Tag Archives: Guy Maddin

APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: RUMOURS (2024)

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DIRECTED BY: , , Galen Johnson

FEATURING: , , Denis Ménochet, Charles Dance, Nikki Amuka-Bird, Rolando Ravello, Takehiro Hira,

PLOT: G7 leaders gather at a conference to write a statement on an unspecified crisis; everyone else suddenly disappears, leaving the leaders stranded in the woods with masturbating zombie bog-men and a giant brain.

Still from Rumours (2024)

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: Ever since seeing the pre-release still of the giant brain in the forest with ivy growing on it, we knew Rumours was going to be weird. While the cast and budget may be bigger than usual, Guy Maddin proves he is no sellout, and the rumo(u)rs are all true: the movie does not disappoint in the oddness department.

COMMENTS: Seeing a Guy Maddin (well, a Maddin and the Johnsons) movie with known actors in an actual AMC theater is, in itself, a surreal experience. The fact that I was not the only one there was even stranger. Although it would be nice for other local Maddin fans to get a chance to come out and catch Rumours on a big screen—there must be at least one or two others in a metro area of one million souls—I was halfway hoping that the five other patrons had wandered in unsuspecting, lured by Cate Blanchett’s name on the marquee, and, like hapless G7 leaders, were about to be blindsided by a strangeness they could never have foreseen.

To be fair, it takes a while for it to sink in that this is a Maddin movie. There’s no homage to a particular cinematic era—the movie instead is a stylistic melange of soft focus, lavender lighting, and melodramatic musical cues, shot in academy ratio—and the broad political satire is far away from Maddin’s typical Freudian introspection. Perhaps this shows the influence of screenwriter and co-director Evan Johnson and third co-director Galen Johnson steering Maddin away from his usual fallbacks. But soon enough the absurd sense of humor reminds us that we are, indeed, watching a Maddin film. (My favorite joke may be when the French Prime Minister explains that the giant brain in the forest must be a woman’s, because it is “slightly smaller than a man’s giant brain.”)

Satirically, the movie is obvious rather than incisive, earning its laughs from its absurdities, not its relevancies. The G7 leaders have assembled to address a crisis they never get around to defining, instead meeting in small groups to draft statements that are made up of half boilerplate, half non-sequitur (items like the display of non-sexual physical affection within marriage make it into the statement, along with nonsense the American president mutters while talking in his sleep). The characterizations of the ineffectual statesmen and women are, to say the least, unflattering: the Italian Prime Minister does little but offer his companions lunch meat. In a ironic nation-deprecating joke, the most dynamic of the seven is the Canadian: he’s a horndog in a man-bun with a weakness for strong women, who has, or will, sleep with the entire female cast. But don’t do as the French Prime Minister explicitly suggests and look for symbolism in the leaders’ characters. Instead, embrace the UK’s atypical astute response when P.M. Broulez asks, “what does it mean that Canada is faster than Germany?” “Nothing!” It’s not specific shots at the political order, but the dreamlike elements of the masturbating bog-men, the giant forest cerebrum, and the treacherous A.I. chatbot that hit hardest in Rumours. We don’t know what has caused the apocalypse, or even if it is an apocalypse; all we know is that the world’s leaders are spectacularly unequipped to save us all from whatever weirdness is slouching towards the summit.

The relatively big exposure of Rumours made me slightly afraid that Maddin might have gone (slightly) mainstream.  My fears were assuaged when the credits rolled and the five other people in the theater all started loudly complaining to each other: “That made no sense at all!” “That was terrible!” “I wanted to leave but I just thought it had to get better!” “Who did Cate Blanchett owe money to?” They may have hated it, but odds are they would think about what they had seen later, and would never entirely forget the bizarre experience. It’s a response that I like to think would have had Maddin and the Johnsons chuckling. It certainly had me chuckling.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Sporadically ingenious, occasionally chilling and entirely bonkers… Maddin… responds to the call of the weird with a refreshing lack of pomposity.”–Jeannette Catsoulis, The New York Times (contemporaneous)

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

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: , 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.

Still from Tales from the Gimli Hospital (1988)

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)

WEIRD LOVE: THE WORLD’S TOP 10 ART-HOUSE INCEST MOVIES

Eugene Vasiliev provides 366 Weird Movies with his own translation/adaptation of his original article, which appeared in Russian here.

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10. Murderous Maids [Les blessures assassines] (2000) (France)

DIRECTED BY: Jean-Pierre Denis

PLOT: Two lustful maids (and sisters) turn tricks in the attic, until caught red-handed by their housemistress. They ignore her remonstrances and calls to virtue. In fact, the two “guilty” servants thrash their mistress and her daughter to death after gouging out their eyes.

WHAT IT’S ABOUT: Domestic workers’ struggle for equal rights is sometimes an uphill battle.

Scores of movies about incest feature absent fathers, mothers, delinquent daughters, and criminal sons. Religious families, orphaned children, widowed mothers, and the underclass form fertile ground for weird love. (A rare exception is a case of upper-class incest in Louis Malle‘s Murmur of the Heart, discussed below.)

Still from Murderous Maids (2000)

Murderous Maids is based on a real case that shocked France in 1933, when the Papin sisters brutally murdered their employers. The film shows us how things went so bad in a very long and tedious way up until the denouement. The ruthless exploitation of the poor orphans, fated to live their lives at someone’s beck and call in a noble house, stirs up indignation in the viewer’s heart. Throughout the movie the unfortunate “feminists” are forced to iron clothes or scrub toilets.

Amazingly, the unholy acts that “the midnight maidens” do look innocent at first. They just relax for a moment in a bizarre position after vacuuming. Then something goes wrong. What we’ve got here is failure to communicate. They wish for the ground to swallow them up, but it doesn’t. The sisters then try to wipe out reality,  press the “DELETE” button, by gouging out the eyes of their mistress.

There was a trial, a society scandal, and a dungeon. In 1941 the younger sister–Lea Papin—was set free. She died at the age of 89, outliving her employers by almost 70 years.

9. A Woman’s Way [Strella] (2009) (Greece)

DIRECTED BY: Panos H. Koutras

PLOT: After serving 14 years behind bars for the murder of a promiscuous woman, a Greek man suddenly realizes that he was deeply wrong. He comes to believe true virtue isn’t found in fasting and praying, but in incest, sodomy, and other types of taboo love.

WHAT IT’S ABOUT: Cinema is an art of illusion.

The great French film theorist Jean Epstein noted in his book “Bonjour, Cinema” back in 1921: “The close-up alters drama through the impression of proximity. Pain is within reach. If I extend my arm, I touch your intimacy… I count the eyelashes of this suffering.”[efn_note](Epstein, “Bonjour Cinema,” p. 104).[/efn_note].

Still from A Woman's Way (2009)

Extreme close-ups, zoom-ins and creepy music transform your perception of reality. Art can justify any sin, make black into white and Continue reading WEIRD LOVE: THE WORLD’S TOP 10 ART-HOUSE INCEST MOVIES

315. BRAND UPON THE BRAIN! (2006)

AKA Brand Upon  the Brain! A Remembrance in 12 Chapters

“[Children are] constantly constructing, and then reconstructing and amending and annexing a model of their cosmos, their universe. The real joyous intoxications and wonderment come from building faulty models, and then tearing them down and rebuilding. But you never completely tear down your model, I think you just keep adding on to your faulty model of the way the world works. All if us, by the time we’re grown-ups, have built this really elaborate model, which we feel is right now finally. But at its very foundation, at the very bottom, its very earliest days, there are these errors that run like a motherlode through the ensuing years.”–Guy Maddin, “97 Percent True”

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Sullivan Brown, Gretchen Krich, Katherine E. Scharhon, Maya Lawson, Erik Steffen Maahs, (narration)

PLOT: “Guy Maddin,” who has not been home in thirty years, returns to Black Notch, the island on which he spent his childhood, to fulfill his mother’s dying wish: to give the family lighthouse/orphanage two good coats of paint. The trip sparks Guy’s memory; he recalls when celebrity teen detective Wendy Hale arrived on the island to investigate the strange holes found on the back of orphan’s heads. Guy develops a crush on the detective, but Hale goes undercover as her own brother, Chance, and seduces Guy’s sister, all while investigating his dictatorial mother and mad scientist father on her way to uncovering secrets that will tear the family apart.

BACKGROUND:

  • Brand Upon the Brain! was funded (for a reported $40,000) by a Seattle-based nonprofit organization on the condition that Maddin use a local Seattle cast and crew. The film was shot in nine days.
  • This is the middle entry in Maddin’s unofficial autobiographical trilogy, in which each film has a (different) protagonist named Guy Maddin. (The first was 2003’s Cowards Bend the Knee and the last was 2007’s My Winnipeg).
  • The script was written with Maddin’s frequent collaborator Geroge Toles, but Maddin regular (who usually appears as an actor) wrote the narration.
  • The idea of narration for a silent film was inspired by “explicators,” people who would be hired by theaters to explain visual and narrative concepts the audience might not get on their own during live screenings of silent films.
  • Originally staged as a live event with a small orchestra (including a “castrato”) and foley artists, different performances featured different guest narrators, including Isabella Rossellini (who does the definitive reading), Laurie Anderson, John Ashberry, , , Louis Negin, , Eli Wallach, and Maddin himself.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: The lighthouse lamp, an all-seeing orb, sort of a rotating papier-mâché rendition of the Eye of Sauron. Several of Guy’s family members come to bad ends before it.

THREE WEIRD THINGS: Rumanian womb birthmark; holes in orphan’s heads; the undressing gloves

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: It’s another mad Maddin false autobiography! This time, the director imagines himself as the offspring of a mad scientist and yet another iteration of his domineering mother archetype, raised in a lighthouse among a band of orphans. Absurd but emotionally true memories are jumbled up, with a melange of archaic obsessions each taking their turn in the subconscious spotlight: teenage detectives, confused genders leading to confusing crushes, family members transfigured into zombies and vampires, with all of this lurid melodrama shot on blurry Super 8 and edited by a drunken, psychotic subconscious. Pure madness.


Original trailer for Brand Upon the Brain!

COMMENTS: “The past… into the past!” Memory is the theme of Continue reading 315. BRAND UPON THE BRAIN! (2006)