Word: maddin
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...using them, hurrah hurrah, to produce reviews. He's covered mainstream movies like Shrek the Third and Bug, and artier fare on the order of Guy Maddin's Brand Upon the Brain and Hal Hartley's Fay Grim. Today he has a review of A Mighty Heart. It's a phrase that certainly applies to Roger, and Chaz too, for their year-long battle against his debilitating illness. With open arms ready to embrace a trusted friend - which Roger has been to Mary C. and me for three decades, and is to any reader or viewer of his work...
...filmmakers. The TFF had at least three: of Roberto Rossellini and his part-time muse Ingrid Bergman, and of two auteurs who were so "indie" they were nearly isolated: Robert Frank and Jack Smith. I skipped the Rossellini movie, though it was made by the wonderful Canadian zany Guy Maddin, because I heard that some members of the Rossellini family were outraged by it, and I was not in a mood to take sides between two groups I respect. In Robert Frank: Leaving Home Coming Home: A Portrait of Robert Frank, director Gerald Fox manages to pry open...
...Warner Bros. made perky musicals designed to snap Americans out of their depression. In Canada, as filmmaker Guy Maddin imagines it, a rich woman dreamed of exploiting, not exorcising, the world's misery. Lady Port-Huntly (Isabella Rossellini), a scheming beer baroness whose two glass legs are filled with her own brew, concocts a song contest with a $25,000 prize for the saddest music in the world. In return, milady will have the ideal promo for the end of Prohibition in the U.S. As she promises, "If you're sad and like beer, I'm your lady...
Cinephiles know the Winnipeg-based Maddin (Tales from the Gimli Hospital, Twilight of the Ice Nymphs) as a unique, independent spirit who makes modern movies with exquisitely anachronistic techniques: fake degraded stock, blue and yellow tints, declamatory acting styles and lighting so soft-focus, Garbo could have bathed in it. The Saddest Music in the World, based on a script by Kazuo Ishiguro (author of The Remains of the Day), is Maddin's first superproduction. It boasts a $2.5 million budget and a few actors you may have heard of: Rossellini, Euro-Kewpie Maria de Medeiros and Mark McKinney from...
...approach, though, is as weird as ever. From the talking tapeworm at the beginning to the Eskimo production number at the end, Saddest Music is the most enthralling 1933 musical made in 2003. In a movie age when there's hardly a garde, let alone an avant-garde, Maddin proves there are many languages to cinema, including the dead one of antique film. And in that language, he sings, he soars. --By Richard Corliss