Most Helpful Customer Reviews
|
|
5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
If You Like the Maddin Style, You'll Love This, December 19, 2008
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.
___________________________________________
|
|
|
4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Beyond Reality, February 10, 2009
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.
|
|
|
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Engaging tribute to hometown by eccentric director Guy Maddin, August 22, 2009
This engaging, very personal tribute from weird Canadian director Guy Maddin to his hometown of Winnipeg is very well done. Shot in black and white with his familiar style that reminds one of both silent cinema and the films of David Lynch, the plot has an alter ego of the director hire his elderly, domineering mother (actually b-movie starlet from the 1940s Ann Savage) and actors playing his siblings in order to relive his teenage years in the sixties, and sort of understand what makes him tick. The movie includes a lot of lore about Winnipeg that may be true in some cases and is almost certainly not true in other cases (the story about the frozen horses' heads in the river, for example, is hard for me to believe). This deadpan, funny tribute is most of all a nostalgic paean to his childhood, and a denunciation of modern capitalism mindless drive to change all things (Maddin recounts in a heartfelt way how they demolished a popular department store as well as his beloved ice hockey arena, for example). And because nostalgia of our childhood is something that most people can relate to, this makes this movie more accessible than other films of him. The film explains also the reason he never leave Winnipeg (in order to defend it, and not let others completely ruin it) as well as a lot of the obsessions in his other movies (for instance, his fascination with communist aesthetics seems rooted in the strong labor movement in his hometown).
|
|
|
Most Recent Customer Reviews
|
Video On Demand ~ Ellen Geer
Video On Demand ~ Mike Akel
Video On Demand ~ Rachel Weisz
Video On Demand ~ James Marsh
Video On Demand ~ Anamaria Marinca
Video On Demand ~ Mark McKinney
Video On Demand ~ Kyle McCulloch
Video On Demand ~ Justin Rice
Video On Demand ~ Jerry Bo Yu Chen
Video On Demand ~ Luc Schaedler
