Again, Canadian Content, Now With Nectar
We're pausing the Tour de Lovecraft (don't worry, the next one is "The Moon-Bog," so we're not in any rush to get there) to bring you my gloat about having seen the new super-freak experienza Brand Upon the Brain! by the Winnipeg Wonder, Guy Maddin, on Saturday.
I don't know how many of you are already Guy Maddin fans, although statistically I would have to guess "very few." his_regard and I were won over in 1992 by Careful, a neo-Expressionist movie about a champion butler in a village threatened by avalanches, where nothing may be expressed above a whisper. Since then, we've seen all his subsequent features and one or two of the shorts. Maddin is definitely an acquired taste, so if you don't begin with a taste for German Expressionism, silent film technique, and total full-bore commitment to the bizarre and the Freudian, your first taste of Maddin should probably be the mostly accessible Saddest Music in the World, a relatively conventional narrative about glass-legged beer baroness Isabella Rossellini's contest to find the saddest music in the world. Oh, and there's twisted cross-generational sex narratives, and some of the funniest anti-American sentiment I've ever seen. (Not that that's a particularly high bar, but this is a very funny movie.) So that's the normal one.
I think my favorite Maddin is Dracula: Pages From a Virgin's Diary, a film of the Royal Winnipeg Ballet performing an amazingly faithful, emotional, and suspenseful version of Stoker's novel. It obviously lacks Maddin's signature insane writing touches, but the direction is note-perfect. It's a little too arch in places ("Money! Stolen From ENGLAND!!"), but the audacity of casting a Chinese actor as Dracula is echoed throughout the film's narrative and dramatic choices.
Maddin is also well worth seeing if you're just a fan of film technique. His trademark is filming things after the manner of the 1920s or 1930s -- silent films, or films with popping, badly synched sound, hand-tinted color or two-strip Technicolor, etc.
Anyhow, for this weekend's shows of Brand Upon the Brain! all the sounds we heard were produced right in the theater. There was an 11-piece orchestra performing the score (really good and jittery and cool -- like, oh, maybe early-period Mahler hopped up on reds), Crispin Glover narrating the action live on stage, a castrato (!) named Dov Houle ("the Manitoba Meadowlark" [!!]) singing two solos, and a team of Foley artists producing all the sound effects live. Just an awesome night at the theater, and a great Maddin film to boot.
"Harpist and crime solver Wendy Hale!"
Deep kowtows to his_regard for discovering its show date and hooking me up with a ticket, and gnosticpi for beating us to the theater and saving three seats right behind the sound board, giving us nigh-perfect sight lines for the whole show.
I don't know how many of you are already Guy Maddin fans, although statistically I would have to guess "very few." his_regard and I were won over in 1992 by Careful, a neo-Expressionist movie about a champion butler in a village threatened by avalanches, where nothing may be expressed above a whisper. Since then, we've seen all his subsequent features and one or two of the shorts. Maddin is definitely an acquired taste, so if you don't begin with a taste for German Expressionism, silent film technique, and total full-bore commitment to the bizarre and the Freudian, your first taste of Maddin should probably be the mostly accessible Saddest Music in the World, a relatively conventional narrative about glass-legged beer baroness Isabella Rossellini's contest to find the saddest music in the world. Oh, and there's twisted cross-generational sex narratives, and some of the funniest anti-American sentiment I've ever seen. (Not that that's a particularly high bar, but this is a very funny movie.) So that's the normal one.
I think my favorite Maddin is Dracula: Pages From a Virgin's Diary, a film of the Royal Winnipeg Ballet performing an amazingly faithful, emotional, and suspenseful version of Stoker's novel. It obviously lacks Maddin's signature insane writing touches, but the direction is note-perfect. It's a little too arch in places ("Money! Stolen From ENGLAND!!"), but the audacity of casting a Chinese actor as Dracula is echoed throughout the film's narrative and dramatic choices.
Maddin is also well worth seeing if you're just a fan of film technique. His trademark is filming things after the manner of the 1920s or 1930s -- silent films, or films with popping, badly synched sound, hand-tinted color or two-strip Technicolor, etc.
Anyhow, for this weekend's shows of Brand Upon the Brain! all the sounds we heard were produced right in the theater. There was an 11-piece orchestra performing the score (really good and jittery and cool -- like, oh, maybe early-period Mahler hopped up on reds), Crispin Glover narrating the action live on stage, a castrato (!) named Dov Houle ("the Manitoba Meadowlark" [!!]) singing two solos, and a team of Foley artists producing all the sound effects live. Just an awesome night at the theater, and a great Maddin film to boot.
"Harpist and crime solver Wendy Hale!"
Deep kowtows to his_regard for discovering its show date and hooking me up with a ticket, and gnosticpi for beating us to the theater and saving three seats right behind the sound board, giving us nigh-perfect sight lines for the whole show.