:51:09 PMNot having seen any of Guy Maddin's films, I definitely want to make the extra effort to check some of them out after watching the trailer for his latest film My Winnipeg. http://www.apple.com/trailers/independent/mywinnipeg/trailer/ Looks amazing. http://www.spout.com/blogs/karina/archive/2008/4/22/27642.aspx Post By: Karina
Post To: Karina on SpoutBlog
Post Date: 4/22/2008 2:01:28 PM
Body: The Tribeca Film Festival opens tomorrow (with Baby Mama, a film I haven’t seen but am rooting for via sheer love for Miss Liz Lemon), and there are a number of films on the schedule that we’ve covered at other festivals and can reccommend, including Baghead, Bigger, Stronger, Faster* and especially Mister Lonely. After the jump, you’ll find a look at some of the films and events that I’m looking forward to covering over the next couple of weeks. The festival concludes on May 4. 2001: A Space Odyssey: A gem of a special event. First, a 40th anniversary screening of Stanley Kubrick’s sci-fi masterpiece. Then, a panel discussion, featuring astronaut Buzz Aldrin, actor Matthew Modine, science writer Ann Druyan, artificial intelligence pioneer Marvin Minsky and NPR’s Ira Flatow. My Winnipeg: Guy Maddin’s latest, a highly dramatized personal doc about his hometown, was one of my favorite films of 2007, but I never got around to reviewing it at Toronto. I’m looking forward to seeing it again at Tribeca and finally publishing a review before its release via IFC this spring. My Marlon and Brando: An experimental narrative that dramatizes the real-life story of a romance between an Iraqi actor named Hama Ali Khan and Turkish actress Ayça Damgaci. In spring of 2003, as the war in Iraq began, Damgaci headed into Iraq to find Khan. Damgaci plays herself, and actuals video love letters made by Khan are woven throughout. The Tribeca catalog describes the film as “something wonderful and new in the history of lovers beseeching.” Sold! See the English-language trailer at YouTube. Somers Town: Shane Meadows, director of another of my 2007 favorites, This is England, reteams with young England co-star Thomas Turgoose for another coming-of-age drama, this one about the friendship between two boys who fall for the same girl Guest of Cindy Sherman: Tribeca often makes it a point to showcase non-conventional, independently produced documentaries about artists, with A Walk into the Sea and the woefully underseen Tierney Gearon: The Mother Project as recent examples. In this competition feature, videographer Paul H-O documents his relationship––as both documentarian and love interest––to art star Cindy Sherman. Faubourg Tremé: The Untold Story of Black New Orleans: As a Katrina doc completist, I’d be remiss to not check out Dawn Logsdon and Lolis Eric Elie’s portrait of the Faubourg Tremé section of New Orleans, also known as the Sixth Ward. The filmmakers began following residents of the area years before the storm and continued to track their lives through the Hurricane and its aftermath. I Am Because We Are: A documentary written, produced by and starring Madonna, about AIDS orphans in Malawi, the country she somewhat controversially adopted a child from? I am because I can’t look away. Other films on my screening list: The Auteur, Chevolution, Secret of the Grain, Milosevic on Trial, Eden, The Chicken, The Fish and the King Crab, Lou Reed’s Berlin, The Objective, Milky Way Liberation Front, Lost Indulgence. Originally posted on:SpoutBlog » Karina Longworth
]]>Tue, 22 Apr 2008 18:01:28 GMTKarinaKarina on SpoutBlog4/22/2008 2:01:28 PM The Tribeca Film Festival opens tomorrow (with Baby Mama, a film I haven’t seen but am rooting for via sheer love for Miss Liz Lemon), and there are a number of films on the schedule that we’ve covered at other festivals and can reccommend, including Baghead, Bigger, Stronger, Faster* and especially Mister Lonely. After the jump, you’ll find a look at some of the films and events that I’m looking forward to covering over the next couple of weeks. The festival concludes on May 4. 2001: A Space Odyssey: A gem of a special event. First, a 40th anniversary screening of Stanley Kubrick’s sci-fi masterpiece. Then, a panel discussion, featuring astronaut Buzz Aldrin, actor Matthew Modine, science writer Ann Druyan, artificial intelligence pioneer Marvin Minsky and NPR’s Ira Flatow. My Winnipeg: Guy Maddin’s latest, a highly dramatized personal doc about his hometown, was one of my favorite films of 2007, but I never got around to reviewing it at Toronto. I’m looking forward to seeing it again at Tribeca and finally publishing a review before its release via IFC this spring. My Marlon and Brando: An experimental narrative that dramatizes the real-life story of a romance between an Iraqi actor named Hama Ali Khan and Turkish actress Ayça Damgaci. In spring of 2003, as the war in Iraq began, Damgaci headed into Iraq to find Khan. Damgaci plays herself, and actuals video love letters made by Khan are woven throughout. The Tribeca catalog describes the film as “something wonderful and new in the history of lovers beseeching.” Sold! See the English-language trailer at YouTube. Somers Town: Shane Meadows, director of another of my 2007 favorites, This is England, reteams with young England co-star Thomas Turgoose for another coming-of-age drama, this one about the friendship between two boys who fall for the same girl Guest of Cindy Sherman: Tribeca often makes it a point to showcase non-conventional, independently produced documentaries about artists, with A Walk into the Sea and the woefully underseen Tierney Gearon: The Mother Project as recent examples. In this competition feature, videographer Paul H-O documents his relationship––as both documentarian and love interest––to art star Cindy Sherman. Faubourg Tremé: The Untold Story of Black New Orleans: As a Katrina doc completist, I’d be remiss to not check out Dawn Logsdon and Lolis Eric Elie’s portrait of the Faubourg Tremé section of New Orleans, also known as the Sixth Ward. The filmmakers began following residents of the area years before the storm and continued to track their lives through the Hurricane and its aftermath. I Am Because We Are: A documentary written, produced by and starring Madonna, about AIDS orphans in Malawi, the country she somewhat controversially adopted a child from? I am because I can’t look away. Other films on my screening list: The Auteur, Chevolution, Secret of the Grain, Milosevic on Trial, Eden, The Chicken, The Fish and the King Crab, Lou Reed’s Berlin, The Objective, Milky Way Liberation Front, Lost Indulgence. Originally posted on:SpoutBlog » Karina Longworth http://www.spout.com/members/0/tags/childhood/MemberTagFilms.aspxchildhood
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