Quintessential Guy Maddin [DVD] [Region 1] [US Import] [NTSC]

Guy Maddin is a really weird director -- he is best known for making silent, black-and-white movies in the German expressionist style, with weird symbolism and title cards. And "The Quintessential Guy Maddin! 5 Films from the Heart of Winnipeg" brings together five of his best works, ranging from a vampiric ballet to mad peephole tales.

"Cowards Bend the Knee" is... about "Guy Maddin" (Darcy Fehr). No, not the director, but a hockey player who falls in love with a weird girl named Meta, who lives at a hair-salon/abortion clinic -- and finds himself in a strange world of ghosts, severed arms and revenge. "Careful" explores the bizarre repression in the tiny town of Tolzbad, and what happens when their repression springs a leak.

Then there's "Twilight of the Ice Nymphs," an eerie little fairytale centering on a beautiful woman and an ostrich farm. "Archangel" is a strange little story set in post-World War I Russia.... in a town that nobody has notified of the war's end! Love, amnesia, and general weirdness ensue. Finally, "Dracula: Pages From A Virgin's Diary" sets Bram Stoker's classic novel to ballet and music, with a special emphasis on the ill-fated Lucy.

Guy Maddin is perfect for anybody who is sick'n'tired of Hollywood's mindless blockbusters, romcoms and remakes. Absolutely NOTHING is normal or predictable in these films, and he crams it full of bizarre situations and characters that could never fit into a "normal" movie. It's like someone dug up a canister of century-old film directed by a madman on acid.

Maddin has a very distinctive style. Crackling with faux-age, cobwebbed and manically surreal, these movies revel in the old-timey cinematic conceits like uber-closeups, iris-ins, and jerky manic acting that makes up for the usually silent filmmaking. And the plots are BIZARRE. Here's a glimpse of just how bizarre Maddin can get -- a guy dumps his girlfriend mid-abortion (she dies) to chase a girl who will only get involved with him if he has her dad's hands grafted onto his arms. Yeah.

In addition, this boxed set comes with a bunch of extras: five audio commentaries with Maddin, some short films, a documentary on Maddin's career, featurettes, interviews, designwork and storyboards, and "imagined audition reels" (whatever that means).

"The Quintessential Guy Maddin! 5 Films from the Heart of Winnipeg" is a delightfully warped, weird little world that sucks you in and doesn't let you go until it's over. Love it or hate it, you'll never forget it.

This four-disc DVD set boasts five of director Guy Maddin's most hallucinatory and hilarious fever-dreams. The beloved auteur of Winnipeg, Canada, Maddin has been spinning fantastic tales of obsessive love and grand guignol with the language of cinema's distant past for more than two decades. Wretched swan feeders, beauty-parlor noir, incestuous psychodramas, ghostly patriarchs, fascist butler academies, midnight-summer fantasia and hyperbolic Soviet montage are all part and parcel of the delirious cracked-glass, scratched-frame universe of this visionary filmmaker.

THIS FOUR-DISC, LIMITED EDITION SET includes:
Disc One: Careful (1992, 100 min, Remastered and Repressed Edition)
Disc Two: Twilight of the Ice Nymphs (1997, 90 min) + Archangel (1990, 83 min)
Disc Three: Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary (2003, 75 min)
Disc Four: Cowards Bend the Knee (2004, 64 min)

SPECIAL FEATURES include: Five feature audio commentaries with Maddin & crew; A 60-minute documentary on Maddin's early career, narrated by Tom Waits; Six shorts, including Odilon Redon (1995) and The Heart of the World (2000); Production design collages and storyboards; Three behind-the-scenes featurettes; Radio interviews; "Imagined" audition reels; Vintage photos from Maddin's personal collection; and 5 collectible postcards of original
poster art.

[...]

Far from the glitz of Hollywood is Winnipeg, a Canadian city that has provided at least one moviemaker, the decidedly offbeat Guy Maddin. The Quintessential Guy Maddin! is a set of five of Maddin's movies that show a style that you're unlikely to catch in your local cineplex unless they have one small theater for "art" films.
Like David Lynch, Maddin's films are very surreal. They are also often very funny.

Chronlogically first in the set is Archangel, which immediately demonstrates the Maddin look - movies that seem from another era, particularly the cusp between the late silent films and the early talkies. The story deals with an American in the Russian town of Archangel at the end of World War I. He becomes convinced a local woman is his one-time lover who's actually dead. That only scratches the surface of the story, in which Maddin defies the constraints of a low budget to create a picture that resembles the German Expressionist films of the 1920s.

Careful takes its influence from the Leni Riefenstahl and her mountain films to tell the story of a small village high in the Alps where the threat of avalanches force everyone to be extra quiet; the animals even have their vocal cords removed. Against this backdrop is the story of two brothers, the first who has lustful feelings for his mother, the second falling for a girl who has similar daddy issues. It's essentially an incest comedy, with a mixture of taboos and humor. This is one of two films in color, albeit a washed out color similar to the old-fashioned two-strip Technicolors.

The other color film is Twilight of the Ice Nymphs, the one film with somewhat familiar celebrities (Shelly Duvall, Alice Krige and Frank Gorshin) and the one film that I really wasn't very impressed with. A former political prisoner comes home to the farm run by his sister. He falls for a mysterious woman who is under the sway of a local doctor. This is another surreal film, but the bright colors and relative talkiness makes this film quite different from the others in the set.

Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary is a ballet version of the classic story, though with a Maddin twist. Silent and black-and-white (with a little red for blood), it offers an interpretation of Dracula that emphasizes the xenophobia and sexism of the novel.

Finally, Cowards Bend the Knee is a semi-autobiographical film which has a hockey player drawn into a plot by his lover to avenge the death of her father. There is an element from the classic horror film The Hands of Orlac in which the "hero" supposedly has the hands of a dead man. This silent film is broken into ten six-minute chapters and was originally designed as an installation at a museum (in which viewers would walk from chapter to chapter.

Besides the movies, there are also short films, most notably the award-winning Heart of the World (slightly reminscent of Metropolis). All the movies have commentaries by Maddin; there's also a documentary about him and several other features. These works are definitely not for everyone. They're far from the mainstream and they have material (such as incest) which some people will find offensive or uncomfortable. But if you like avante-garde films - or just want to experiment with something that is offbeat and entertaining - this is a great collection.