Guy Maddin: C/D

It's finally playing near Boston at the end of the month, so I am going to see this.

Barbara Steele as the narrator, colour me JEALOUS

It's called "montage," you might wanna see it in some '20s films.

I know what it is. I just don't like it when it's used to pad a half-hour movie out to 90 minutes.

OK, do I go see the live version narrated by Stephen Malkmus, Calvin Johnson, or Karen Black.

I'm leaning towards Calvin, since I think he would be funniest.

oooh toughie - Cal's probably a safe choice

Calvin seems most Maddinesque of the 3.

splain me??

is this brand?

Any word on this coming to the UK?

(And, out of that three, I'd go for Karen Black. I can't imagine who Maddin would get for a British show. Alan Bennet? Mark E. Smith? Fenella Fielding?)

Yes, Brand is finally coming in live format to Portland.

The Karen Black showing is explicitly part of the Gay Etc. Film Fest. Which makes it a bit less tempting.

As long as the foley artists are performing live, I don't think the Narrator matters all that much.

i would defly go to the karen black.

I am glad no one is pro-Malkmus.

I'll third Black.

I'm seeing My Winnipeg this weekend, followed hours later by the Kids in the Hall tour! Will I be Canadian by Monday morning?

Ann Savage, the femme fatale of Detour, plays 'Mother'!!

http://www.tribecafilmfestival.org/filmguide/16735781.html

my winnipeg is amazing.

favourite maddin for sure. one of the highlights of tiff 07 in a big way. i hope you like it.

Perhaps, when I am in Toronto, I will not have to wait forever to see new Maddin films.

my faves are still Heart of World & Saddest Music, but this is mostly super.

I ADORE My Winnipeg. Enjoy!

uh, you already saw it. never mind.

I've only seen Saddest Music in the World but love love loved it and am curious to see his next

this isn't actually his next, but you should see it if you get the chance. his best imo.

yeah, prob. my favorite, too...super funny and quirky, as usual, but from what i've seen, MW features his best and most vivid imagery. also really touching. I really liked how it played with truth and fiction. What was it like to see it w/ narration?

awesome but as far as i could tell, actually as far as he specifically said, the narration was the exact same script as the movie.

yeah, he's narrating it live tonight at the Tribeca fest. I'm determined not to research which of the MW events are fictional (aside from the obvious ones).

interview:

http://www.villagevoice.com/film/0817,talking-with-winnipeg-s-remarkably-well-adjusted-guy-maddin,422564,20.html

Just emerging from a no-movie funk and finally watched half of Cowards last night. I wish I had been paying attention and had gotten ticket for My Winnipeg. Speaking of Ann Savage, there is a chapter on her in the excellent but out-of-print Dark City Dames, although I haven't actually read that chapter, mostly read the one about Jane Greer and Rudy Vallee and Howard Hughes.

apparently Ann used to tour with her personal print of Detour.

My Winnipeg opens at IFC Center on 6/13.

Brand on Criterion next week... interview:

http://www.greencine.com/central/guymaddin/mywinnipeg

Once you drive out of Winnipeg, it's eight hours to Minneapolis or six hours to Regina which is just another Winnipeg. And so you're far from the places. Other artists from Winnipeg, more successful ones, often say the same thing. That unlike big cities, where there are lots of things to do and warmer weather, we don't talk our best ideas out into the cafe night air. You're stuck inside, and there's nothing to do but actually doing your stuff....

The 20s just looked cool. They still look cool to this day. It's one of the most durable decades in fashion terms and architectural design terms. There are some others that give it a good run for its money, but it's never gone completely away like some decades do now and then. So I always liked it but I never fell fully in love with 20s cinema until I started making movies myself, and I realized that when I'm putting together movies I tend to think of all books and movies as, more or less, fairy tales, the way all food tastes more or less like chicken. Everything is kinda like, relatively a fairy tale, or not so much. So my way into understanding something was to see something as a fairy tale. To be able to recognize allegories I would have to scrape away all the details, and see some archetypes briefly and see the way they related to each other. When I stripped away details and saw the way major characters were relating to each other, often I saw patterns that were repeated from Bible stories or fairy tales and things like that. When I'm constructing my own scripts I tend to do it that way. That enables you to get away with stylized performances. As a matter of fact, they're better when they're stylized. You don't want naturalism. Once you're stylizing you can level the playing field for a cast that may include really great actors and really not-so-great actors. I'm a bit of a product of natural selection. I've survived as a filmmaker because I kept adapting, using the features, the fins and feathers that stood me the best chance of surviving the environment in which I was working.

funny, i just wrote a thing about that!

I guess it's not up yet?

Glad you liked Baghead though!

as in, just wrote it 5 minutes ago!

the way all food tastes more or less like chicken

maybe this is why I couldn't get through saddest music. guy's got no taste!

Now My Winnipeg has come to Portland. Pfeh!

The Brand! Criterion DVD has six narrator tracks:

http://www.criterion.com/asp/release.asp?id=440

The forks.

The lap.

the cloven tofu.

Tempting.

'40s Femme Fatale Star Ann Savage Dies at 87
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- Ann Savage, who earned a cult following as a femme fatale in such 1940s pulp-fiction movies as ''Detour,'' has died at 87.

The actress died in her sleep at a nursing home on Christmas Day from complications following a series of strokes, said her manager, Kent Adamson.

Her Hollywood career had largely been over since the mid-1950s, but she had a resurgence over the past year with a starring role in Canadian cult filmmaker Guy Maddin's ''My Winnipeg.''

Starting with her 1943 debut in the crime story ''One Dangerous Night,'' Savage made more than 30 films through the 1950s, including Westerns (''Saddles and Sagebrush,'' ''Satan's Cradle''), musicals (''Dancing in Manhattan,'' ''Ever Since Venus'') and wartime tales (''Passport to Suez,'' ''Two-Man Submarine'').

Savage was best-known for director Edgar G. Ulmer's 1945 B-movie ''Detour,'' in which she played a woman ruthlessly blackmailing a stranger, played by Tom Neal.

''It's actually a showcase role,'' Adamson said. ''Neal and Savage really reversed the traditional male-female roles of the time. She's vicious and predatory. She's been called a harpy from hell, and in the film, too, she's very sexually aggressive, and he's very, very passive. It's very unusual for a '40s film to have a woman come on that strong.''

Decades later, ''Detour'' and Savage gained a cult audience on television and home video.

Adamson said Maddin had been a longtime fan of ''Detour.'' Maddin cast Savage to play his mother in ''My Winnipeg,'' a combination of documentary, drama and personal memoir about his native city in Manitoba.

Savage did some television in the 1950s, including ''Death Valley Days'' and ''The Ford Television Theatre,'' then left Hollywood for New York City, where she appeared in commercials and industrial films.

In 1986, Savage returned to acting with an appearance in ''Fire With Fire,'' a drama whose cast included Virginia Madsen and D.B. Sweeney.

http://edendale.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8341bff3653ef010536a129d4970c-pi

"(H)e's like Mike Todd, Jean (Cocteau) and Jacques Tati all rolled into one!"

http://edendale.typepad.com/weblog/2008/12/ann-savage-guy-maddins-mother-in-my-winnipeg-dies.html

was gonna start a thread, r.i.p.

RIP

I'm thinking My Winnipeg might be one of my favourite films of the decade.

me too

Saddest Music & Heart of the World are two of mine.

So many people I love and respect like this guy's films and I cannot stand them. Watched My Winnipeg last night and it started ok but really started to grate after a while. Too wacky (or the wrong kind of wacky, I LIKE wacky). whyyyyy

if it was wacky i'd have hated it tbh

Quite like his writing though

(xp)

I went on a date to a Guy Maddin film once (Brand upon the Brain!) and it was quite nice, but then I watched Dracula on DVD a few months later and zzzzzzzzzzz. I can see how it could be construed as wacky. It kind of is; it's like a more "sophisticated" Tarantino or something.

'my winnipeg' and maybe 'heart of the world' aside i don't really care for him

How can I see some of Maddin’s most recent shorts? I live in the US.

Thought this would be an RIP Louis Negin revive.