The Screengrab : brand upon the brain!

DVD Digest for August 12, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 14:00:00 GMT

After last week’s thin selection of new DVDs, this week brings a number of high-quality releases.

DVDs of the Week: DVDs couldn’t be much different than this week’s two most notable new releases, the Criterion release of Guy Maddin’s Brand Upon the Brain! and the final season of The Wire (HBO). But in its own way, each is pretty indispensible. Maddin’s film is, like his entire body of work, indescribable to anyone who hasn’t already seen it, but for those who are on his wavelength, it’s magical. That Criterion has finally embraced this most movie-drunk of filmmakers is exciting enough. But they’ve also gathered half a dozen different narration tracks for the sake of variety, including narration by Isabella Rossellini, Laurie Anderson, Eli Wallach, and Maddin himself. In addition, there’s a new documentary on the director, plus two new short films by Maddin, made especially for this release. So yeah, good news.

But if anything, the release of Season 5 of The Wire is even more of a cause for celebration. The groundbreaking, critically-acclaimed HBO series has been praised to the heavens in venues both classier and more authoritative than this one, so I’ll refrain from heaping still more effusive praise on a series that hardly needs it. All I can say is, if you haven’t experienced The Wire yet, you’ve got some great times ahead of you. And if you have, you don’t need me to convince you to buy the final season on DVD.

This week’s recent releases coming to DVD include: Dennis Quaid and Ellen Page in Smart People (Disney, also Blu-Ray); Stephen Chow’s cockeyed kids’ movie CJ7 (Sony, also Blu-Ray); and Val Kilmer and Stephen Dorff in Felon (Sony, also Blu-Ray). Also, three DVDs by Lech Majewski: The Garden of Earthly Delights, Glass Lips, and The Gospel According to Harry (all Kino), the last of which features a young Viggo Mortensen.

In TV on DVD, this week brings South Park Season 11 (Paramount), Prison Break Season 3 (Fox, also Blu-Ray), and Caroline in the City Season 1 (Paramount).

Finally, in Blu-Ray only news, the week’s big release almost certainly has to be Sony’s “Action” Box Set, which includes Jean Claude Van Damme in Maximum Risk, Steven Seagal in Half Past Dead, Wesley Snipes in 7 Seconds, and Ice Cube in xXx: State of the Union. I mean, come on- Van Damme, Seagal, and Snipes all in one box set? The 1993 version of me is stoked. Also this week: The Doors (Lionsgate) and Belly (Lionsgate), in case you were wondering.

Trailer Review: My Winnipeg

Paul Clark — Mon, 12 May 2008 16:00:00 GMT

Of all the movies I wasn’t able to see at last year’s Toronto Film Festival, one of my biggest regrets was missing the latest film by Manitoba’s mad genius Guy Maddin. Of course, only part of my regret has to do with the film itself- it would have been a blast to see it narrated live by the director, who has always been a fascinating character. But the film itself, which has received almost unanimously positive reviews, should be more than compelling enough on its own. Like many of his earlier works- in particular Tales From the Gimli Hospital, Cowards Bend the Knee, and Brand Upon the Brain!- Maddin appears to be re-imagining his own childhood here through a prism of frenzied Freudian melodrama and wicked, film-saturated satire to create an unmistakably Maddin-flavored cocktail. Nice to see Ann Savage, the infamous “dame with claws” from Detour so many years ago, turn up again here as the Maddin family matriarch. I’m not sure how all of this strangeness- like a “man pageant” just around the corner from Sissy Boy Slap Party- but I’m eager to find out.

Tribeca Film Festival Review: "My Winnipeg"

Phil Nugent — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 15:00:00 GMT

My Winnipeg, the latest from Canadian filmmaker and friend of the Screengrab Guy Maddin, was commissioned by the Documentary Channel, but as noted here recently, it's hardly the straight history-travelogue that the title might suggest. It's an impressionistic, semi-satitic tribute to the hometown of his fantasy life that Maddin's feelings about the city as a taking-off point, the way his recent "autobiographical" films Cowards Bend the Knee and Brand Upon the Brain! take off from his feelings about his memories from his early life. Those feelings, as they come through here, might best be described as affectionate but haunted. In Maddin's telling, the entire city is a folksy snowscape where people might yearn to get away but aren't awake enough to formulate an escape plan. "Guy", our hero and narrator (played by Darcy Fehr) recalls that for a hundred years, there was a yearly, day-long, city-wide treasure hunt, and the prize was a train ticket out of town, but nobody ever used their winnings because, after spending a day exploring the city, no winner could bear to leave. At the same time, Guy says, Winnipeg has ten times the number of sleepwalkers of any other city; at night, the sidewalks are clogged with folks who've gone to bed only to stagger outside and wander zombie-like through the cutting winds. It's as if their subconscious minds where sending their bodies a message that their brains don't want to hear. Guy, who himself would dearly love to leave but can't, murmurs to himself, "Stay awake, stay awake, stay awake!"

Naturally, Maddin's feelings about the place he grew up in are tangled up with his feelings about his family, his mother in particular. (She's played here by the 1940's starlet Ann Savage, best remembered as the female lead in Egdar G. Ulmer's febrile noir Detour, in her first film role in more than twenty years.) Eager to get at the roots of his unresolved childhood issues, Maddin decides to move back in with Mom and use some of the film budget to hire actors and a dog to "play" his siblings and his "long, long, long-dead chihuahua", Toby. ("Because Mom doesn't want Dad left out, "we pretend to have had him exhumed and reburied in the living room.") This idea, which is partially borrowed from Albert Brooks's Mother, generates some laughs but not a lot of mileage. (It didn't generate much mileage in Mother either, where it proved good for fewer laughs.) In general, My Winnipeg feels as if it were made to order; it lacks the fever-dream obsessiveness of Maddin's best work. But it's very funny and consistently entertaining. It turns out that Mom stars in the only dramatic TV series ever made in Winnipeg, Ledge Man, in which she plays the mother of "an overly sensitive man" who each week has to be coaxed back inside after climbing out onto the ledge over some perceived slight. (It's been running for fifty years and Mom hasn't missed an episode.) And the stream-of-consciousness narration suggests a previously unsuspected influence on Maddin's work: Ken "Word Jazz" Nordine. It's nice that cable TV is doing its part to keep Maddin working, but My Winnipeg gave me a feeling that he really ought to have his own late-night radio show.