A stiff and silent clown provides ambiguous evidence of visitations by the Underpant People from the sky.
All posts by Gregory J. Smalley (366weirdmovies)
38*. TALES FROM THE GIMLI HOSPITAL (1988)
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“It all happened in a Gimli we no longer know.”–Tales from the Gimli Hospital
DIRECTED BY: Guy Maddin
FEATURING: Kyle McCulloch, Michael Gottli, Angela Heck, Margaret Anne MacLeod
PLOT: In a modern (?) hospital room, a Canadian-Icelandic grandmother tells her grandchildren the story of Einar the Lonely to distract them as their mother lies dying. Simple fisherman Einar falls in love with a beautiful girl, but she rejects him when it is revealed that he has contracted smallpox. He goes to recuperate in Gimli’s barn-cum-hospital, where he befriends a fellow patient, Gunnar, who shares stories which are mixed up with fever dream hallucinations.
BACKGROUND:
- Gimli is a small village in Manitoba, settled by Icelandic fishermen who arrived in Canada fleeing the eruption of Mount Askja in 1875.
- Maddin lifted some names and incidents from a book of local history (and poetry) entitled “The Gimli Saga” (also his original choice of title).
- Tales from the Gimli Hospital was rejected by the Toronto International Film Festival, but championed by legendary cult film aficionado Ben Barenholtz, who secured a midnight run for the film at Greenwich Village’s Quad Theater.
- The film garnered a Best Screenplay nomination for Maddin from Canada’s Genie Awards.
- The 2022 “Redux” cut (reviewed here) substitutes a dream sequence shot eleven years later for an original scene that featured Kyle McCullough in blackface.
INDELIBLE IMAGE: Although there are many strange sights to see in Gimli, almost all of them have something to do with fish: fish-chopping, fish-carving, a magenta-toned dream women turning into a fish princess. The most iconic moment is when Einar grabs a fish (which has been nailed to the wall of his shack), holds it over his head, and twists it to release its oily guts, using the goo to slick back his hair.
TWO WEIRD THINGS: Fish guts pomade; bloody butt grappling
WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Guy Maddin’s debut feature sets the tone for his career—recreating the aesthetics of silent and early talkie movies, spiked with Freudian surrealism and absurdist humor—though his subsequent movies benefited from melodramatic plotting that is absent from the episodic Gimli. Although highly accomplished, it’s one of Maddin’s most surreal movies, and therefore not the easiest entry point to his world. It may be better to visit Gimli after becoming familiar with Maddin’s more mature work.
Redux re-release trailer for Tales from the Gimli Hospital
COMMENTS: Guy Maddin may be the archetypal cinematic postmodernist. “Postmodernism” is a term that’s simultaneously highly Continue reading 38*. TALES FROM THE GIMLI HOSPITAL (1988)
SATURDAY SHORT: SLEEVES / RON & FEZ – SERZONE (2009)
Bristol-Myers Squibb declined to use this video, edited together by a fan of the comedy radio show Ron & Fez, as an advertisement for their antidepressant, Serzone. Music by Sleeves.
CAPSULE: UNIDENTIFIED OBJECTS (2022)
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Unidentified Objects is currently available for VOD rental.
DIRECTED BY: Juan Felipe Zuleta
FEATURING: Matthew Jeffers, Sarah Hay
PLOT: Peter, an irritable gay dwarf, reluctantly agrees to go on a last minute road trip with sex worker Winona, who believes she has a date to be abducted by aliens in Canada.
COMMENTS: Ralph Waldo Emerson could have made his famous declaration “it’s not the destination, it’s the journey” as a motto for the road movie genre. The road movie formula structures its plot as a series of challenges meant to reveal its characters, force them closer together as they overcome obstacles, and eventually rip them apart (before they reconcile in the finale). Unidentified Objects fits firmly within the road movie genre, with a couple of twists: it focuses on one of its two travelers much more than the other, and it’s spiked with hallucinatory sci-fi interludes.
Not to slight Sarah Hay—who is excellent as a sex worker Winona, a woman who appears wacky in her alien obsession yet is far more down-to-earth than her companion—but Unidentified Objects belongs to Matthew Jeffers. His portrayal of Peter perfectly embodies the script’s magnificent creation of a misanthropic, deeply depressed homosexual dwarf who’s an expert on Anton Chekov. If Jeffers had hit a single false note, the movie might have quickly come to a screeching halt. Fortunately, Jeffers is always a joy, prickly and sarcastic but achingly vulnerable. Peter is a natural hermit—a sort of homegrown alien in, as he complains, “a world with little to no patience for bodies not of a highly specific make and model”—so Winona’s main function is to give him an excuse to travel out into the world, as well as to challenge his cynicism. She’s a platonic pixie dream girl.
Along with their road encounters with drug-addled survivalist, lesbian cosplayers, and horny teens, two or three dream sequences provide serious character development for Peter. I’ll leave it to the viewer to discover the details for themselves, but the first major set-piece is effectively horrific and supplies backstory and motivation for his journey, while the second emphasizes his loneliness in a way that a real-life scenario never could. These scenes (and others) are accompanied by disco-pink lighting that emphasizes the tale’s otherworldly queerness. Although Winona sets a dreamlike tone early on by asking, “ever wake up from a dream and it’s like you’re still dreaming?,” in practice the movie does the opposite: it’s always clear when a dream has ended, but not when one has begun.
Some may complain that the ending, while not overly ambiguous, shies away from the cosmic promise of the premise—but remember, it’s the journey that matters, not the destination. Winona abducts Peter from his lonely apartment, where he feels like he has every reason to stay locked away from humanity with his volume of Chekov. His courage in choosing to face a harsh world that was not built with him in mind is ultimately a more impressive achievement than being chosen to be whisked away to some celestial paradise.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
SATURDAY SHORT: METEORES (2023)
Children and forest creatures awake to investigate a meteor shower in the forest.