Tag: Guy Maddin

Blu-ray, by Sean Axmaker, Contributors, DVD, Film Reviews

Blu-ray / DVD: Oscar winner ‘The Big Short’ and Guy Maddin’s ‘Forbidden Room’

Written by Sean Axmaker March 16, 2016

The Big Short (Paramount, Blu-ray, DVD, VOD) – Adam McKay is not necessarily the guy you look to for dramatic outrage at the greed and failure behind the economic collapse of the last decade. He is, after all, the director who guided Will Ferrell through such comedies as Anchorman, Talladega Nights, and The Other Guys. Yet here he is, adapting Michael Lewis’ nonfiction book on the reasons behind the financial collapse and coming away with a hit movie, five Academy Award nominations, and an Oscar win for Best Adapted Screenplay (shared with Charles Randolph).

The Big Short is serious and angry. It’s also very funny, which is its secret weapon. What’s a subprime mortgage? Here’s Margot Robbie in a bubble bath to explain it to you. Need to explain what a CBO is without driving audiences away? How about Selena Gomez at a casino?

In the hands of McKay and his co-conspirators, the financial fraud of the 2000s is nothing short of a criminal farce with dire consequences. For us, that is, not the folks who perpetrated the crisis out of greed, criminal neglect, and reckless abandon. In this company of thieves and accomplices, the heroes of this story are a few men who saw through the façade and proceeded to bet against the house. They are, of course, outliers with idiosyncrasies.

by Sean Axmaker, Contributors, Film Reviews, Silent Cinema

The Heart of Guy Maddin

Written by Sean Axmaker March 5, 2016

The Heart of the World, one of a half-dozen shorts he made between his dreamily surreal pastoral fantasy Twilight of the Ice Nymphs (1997) and his ballet-as-expressionist horror meditation Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary (2003), is the essence of Guy Maddin condensed into a brilliant, breathless, breakneck science fiction thriller. How marvelous that Maddin’s first major film of the 21st century looks like a mad masterpiece from the fevered mind of a silent moviemaker from 1925, discovered in the buried time-capsule vault of an asylum for insane artists. It just may be the greatest six-minute film ever made.

Maddin described his silent movie fantasia, produced for the 2000 Toronto International Film Festival to celebrate the 25th Anniversary of TIFF, as “world’s first subliminal melodrama.” There are two brothers, Nikolai the youthful mortician who seems just a little too passionate about his work, and Osip, an actor playing Christ in a passion play who takes lives the role outside of the play. They are both in love with Anna, a scientist who turns a vast telescope inward to the center of the earth to study the heart of the world: a literal beating heart, of course, and in danger of a world-shaking heart attack.

Continue reading at Keyframe

by Robert Horton, Contributors, Film Reviews

Review: The Forbidden Room

Written by Robert Horton October 15, 2015

In a recent Film Comment interview, the madcap Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin describes the different movie genres he’s re-creating in The Forbidden Room. There’s the “virgin sacrifice volcano movie,” a submarine picture, a Western, the “Japanese shamed-father genre,” and of course “a lot of different vampire films, because they’re radically different from culture to culture.” Even this sampling—there are more—doesn’t hint at this gleeful mishmash, which presents a series of fever-dream glimpses of Maddin’s imagined world of old movies. This thing is either for straight-up surrealists or fans of long-gone movie styles. That’s a narrow margin, but within it, Maddin thrives.

Continue reading at Seattle Weekly

by Sean Axmaker, Contributors, DVD, Silent Cinema

Oh the Joy! Joy! Joy! of Guy Maddin plus Rita Hayworth: The Love Goddess – DVDs of the Week

Written by Sean Axmaker December 21, 2010

The Quintessential Guy Maddin! 5 Films From The Heart Of Winnipeg (Zeitgeist)

Canadian maverick Guy Maddin makes films like no one else: surreal studies in repression and sexual hysteria with the textures of silent cinema and the scuffed-up surfaces of neglected cinematic ephemera unearthed. In the 22 years since first feature, Tales from the Gimli Hospital (1988), he continued to make his films his way: Obscure, lush, and antiquarian, made on tiny budgets and released to tiny audiences. Zeitgeist has been there from the beginning, releasing five his ten features in theaters and on DVD (accompanied by many of the short films he made between features). There’s nothing new on this set (not even new masters of the old films; the old discs are simply repackaged) but it does offer a quick and efficient way of collecting a big chunk of Maddin’s filmography, and an excuse to roll back through his career.

Witness his sophomore feature Archangel (1990), a surreal silent movie melodrama of love, war, and amnesia for the sound era: an absurdist silent WWI epic that never was. Set in WWI Russia by way of claustrophobic sets transformed into Maddin’s dreamland imagery, this story of a one-legged soldier (Maddin regular Kyle McCulloch) caught in a romantic triangle between his lovesick landlady and a married nurse (Kathy Marykuca) who resembles his dead lover is less a parody of silent cinema than a loving crackpot tribute. Shot in often soft focus B&W, artificially aged to look like a survivor of yesteryear, and filled with absurd imagery (bunny rabbits leap into the trench in the midst of battle) and unfathomable twists, this is a farce with a tragic dimension and a singular vision that defies categorization and description.