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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Perhaps Maddin's most personal film,
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This review is from: My Winnipeg (DVD)
This is perhaps Maddin's most personal film, although I've seen pretty much all his output and it's rather hard to say what may be his personal life and what may be his twisted versions of it. In this, he returns to the city of Winnipeg, where he grew up, and hires actors to play his brothers & sisters, and returns to the apartment where they lived (although things are a bit awkward, since the current tenant refuses to move out). His real mother is there, and while his father is deceased, they pretend to have exhumed his body and reburied it in the living room..!? Anyway, the whole films is Maddin's odd reminiscences and it comes off as kind of a dreamy travelogue through the strange history and locations in Winnipeg. Most memorable is the great stable disaster when a fire caused horses to stampede and jump into the river, where they froze to death. We're treated to couples strolling amongst the frozen anguished horseheads, like it was a beautiful picnic spot or something.
I'm really surprised this hasn't been officially released in the US, though, I ordered mine from Amazon Canada many months ago & got it rather quickly for a decent price (about 19.75 USD). 5 out of 5, HIGHLY recommended.
7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
If You Like the Maddin Style, You'll Love This,
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This review is from: My Winnipeg (DVD)
This latest film by Guy Maddin is classified as a documentary on Winnipeg, but it's about as much a documentary on Winnipeg as his BRAND UPON THE BRAIN! is a documentary on lighthouse painting. It bears what I now see as his patent style, which I eagerly embrace. Again he borrows aspects of silent film and minimalist Foley work to conjure the sense of pale memory filtered through dream. The only time it actually resembles a real documentary is when he intermittently and briefly resorts to amateur-millimeter color film. In a couple of places, he segues into garish and broad animation that dovetails with his style by resembling some recovered grade-school educational film. To provide the missing pieces of his faux journal, he hired actors to portray the Maddin family, in their full panoply of dysfunction. How much is true, only Maddin can say. He has the uncanny ability to jab the interstitial material between memories, hitting it just close enough so that you get a vivid sense of something concrete beneath an abstract rendering, sometimes to comic effect. It all comes together brilliantly, if you're inclined toward this sort of thing. Maddin is the modern master of psychological comedy, covering similar territory staked by early Woody Allen, but with a surreal touch, and sans the kvetching.
The extra features include three very short Maddin films and a separate short of some of that surreal bygone animation (which, by the way, was NOT created by Maddin). As for the film itself, at bottom, I suppose some of this stuff COULD be real, in some skeletal way. We know there's a city called Winnipeg; so that much is definitely true. However, it's doubtful that people took strolls on the frozen river, among horse heads protruding through, frozen in anguish. ___________________________________________
5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Beyond Reality,
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This review is from: My Winnipeg (DVD)
People who say they want something new usually don't mean it. But I suspect that this film is something new - which is why a lot of viewers won't "get it." I am not an expert on the output of Guy Maddin. I think "The Saddest Music in the World" is a masterpiece. "Brand Upon the Brain" let me down, but maybe I need a second viewing. "My Winnipeg" is both like and unlike both of them. It is a dream meditation upon Maddin's hometown. I suppose you could call it a docu-fantasy. I know I could never visit Guy Maddin's Winnipeg because it exists inside Guy Maddin's skull. But I enjoyed going there in this movie. It is certainly now realer for me than the real Winnipeg - which as far as it concerns me is a dot on a map with letters next to it. But if I ever go to Winnipeg (only if I get on the wrong flight)I will be convinced that it is a faulty attempt to realize Maddin's vision.
This movie pushes back the horizon, and you can't ask a movie to do more than that. Maybe it deserves five stars. I held back the final star just because there is nothing else to compare it to. It could be the first in a new genre of docu-fantasies - but probably only after it is rediscovered in twenty years, forty years, whatever. It isn't just ahead of the curve; it's off the graph paper altogether. See it. Enjoy it. Or bitch about it afterwards. But don't pass it up.
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