Tag: Guy Maddin

In Guy Maddin’s Rumours, What’s Amazing is That There’s No Secret Societies At Work Here

There’s lots of absurdist moments in this polticial satire set during the apocalypse in Rumours. What’s offered is more than just a movie review here, but also an analysis about what it all means!

Guy Maddin's Rumours Movie PosterNow playing at select theatres
Spoiler Alert

When Guy Maddin’s Rumours gets heavy with absurdist humour and presents a group of world leaders as inept, this movie may well be his most bizarre to date. That’s because of the setup: these folks have gathered to deal with some unknown global crisis. And as for whether the mud people they discover is part of it or not, that’s a mystery they’ll have to figure out, if they don’t kill each other first! I suspect these subplots had the help of co-directors Evan and Galen Johnson during filming, and reminded me of the classic soap opera, Dark Shadows.

By the time everyone agrees on how to enact a plan against some strange mauraders, it’s too late. Here, we meet German premier Hilda Orlmann (Cate Blanchett) trying to keep it together, but I suspect she’s ready to crack. And the people who are there to represent other extremes include Antonio Lamorle (Rolando Ravello) from Italy; Maxime Laplace (Roy Dupuis) from Canada; Sylvain Broulez (Denis Ménochet) from France; Tatsuro Iwasaki (Takehiro Hira) from Japan; Cardosa Dewind (Nikki Amuka-Bird) from the UK, and US President Edison Wolcott (Charles Dance). While most of them are caricatures of certain leaders we know in our world, the folks who don’t get lost in the shadows.

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[Victoria Film Festival ’14] Introducing Guy Maddin

The Do It Yourself (DIY) approach to filmmaking is at the heart of how respected artist and auteur Guy Maddin makes many of his films.

Guy Maddin

The Do It Yourself (DIY) approach to filmmaking is at the heart of how respected artist and auteur Guy Maddin makes many of his films. When he’s a first-wave post punk rocker – born in ’56 and growing up listening to the music of the Sex Pistols and Public Image – he lived and breathed everything that had to do with what that music revolution represented. When he started daydreaming about making films, the ethos of just picking up an instrument to play what you felt, or to be a brat at the time, and many of the thrills he felt from the music were in the audio textures and in the process of how they were recorded way more than in any melody.

“It just seemed to me that just by analogy people would love movies made of the same spirit,” said Maddin.

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[Victoria, BC] The Victoria Film Festival from a Geek’s Perspective

Half of the Otaku no Culture team is definitely getting excited for the Victoria Film Festival, running from Feb 7th to the 16th at various venues, for the huge variety of films offered. On my Friday night wish to hit list is The Congress, a sci-fi product that looks like it blends elements of Cool World, Who Framed Roger Rabbit and The Matrix together. When actress Robin Wright (The Princess Bride) plays herself as a starlet struggling to help her young son, she gives up her rights to be on film for a digitized version. Just what happens is a look into a not too distant future if Hollywood has their say. Il Futuro is a must since it features Rutger Hauer. It’s been a long time since I last saw him on-screen. I remember him best in Blade Runner, so what I’m after to see, based on my geeky interests, are consistent.

Victoria Film Festival

I would like to see the gala film, Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa, that night in hopes Colm Meany might be in town. He’s one of those underrated stars that I can truly appreciate and I like to meet him and say I really enjoyed all the work, like Law & Order the The Commitments, he has done outside of the Star Trek universe, but that’s unlikely. When considering this film played in European theatres last year and it’s not a world premiere, the chances for the stars to show up is very slim, but the director might be around.
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