The Screengrab : guy maddin

Nine-Point Plans

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 18:15:00 GMT

It ain't Thanksgiving, but everyone wants a slice of the turkey. Most people have already made their New Year's resolutions (some of us have already broken them, for that matter), but up north, in Edmonton's Vue Weekly newspaper, critic Brian Gibson is asking not what he can do for Hollywood, but what Hollywood can do for him.

Shocked into a wishful reverie by a chance viewing of Clint Eastwood's embarrassing end-of-life project Gran Torino, Gibson delivers a nine-item wish list for what he hopes the movies will deliver in 2009. On his checklist are more realistic films about class and race, big comebacks from fading Hollywood actresses (including Screengrab favorite Debra Winger), more films by female directors, and "a damn good Canadian movie from a director other than Cronenberg, Egoyan or Maddin".

Never ones to miss out on the chance to jump someone else's train, we'd like to echo several of Gibson's wishes -- especially his desire to see serious film criticism make a comeback, and a better distribution system that ensures that people in locations like, oh, say Edmonton and San Antonio get a chance to see something other than blockbusters on the big screen a couple of times a year. And, to round out his list to an even dozen, here's three more things we'd like to see from the film world in 2009:

1. The emergence of a new and exciting national cinema. The last several years have seen the emergence of exciting and vibrant film scenes in places like South Korea, Spain, Thailand, and even Iran. But how about a new national cinema taking center stage? Enough great films have come out of Africa in the last few years to suggest they're due for a major renaissance; Arab cinema might finally bloom in the unlikely event that a prolonged period of politcal and economic stability settles in the Gulf; and Italian cinema has been in the doldrums for a number of decades.

2. Directors breaking out of their boxes. While there's something to be said for finding what you're good at and sticking with it, the emergence of several major talents in recent years who have confined themselves to the dreary and limited world of torture-porn horror movies gives one pause. Rob Zombie's movies are made by a man with a careful and crafty eye for visuals and a keen grasp of mood, and the first half The Strangers proved that young Bryan Bertino is a master of timing and a guy who knows how to wring tension out of a dramatic scene or a simple framing shot. We'd like to stop imaging what it would be like if these guys turned their obvious skills towards something a little bit more mature, and actually see it.

3. Watchmen being worth watching. It doesn't seem like so goddamn much to ask.

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Ann Savage, 1921-2008

Phil Nugent — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 15:30:00 GMT

Ann Savage, nee' Bernice Maxine Lyon and fated to become one of the iconic femme fatales of no-budget noir, died on Christmas Day, at a nursing home, at the age of 87. She was born in Columbia, South Carolina, to an army dad who died before she was five years old and a mother with whom she lit out for Hollywood when Bernice was all of ten. She trained at Max Reinhardt's acting school at a time when it was managed by Bert D'Armand, who she married when she was twenty-one; the marriage--her second--lasted until his death in 1969. (Her earlier marriage, when she was eighteen, last two years and ended in divorce.) She appeared in thirty movies between 1943 and 1953 but failed to make much of a dent in the public's consciousness--but then, as she herself admitted, most of the pictures she was in didn't deserve much of an audience. The big exception is Detour, the 1945 cult classic in which she co-starred with Tom Neal for director Edgar G. Ulmer. Shot in less than a week on a budget of $20,000, it would develop a reputation as one of the most febrile and unforgettable noirss ever to come out of poverty row, and Savage's Vera would take her place in the history of the genre as one of the all-time greatest mistakes ever made by a man on the road, a woman who attaches herself to Neal's doomed antihero like a virus. (It was the fourth and final movie that she made with Neal, who in 1965 would be tried for the murder of his wife and convicted of involuntary manslaughter. He died in 1972.)

In 1986, just about the time that the rediscovery of Detour (thanks to TV broadcasts and home-video releases) was reviving her name, Savage made her first film appearance since 1953, cast somewhat against type as a nun in the steamy romance Fire with Fire starring Virginia Madsen. After that, she resumed her retirement until last year, when Canadian auteur and Detour fan cajoled her into playing the mother of his on-screen alter ego in My Winnipeg. Scarcely recognizable, she gave that movie a full jolt of comic energy, but was subsequently bedrodden after suffering a series of strokes. In 1992, Detour was selected for preservation by the Library of Congress's National Film Registry.

DVD Digest for August 19, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 14:00:00 GMT

The seemingly endless run of crappy spring releases continues unabated this week, as I reach into last week to select a noteworthy release I somehow overlooked.

Belated DVD of the Week: With Criterion still digging into film history to bring cinephiles the best of classic cinema, it’s easy to overlook what’s going on at their kid-sister company, Eclipse. To wit: I was so caught up last week’s in Criterion’s impressive DVD of Guy Maddin’s Brand Upon the Brain that I completely forgot to mention the release of Eclipse Series 11: Larisa Shepitko. As with Eclipse’s previous box sets devoted to William Klein and Raymond Bernard, Eclipse has rescued a worthy if unsung filmmaker from semi-obscurity, this time by releasing two of her greatest achievements on DVD. This Shepitko set includes the war films Wings and The Ascent, two key films in her all-too-brief filmography, and which gives some insight of what a major director she might have become had she not died in a car accident at the age of forty. As with Shepitko’s husband Elem Klimov’s masterpiece Come and See, both films in this Eclipse set are hardly cheerful entertainment, but like Come and See they’re indispensible viewing, and I’m glad Eclipse has taken the care of releasing them.

Meanwhile, Criterion this week has new DVDs of Powell and Pressburger’s The Small Back Room and Keisuke Kinoshita’s Twenty-Four Eyes. Also in classics coming to DVD: Oliver Stone’s Nixon: Election Year Edition (Disney, also Blu-Ray).

New releases coming to DVD this week include: Frances McDormand and Amy Adams in Miss Pettigrew Lives For a Day (Universal); tween-bait Hannah Montana & Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds 3-D Concert (Disney, also Blu-Ray); Jay Roach’s funny/depressing HBO film Recount (Warner); yet another horror remake in Prom Night (Sony, also Blu-Ray); Keanu Reeves as a crooked cop in Street Kings (Fox, also Blu-Ray); and the grief-porny The Life Before Her Eyes (Magnolia). Also, two notable direct-to-DVD releases: My Sassy Girl (Fox), a remake of the Korean cult hit starring thespian extraordinaire Elisha Cuthbert; and mixed martial arts champ Randy Couture taking over for The Rock in The Scorpion King 2: Rise of a Warrior (Universal, also Blu-Ray).

This week’s TV on DVD releases include: Dexter Season 2 (Paramount); Gossip Girl Season 1 (Warner); House Season 4 (MGM); Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles Season 1 (Warner). And in Blu-Ray only news, this week brings the release of Justice League Season 1 (Warner).

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.

The Screengrab Highlight Reel: June 7-13, 2008

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 21:00:00 GMT

Guest editing this week’s Highlight Reel will be noted physicist Dr. Bruce Banner. Dr. Banner, if you could just…Dr. Banner? Is there something wrong? You look a little angry, and…what’s happening to your pants? Dr. Ban –

HULK BLOG!!!!

Hulk has new movie for puny humans to see! Also see Hulk’s old movie! It a little artsy-fartsy for Hulk, but Hulk appreciates innovative editing scheme!

Hulk think Zooey Deschanel very pretty and sings like bird!

Hulk not opposed to Liv Tyler making out with Kate Hudson!

Hulk remember stupid Jaws 2 movie and stupid Battlefield Earth movie, but Hulk not see Summer Catch with ten foot pole!

Hulk like Top 10 Empowered Girls more than Top 9 Disempowered Girls – they snap like twigs in Hulk’s embrace!

Although a big Guy Maddin fan, Hulk admits to not yet seeing My Winnipeg!

Hulk think Sam Hamm Watchmen script reductive and trite!

Hulk stomp Terence Stamp!

Hulk take Spike Lee and Clint Eastwood by necks and crash heads together like cymbals!

Hulk miss last Friday the 13th movie because puny Banner want to see revival of The Robe instead!

Screengrab Review: My Winnipeg

Peter Smith — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 19:30:00 GMT

By Mike D'Angelo

"I must leave," Guy Maddin intones solemnly at the outset of his hilariously sardonic-affectionate tribute to Manitoba's capital, where he's lived and worked his entire life. "I must leave here now." But while it's Maddin's voice we hear on the soundtrack, the anxious-looking "Guy Maddin" we see booking it out of town on a locomotive in this early sequence is actor Darcy Fehr, in a puckish mix of invention and autobiography that characterizes the movie as a whole. Yes, Winnipeg did experience a turbulent strike in 1919 that was directly inspired by the Bolshevik revolution. No, Winnipeg in all likelihood not does have ten times the sleepwalking rate of any other city in the world. Merrily juxtaposing history and myth, Maddin/"Maddin" decides to "film [his] way out of here," shepherding his surviving family into the apartment-cum-salon where he grew up and re-enacting episodes from his childhood. According to the narration, his tyrannical mother plays herself; those who stick around for the credits will discover that the role is in fact played by Ann Savage, the long-ago star of Detour.

Shot in Maddin's now-standard faux-silent style, complete with apparent celluloid damage and breathless intertitles, My Winnipeg itself amounts to a neverending series of detours. Truth is, the titular subject is entirely ostensible, which is both the film's charm and its greatest limitation.

Unlike Maddin's last feature, the overly plotty Brand Upon the Brain!, this one never wears out its welcome, but neither does it ever achieve the galvanizing force of Maddin's best work, simply because we're forever off to the next random goofy vignette. (Cowards Bend the Knee, which worked similar quasi-autobiographical terrain, derived much of its lunatic power from Maddin's expert use of silent horror tropes.) In other words, the movie is kind of a doodle — and yet, it's a magnificent doodle, with parts so individually flavorful that you don't so much care about pulling out your calculator and working out their sum. Any film deranged enough to include a a fictional '60s TV show called "Ledge Man," which found the hero threatening to leap to his death from a tall building every single week, really must be seen.

Video(s) of the Day: Short Films by Guy Maddin

Paul Clark — Mon, 12 May 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Earlier today, I posted the trailer for Guy Maddin’s latest feature, entitled My Winnipeg. So it seemed like as good an excuse as any to revisit two of Maddin’s best-known short films. First, here’s his 2000 masterpiece The Heart of the World, which was originally commissioned for the Toronto Film Festival that year and ended up being one of the most raved-about films of the fest, short or otherwise. It’s a Soviet-style epic in miniature, full of grandiose camera angles and plenty of phallic imagery, and climaxing in an orgasmic celebration of… well, see for yourself:

Now, from the sublime to the oh-so-ridiculous, here’s Maddin’s infamous 1995 short Sissy Boy Slap Party. While hardly a masterful work like The Heart of the World, it’s still a lot of fun, and just as un-PC as the title would suggest. Check it out:

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.

Winnipeg is the New Cleveland: Guy Maddin's Hometown

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 14:30:00 GMT

As Tribeca kicks into high gear, New York filmgoers brace themselves for a spate of the strange and unsual, and they don't get much stranger than the fact that Guy Maddin, Canada's master of the bizarre, has apparently made a documentary.

Well, maybe that's going a bit too far -- in this brief interview with the Village Voice's Aaron Hillis, Maddin makes it clear that his new film debuting at the festival, My Winnipeg, isn't exactly a documentary so much as it is a "docu-fantasia", and that the idea of a documentary as little more than straight-up representation of the sort he says could easily be made with a security camera doesn't really appeal to him that much.

But Maddin (who here, as elsewhere, is a mighty fun interview) says that he jumped at the chance to immortalize his hometown on screen: "Canadians, especially Winnipeggers, are lousy self-mythologizers—pathologically so. I think it's because we're sitting next to a country that's so great at it," he says. "I decided, while I'm living here, I should try my best to bring Winnipeg at least up to speed with Cleveland on this sort of thing. "

"Green Porno": Isabella Rossellini's Dirty Bug Show

Phil Nugent — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Isabella Rossellini, once thought of as a bit of a muse figure, is turning into the quite the one-woman show. In My Dad Is 100 Years Old, th short film tribute to her father, Roberto Rossellini, that Guy Maddin directed from her own screenplay, she played herself, Alfred Hitchcock, Federico Fellini, David O. Selznick, and Charlie Chaplin, one or two of which must have constituted a stretch for her. Now she's on the festival circuit, the Sundance Channel, and maybe your cell phone with a series of really short (one-minute) films, collectively known as Green Porno, that she wrote and co-directed with Jody Shapiro, and which star Rossellini as various insects explaining their mating rituals. Rossellini talked about the series with Deborah Solomons, who hit her straight up with the most obvious question about all this: why did she choose to play the male insects? Rossllini: "I am a ham. It makes people laugh when I play the male. So I played the male, when I am not playing a hermaphrodite." Solomon: "But aren’t the females more interesting, if only because they rule the bug world?" Rossellini:: "Can I say something? I am sorry. I didn’t want to make a feminist statement by saying the female praying mantis eats the male, so, Watch out, husbands." Solomon:: "Maybe your interest in bugs was spawned by David Lynch, who cast you in your first major film, Blue Velvet, and presented a view of the world in which red ants are teeming beneath every beautiful surface." Rossellini: "Oh, David must have chosen red ants because they are known to bite; they have a painful bite." For some reason, this reminds the reader of the story that Lynch broke up with her over the telephone. Maybe he really is a Martian.

Top Ten of 2007: Leonard Pierce

Leonard Pierce — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 17:00:00 GMT

Unlike many of my fellow bloggers here at the Screengrab, who live in urbane, sophisticated metropoli, I make my home in San Antonio, Texas. We have a ratio of approximately one movie theatre for every million people here, and "art house" is just what the locals call a museum. I hear if we play our cards right, we might be getting a one-week screening next year of that movie The Graduate all the cool kids are talking about, but until then, it's pretty much Transformers on nineteen of the twenty-four screens down at Huebner Oaks. So you'll forgive me if my list leans pretty heavily on stuff that's already available on Netflix; at least half the movies on my list were ones that I had to drive an hour up to Austin to even have a chance of seeing before their DVD release, and there's more than a few movies that likely would have a chance of appearing here (I think specifically of There Will Be Blood and Syndromes and a Century) that there was simply no way for me to see before the year was up. Still, I'll be happy to go along with the prevailing wisdom that 2007 was an especially rich year for film; there was plenty to see, even if you had to go out of your way to see it.

#10: THE LIVES OF OTHERS (Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, dir.)

Although it was released in 2006, this masterful film from Germany didn't receive an American audience outside of the Telluride Film Festival until February. It was well worth the wait. Far too many movies that pick up Best Foreign Film Oscars are the international doppelgangers of Best Picture winners -- overblown, overpraised, middlebrow 'prestige' pictures lacking in resonance, depth and any particular qualities that will result in their being remembered far down the line. But The Lives of Others -- best thought of as a brilliant reworking of The Conversation against the dreadful backdrop of Soviet East Germany -- deserved every bit of praise heaped on it by critics both here and abroad. It's a stunning, terrifying film, brilliantly illustrating Hannah Arendt's 'banality of evil' in the person of the astonishing Ulrich Mühe.

#9: SWEENEY TODD, THE DEMON BARBER OF FLEET STREET (Tim Burton, dir.)

One of the few of a year-end spate of high-profile films that I actually got a chance to see, Sweeney Todd is Tim Burton's adaptation of the notoriously blood-soaked and difficult Stephen Sondheim musical. I've never been especially fond of Tim Burton as a director, but the qualities of his filmmaking that usually work against him -- the broad emotional strokes, the barely-held-together plots, the characters as caricatures, and the meticulous set design at the expense of believability -- are turned into such strengths that it's hard to believe no one ever had the idea of having him do a musical before this. The result is certainly the best film he's ever done and likely the best film he'll ever do, an absolutely gorgeous thing to look at, and with some surprisingly fine performances. One of the best musicals I've ever seen.

#8: EASTERN PROMISES (David Cronenberg, dir.)

Conversely, I've long been a staunch defender of David Cronenberg's, even with films like Crash and Spider, which met with widespread revulsion from a lot of my fellow critics. Unfortunately, I found his most celebrated film -- 2005's A History of Violence -- sadly lacking, a formulaic and uninspiring drama that bore so little of his unique imprint as a filmmaker that it could have been directed by almost anyone. If the Russian mob drama Eastern Promises isn't strong enough to stand alongside his greatest works, though, it's at least a return to form and a revisiting of some of the themes -- muddled self-identity, the grace and brutality of violence, and a simultaneous revulsion at and fascination with the human body -- that have made him one of the signature talents of the day. Plus, naked Viggo Mortensen, ladies!

#7: BEFORE THE DEVIL KNOWS YOU'RE DEAD (Sidney Lumet, dir.)

If you'd have told me last year -- hell, if you'd told me twenty years ago -- that one of the best film of 2007 would be by ancient journeyman Sidney Lumet, I'd likely have scoffed. But damned if the old trooper doesn't turn in a remarkably swift and sure-handed job behind the helm here, presenting a neo-noir thriller about a simple caper gone disastrously wrong that wouldn't be entirely out of place in the early 1960s and yet never loses a fresh sense of modernity. Before the Devil Knows You're Dead isn't a groundbreaking piece of cinema art; it's simply an assured, highly professional piece of moviemaking of the sort we rarely see anymore, and which Lumet is eminently qualified to give us. It's further bolstered by a dynamite performance from Philip Seymour Hoffman, who has simply owned 2007 on screen.

#6: LUST, CAUTION (Ang Lee, dir.)

Ang Lee continues to be the most versatile moviemaker in the business with his best work since Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; if he is absolute master of no genre, he at least never ceases to amaze with his ability to dive confidently into all genres. Bouyed by astonishing performances so tightly controlled and confidently directed that they seem drawn from lost Wong Kar-Wei footage, Lust, Caution maintains a killing pace throughout and doesn't fail to deliver on its near-constant sense of tension and frustration. The much-discussed sex scenes are indeed intense and scarily erotic, but they also accomplish something that's so rarely done that it's become an industry joke: they're not arbitrary, but essential, not only to the plot, but also to the slow but inexorable revelation of the nature of the characters.

#5: THE DIVING BELL AND THE BUTTERFLY (Julian Schnabel, dir.)

I was never fond of Julian Schnabel, the visual artist, and while I thought that his debut film, Basquiat, showed promise, I tended to agree with the New York art critic Robert Hughes, who called it a movie about the worst painter of the 1980s made by the second worst. I'm not sure what Hughes has to say about The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, but I think it's an amazing film by a director who's finally come into full posession of the tools of his craft. Schnabel has said that he still considers himself an artist first and a director second, but this visually rewarding, complex and beautiful movie is better than anything he ever put to canvas, and even without the tremendous lead performance by Mathieu Amalric, it would be a film worth watching for its mastery of internal landscapes far richer than Schabel's art ever suggested.

#4: MANUFACTURED LANDSCAPES (Jennifer Baichwal, dir.)

In what is widely regarded as a banner year for documentaries, the finest one I saw had nothing to do with the war in Iraq, the peccadilloes of the president, or the politics of personality. Instead, it was a little-seen film about a little-known photographer named Edward Burtynsky. His photographs -- and the like-minded film by Jennifer Baichwal -- document the vastness and power of man-made constructs, and convey the awe and the terror one feels at observing objects, from China's Three Gorges Dam to American junkyards, that are made by the hand of humans but can dwarf or even overwhelm the natural surroundings in which they appear. A slow-paced, deliberate, and provocative film made as a collaboration between two artists who understand each other in an perfectly asynchronous way.

#3: ZODIAC (David Fincher, dir.)

Much has been made of the fact that David Fincher, best known for his visual pyrotechnics, allegedly made his most successful film without them. That's not entirely true; among other scenes, the opening drive-by tracking shot, the first murders, and the construction montage of the San Francisco skyline can stand next to some of the most stylish set-pieces in his other films. But it's undeniable that his best film to date, and one of the best films of the year, is at its best when he simply stands back and lets the audience become spellbound with the absorbing interplay of his characters. A fascinating treatment of the nature of obsession and a subtle treatise on the way we become ensnared in the grotesque and the perverse, Zodiac is revelatory in the way it defies expectations of what a serial-killer drama should be.

#2: BRAND UPON THE BRAIN! (Guy Maddin, dir.)

Guy Maddin has been quietly establishing himself as one of the finest, most idiosyncratic directors in the world for several years now, and Brand Upon the Brain! is both his most autobiographical film to date (the lead character in the film is, well, Guy Maddin, ably and amusingly played by young Sullivan Brown) and his best. There was some fear amongst critics who had a chance to see it in its 'touring edition' -- a live extravaganza featuring on-site music, celebrity voice-overs and sound effects composed right there in the theater -- that the film wouldn't hold up without all the show-stopping theatrical gimmicks, but they needn't have worried: this is the purest distilliation of Maddin's unique sensibilities as a filmmaker: sexual obsession, throwback surrealism, fantastic dreamscapes, and madness as part of the everyday.

#1: NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN (Joel & Ethan Coen, dirs.)

There are plenty of filmmakers who would trade their favorite limb for a track record like Joel and Ethan Coen -- from 1984 to 2001, they didn't make a bad film, and the 9 features they put in the can over those 17 years add up to the most robust corpus by any living American filmmaker you can name. Things started to go awry with Intolerable Cruelty and The Ladykillers; many placed the blame on the fact that, for the first time, the Coens were filming material they didn't write. That's not a problem with No Country for Old Men, a triumphant masterpiece of genre filmmaking based on a minor Cormac McCarthy novel that once again places the brothers (credited, for the first time ever, as co-directors) where they belong: at the very pinnacle of American moviemaking. An astonishing comeback that will be discussed for decades.

Video of the Day: Maddin 2002

Peter Smith — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 17:00:00 GMT

One of the marks of a true artist is that even his casual, unimportant efforts are worth watching. Such is the case with this brief clip of auditions for Guy Maddin's film Cowards Bend the Knee. Made by Maddin and his editor John Gurdebeke for no particular reason other than just screwing around, the clip (featuring a number of actors who actually ended up in the film, including Melissa Dionisio, Mike Bell and David Stuart Evans), is a lovely little piece of filmmaking that oddly echoes the overall tone of the movie. — Leonard Pierce

Movies We Missed: Interkosmos (2006)

Peter Smith — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 20:00:00 GMT

One of the sad truths about our current distribution system is that many unique films are overlooked by distributors in favor of movies deemed more "marketable." Such was the case with Interkosmos, the wholly original debut feature from Chicago video artist Jim Finn. Finn uses a faux documentary format to tell the story of an apocryphal Eastern bloc space mission to colonize the outer reaches of our solar system- not exactly the most commercial of projects. But Interkosmos is so wonderfully strange that it deserves to find a cult audience on DVD.

Why we missed it: After making the festival rounds last year, Interkosmos only played a handful of theatrical venues, so it's not like we were the only once who bypassed it.

Unless the names Nandini Khaund and Ruediger van den Boom mean anything to you, there aren't any name actors to be found in the cast.

Why we should have known: Interkosmos was buzzed about at every festival it played, even receiving a rave from that connoisseur of the esoteric, Guy Maddin.

The most popular pitch for the film was "Wes Anderson in space," which isn't exactly a dead-on description but should at least clue you in to Finn's comic wavelength.

Why we ended up kicking ourselves: Finn's brand of comedy is almost bone-dry, but it's also blissfully offbeat, and in a movie comprised largely from stock footage and flat-voiced narration, the tangents are what make Interkosmos truly special. Along with descriptions of the crew's mission agenda, there's footage from a German kids' special called Kosmoschweinchen ("The Space Pig"), a description of a program by which the cosmonauts en route are made to watch recorded images of Earth in order to combat cabin fever, and archival radio transmissions that include such morbid bons mots at "If you cut a squirrel in half, all you get is blood and fur."

Not content to tell the film in documentary style, Finn also adhered to the rules of the classical Hollywood musical, with one musical number every eight to twelve minutes. Even with his limited resources, Finn accomplishes this with the help of Jim Becker and Colleen Burke's Teutonic garage-rock score. The musical numbers include a sequence involving two women's field hockey teams, footage of the cosmonauts exercising onboard, and most memorably, cosmonaut Falcon (played by Finn) serenading cosmonaut Seagull (Khaund) by radio with that "capitalist love song," "The Trolley Song."

Amidst the quirkiness, Interkosmos also contains a surprisingly moving romance between Falcon and Seagull, albeit a particularly communist one in which they sacrifice their own feelings for the cause.

Why we might have been better off without it: With a story set behind the Iron Curtain at the height of the Cold War, and a DVD package that prominently features the hammer and sickle emblem, watching Interkosmos could very well get you put on an FBI watch list even today. But don't let that discourage you. . .

— Paul Clark