Reviews (2)

A UNIQUE VISUAL DELIGHT
I've now watched this movie twice & it's starting to grow on me. By Guy Maddin's own standards this is definately a departure from his usual unusual expressionist style. The storyline is a bit incoherent, but the look is truly a treat for the eyes! Any fan of Guy Maddin should appreciate what he was trying to accomplish here, a remarkable vision on par with any of his other feature films.

A troubled production results a mixed bag from Maddin
After the great cult success of his cult films TALES FROM THE GIMLI HOSPITAL and CAREFUL, Guy Maddin acquired a much larger budget and attracted much better-known actors to star in his first full-color feature, THE TWILIGHT OF THE ICE NYMPHS, which represents a great departure in his work. All his earlier major works had been largely parodies of Twenties and Thirties experimental films from Germany and the former Soviet Union. ICE NYMPHS seems instead to be a send-up of (of all things) symbolist drama and opera. Set in the mythical land of Mandragore and shot in hyper-saturated colors, the film tells the story of Peter, an ex-convict who returns to his sister Amelia's ostrich farm after he falls in love on the ship journey home with the lovely Juliana. While hunting (or "sleephunting," as he is prone to do), Peter awakens the ardor of a mysterious woman in the forest, Zephyr, who prays to a statue of Venus that Peter should fall in love with her. But after trysting with Zephyr, Peter discovers that Juliana has returned and has become the mistress of Dr. Solti, the wooden-legged Mephistolean conjurer and physician his sister is madly in love with. Meanwhile, Amelia is herself fending off the furious ploys of vengeance made by her servant, Cain Ball, who desperately wants to acquire the ostrich farm...

If all this suggests a strange turn-of-the-century opera, such as PELLEAS ET MELISANDE or DIE FRAU OHNE SCHATTEN, it should: there's even opportunities in this film for arias to be inserted, such as during Peter's bizarre lengthy command to the trees to enclose upon Dr. Solti and Julian. But despite many great moments of visual beauty (especially thanks to the glorious use of color filters), it's clear that Maddin is over his head here: he doesn't have the kind of control over his material he did in his earlier works, and the professional actors seem to gum up the works a great deal. In his earlier films, Maddin's familiar cast of gifted amateurs (Sarah Neville, Brent Neale, and especially Kyle McCulloch) work wonders with the arch dialogue and campy situations Maddin and his usual screenwriter, Peter Toles, dream up: they deliver the lines with great wide-eyed sincerity, which the material absolutely requires. But here the experienced Alice Krige (who previously did a short with Maddin) and Shelley Duvall seem hampered by the intentionally hokey dialogue. Worst of all, Frank Gorshin, in a disastrous turn as Cain Ball, keeps hamming things up (by practically winking at the audience that he's in one the joke too) which spoils the humor entirely.

Reputedly Maddin was miserable during this production because of his inability to control his cast and crew, and the unhappiness shows onscreen: fortunately, he entirely bounced back the year after ICE NYMPHS with his masterpiece short THE HEART OF THE WORLD, where he returned to more familiar territory. ... Read more

Reviews (2)

Unbeatable package!
Must-have for Maddin fans: His most beautiful and haunting feature and a short ("The Heart of the World") that's perhaps the best thing he's ever done. For the uninitiated, it would be better to start with the somewhat more lucid "Careful," which is more successful in making use of a great premise.

The (historically faithful) premise of "Archangel" is that the
citizens of this Russian town, cut off from the rest of Europe,
have not yet learned that WW I is over, so they continue fighting. Unfortunately, you might never know this from watching the film (I heard it from the horse's mouth). Connected with this theme of repetition and "forgetting" that something is over is the main plot of the amnesiac hero, a soldier who has forgotten that his beloved Iris has died, and thinks he has found her again in Veronika when he comes to the little town. Veronika is herself married to an amnesiac who repeatedly marries her, betrays her on their wedding night, then forgets he has done so.

"Archangel" is a sad example of a director with a fully developed visual sense and great ideas who hadn't yet learned how to coherently develop and present a narrative--and it would take a narrative master to lucidly present this massively complicated plot. Most successful is the absurd but moving subplot about the hero, John Boles's, usurpation of the father's role in the Archangel household that takes him in and the cowardly father's eventual redemption in his son's eyes. There are brilliant, beautiful surrealist moments like the famous "bunny snowfall" in the "sleepy trenches" and the war tableaux. Maddin maybe packs in *too many* dazzlingly original ideas for the viewer to absorb, but that makes for rewarding subsequent viewings. Frequent screenwriting collaborator George Toles is at his best here, drawing on amnesiac melodramas of World War II-era Hollywood. The Toles/Maddin trademark stilted, flowery dialogue also seems to fit perfectly with the haunting, disorienting themes and setting and adds to the eeriness. The soundtrack (scratches, stock war noises, and old '45s) is as gorgeous as the visuals. Not quite successful in what it sets out to achieve, but one-of-a-kind. It would take just as long to explain "Heart of the World," so I can't, except to say that Maddin has become such a coherent storyteller since "Archangel" that he can compress a (nearly) perfectly lucid narrative into a 6-minute film that's visually even more stunning and just as inventive as "Archangel."

Maddin's homages to the Soviet greats
Almost all of Guy Maddin's films in some way or another are salutes to the great experimenters of the European silent and early sound cinema: these two films, the full-length ARCHANGEL and the six-minute short THE HEART OF THE WORLD, are Maddin's salute to the great Soviet filmmakers of the Twenties, and have been eagerly anticipated by Maddin's cultish following. ARCHANGEL takes place in the Russian city of the same name in 1919, where (according to Maddin's scenario) the Great War has been continuing even while it has been over elsewhere for years. Warding off not only "the Hun" but crazed Bolsheviks, the inhabitants of Archangel all must go to the front to protect their homeland. The plot involves obsessive love among a group of amnesiacs in the besieged city, and prominently features Maddin's handsome and very funny favorite feature actor, Kyle McCullogh. maddin is perhaps too enemored of narrative for his own good, in that there are plot strands like crazy weaving back and forth, but the film is still very funny, even if not up to the standards of his next full-length work CAREFUL. (His funniest running gag is that many of the inhabitants of Archangel are dressed exactly like the medieval nuns, metroploitans, and empresses in Eisenstein's IVAN THE TERRIBLE--even when they're fighting at the front.)

This video gets the full five stars, though, for its inclusion of THE HEART OF THE WORLD, probably Maddin's masterpeice to date. This award-winning silent short, commissioned for the 25th anniversary of the Toronto Film Festival, directly parodies Soviet propagandistic experiemental film, and may be six of the funniest minutes ever captured on celluloid. The entire thing is so berserkly paced (in homage to Eisentstein's "lightning mixes") that you have to go back to replay it because you laugh so hard you miss key moments as they shoot by you at an insane clip. ... Read more

Reviews (18)

A Gorgeous Melding of the Surreal and Folklore
From the very first frame, Guy Maddin's offbeat "Tales from the Gimli Hospital" takes us into a brilliantly conceived world where the surreal and the ancient merge to form one of the most unique and thrilling cinematic realms ever seen. Combining gothic sensibility with early twentieth century silent film techniques, Maddin creates an atmosphere drenched with visual delights, horrors and deep rooted symbolism. What Maddin has done with this film is create a visionary work that is nearly flawless. Although the film takes many viewings to fully sink in due to its strange structure and deliberately labyrinthine story telling, it is a fully realized piece of avant-garde cinema in the tradition of the great works of the silent German Expressionists. By taking ancient Icelandic folktales and blending them with incongrous and fantastical images onto a black and white celluloid canvas, Maddin has done with one film what few directors ever accomplish in their entire carreers ....the creation of a truly unique and worthy piece of cinemtaic art!

MAKES YOUR HMO LOOK GOOD
...

"TALES FROM THE GIMLI HOSPITAL" is the black and white first film from Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin and it reflects the best of the great silent and surrealist directors like F.W. Murnau, Luis Bunuel and Jean Cocteau. Originally released in 1988, this 68 minute nightmare is set during a smallpox epidemic in the village of Gimli, Manitoba, at the beginning of the 20th century. Friends Emar and Gunnar are two male patients who share a hospital room as well as their darkest secrets. Disturbing tales of creeping pestilence, unconsummated passions, envy, necrophilia are told climaxing in a deadly battle between the former friends now rivals. Moody, weird and atmospheric, the Gimli universe has been embraced by the midnight movie circuit and set the director's career in motion. The disc includes a crisp full frame transfer, an impish director's commentary and two of his short films.

My favorite movie of all time
I've watched this movie several times and am fascinated by it. What makes it so terrific is its uniqueness and the wonderfully fitting music that is found throughout the effort. You'll never see another movie like this and I must say that you have to be a little "off center" to enjoy it. If you're looking for something different then I recommend you try it.

why the hype?
This is ham-fisted moviemaking at its worst--or should I say best? Burdened by an impossibly cheesy plot which fills the movie with more dead-air time than your next laundryroom round, the movie is at once too insultingly imcompetent to be a homage to the great German expressionist films which supposedly inspired it, and too boring and poker-faced to be a send-up of anything but the director's own mediocrity. Go see any film by Murnau, Pabst, Ruttmann, or Lang from the 20s--or for that matter any silent films at random, whether Russian, American, French, whatever--and they'll be infinitely better than this puerile endeavor at self-indulgence.

Tales From A Parallel Universe
Poor Einar the Lonely (another of Guy Maddin's hapless heroes) has fallen a victim to the disfiguring pestilence that has been dropping from a great height onto the Canadian/Icelandic community of Gimli, Manitoba. He drags himself to the Gimli Hospital, a strange place where puppet shows are used in place of anaesthetic and the 13-year-old nurses ignore Einar in favor of Gunnar. Gunnar is the occupant of the bed next to Einar's; Einar's initial jealousy turns to friendship... but as the two men begin to exchange confidences, a secret comes out that makes them deadly enemies.

Although the story is set in "a Gimli we no longer know", there really is such a place as Gimli, and there is a real Gimli Hospital. The Gimli of the film seems to exist in a time warp in which it is always 2 A.M., 1930; there is a late-night atmosphere over everything, and even the sun seems to give off an artificial light. The production values and the overall look of the film recall the early days of sound films ("White Zombie", "Vampyr", etc.). Maddin has taken great pains to recreate the technical limitations of those old movies, right down to the scratch and hum on the soundtrack.

Imagine either SCTV doing a parody of Ingmar Bergman or Ingmar Bergman doing a segment for SCTV-- in fact, in certain shots Kyle McCulloch (Einar) and Michael Gottli (Gunnar) resemble Joe Flaherty and John Candy. There's a great deal of deadpan silliness to this film, but you can't help but like the characters (Gunnar is hapless too); there's no directoral irony that invites us to look down on the cast. This is a film that walks a fine line between honest emotion and kitsch.

In that vein, one of the extra features provided with the DVD is the short film "The Dead Father", which has its comedic moments but is ultimately touching and will resonate with those who have lost a family member only to have him or her show up in their dreams. It's a serious film with funny overtones; sort of the flip side of "Tales of the Gimli Hospital". The last ten minutes are especially poignant.

Maddin provides a rollicking, often digressive commentary; it may not tell you everything you want to know, but it's a lot of fun to listen to. ... Read more

Reviews (14)

Like a very funny and beautiful dream...
When I first saw this film at a special screening at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the host described Guy Maddin as "Winnipeg's answer to David Lynch... that is, if David Lynch were as good as Guy Maddin." The praise might be just: there are lovely dreamlike effects in Maddin's film (especially this, one of his best) which are like nothing David Lynch ever achieved.

CAREFUL is a tribute to the great bergenfilms of the Weimar Republic, and is filmed with the same kinds of filmic effects and film stock as those lovely little hallucinations of the silent era. The film is largely about the joys of repression, and what disasters can be brought about without it. If you think I'm being facetious, you're wrong: in Maddin's deliriously offkilter Expressionist universe, every act of curiosity is sure to kill a cat, and everyone else besides.(the film's prologue, which explains all this, is one of the funniest things I've ever seen: "Careful, don't touch that pot!") Maddin's muse, the very gifted Kyle McCulloch, is on-hand as usual. This film can't be explained, but it also shouldn't be missed.

goofy , tedious, grossly arty
Interesting looking, one of a kind, but very dull art film. What I assume the filmmakers are saying is that if people were to open up about a number of societal taboos that it would open a can of worms. But its torture to sit though this very slow annoying film for that message. I found this expensive looking purposely choppy film's acting, color photography, story, characters, dialogue dubbing and sound effects to be grossly arty but not compelling...although I will say that a few of the Lynchian jokes were mildly funny. As for an original art film? -Pop psychology, extensive symbolism, intentional camp, and sets that imitate German expressionism have already been done...ad-nauseum. What might be considered original here is that the director chose to parody the style and mood of an old German mountain climbing film. Frankly I've never watched an entire one of these but let it be clear that German mountain climbing films are extremely esoteric - so who is Careful made for...15 people? The most preposterous thing is that the guys that made the very goofy Careful thought so much of themselves that they had the nerve to make fun of someone else's film. I'd recommend Careful for art students, but why? When you can still see all the original films that Careful imitates. Without being able to recommend Careful to anyone - Id still give Careful four stars in that - the techinical people such as set designers, photographers, film and sound editors were obviously meticulous about there craft. Also that the producers and the director had the nerve, talent, gall or perseverance to capture their warped vision on celluloid in the 1990s. But I take away 2 stars for being monotonous, dull and one more of thousands of pretentious, blurry, out of focus art films. By the way - did I read the end credits right? Is this the kind of thing Canadians are spending their tax dollars on?

The quality of the film stock, sound and extras provided by Kino Video are excellent.

Keep an Eye on Guy
I'll never forget the first time I saw a Guy Maddin film--it was "Tales from Gimli Hospital." When it ended I sat quietly for a few moments and just muttered "Holy Cow" over and over. "Gimli" is an early and very low budget effort. "Careful" shows Guy nearing a peak that hopefully will go on for a few more decades.

Guy somehow (and miraculously) manages to sum up the entire history of cinema in his work. While there's much chatter about his obvious retro style, few have noticed his nods to Godard and more recent filmmakers. He may seem to mimic early films with missing frames and soundtrack problems but these "affectations" are ultimately as expressive as the equivalent jump cuts and soundtrack dropouts in Godard's "Alphaville." They're richer too because of the inevitable multiple associations. His amazing short, "Heart of the World" (one of the best shorts I've ever seen) owes as much to modern MTV editing styles as it does to early Soviet cinema (and creates a bridge and dialogue between two seemingly unrelated creative eras). Guy's not an artsy filmmaker, he's just a "guy" who loves movies passionately and works, unselfconsciously, with film's full lexicon.

"Careful" is a beautiful (often breathtakingly gorgeous), complex, unique, and very funny film. He's made a disturbing comedy about tragic and sensitive issues or maybe a tragedy about comic issues--there's something almost Shakespearean about his output. He also has a knack for getting memorable performances from his actors.

No this film isn't for everyone--right now at least--but I'm convinced we are currently witnessing the appearance of one of film's truly great creative geniuses. His films make one realize how stunningly shallow so many modern movies are, overburdened with flashy technologies like CGI, mandatory pop-cultural references, pretty people, and consumerism. His output is also a challenge to the equally bankrupt "underground" or "counter-culture." By avoiding every modern cliché, trend, anti-trend, technology, anti-technology, and pretense in his work he's giving us, in this film and others, timeless and (a rare thing these days) sublime works that are, even after all this lofty commentary, still pretty damned funny!

Recommended by Leni Reifenstahl!
When Maddin showed this homage to kitschy, proto-Nazi German "mountain films" (if you have no idea what I'm talking about, see Susan Sontag's essay "Fascinating Fascism) to their one-time star and later Nazi propogandist filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl, she proclaimed it brilliant--high praise coming from a demented genius. Maddin is also a demented genius, though not of the same ilk as Reifenstahl. Maddin and regular screenwriting collaborator George Toles, the cerebral bad boys of Canadian cinema, are at their naughtiest and cheekiest here, paying tribute to racist kitsch, promoting repression, and playing with Freud's concept of family romance. Although after you see this movie you may need to re-think the concept of "bad boys"...

The film's homage to German expressionism has been widely noted, but Maddin and Toles, no typical film students, are also deeply versed in studio-era Hollywood melodrama (if you don't believe me, see Toles's book of film criticism, "A House Made of Light"), and there's an intriguing family melodrama here underneath the multiple layers of stylization, allusions to the history of cinema, and Maddin's quirky obsessions--with ritual, for example. In other words, it's not all a postmodern in-joke, so if you like your nihilism old-fashioned, based in the self-destructive human psyche--get it here.

This is Maddin's best feature film, in my opinion, because it has an hilarious and lucid premise from which the absurdist tragedy logically unfolds, which is also a brilliant psychological trope: in the isolated mountain village of Tolsbad (a metaphor for Canada, duh) the citizens must be careful not to raise their voices above a whisper or cause any other kind of disturbance for fear of causing an avalanche. After watching this film, if you have children or small siblings you may become disturbingly aware of how many times per hour in how many contexts you use the word "Careful!" Should be seen as a double-bill with Cronenberg's "Dead Ringers" for anyone who wants to understand the Canadian psyche--but then again, believe me, you don't.

Snowy Surrealism
One of Guy Maddin's best-known films, Careful is naturally, extremely bizarre. The inhabitants of a mountain village must be careful not to make a noise loud enough to trigger an avalanche, which would bury them all. Naturally ther are all repressed, sexually as well as literally.
The film is often very funny, with great lines of dialogue such as "here is all the hair I've lost in the past few weeks." Even the Oedipal elements are so melodramatic they're pretty chuckly. The colour scheme is pretty painful on the eyes, and often irritating, but it does make the film what it is. ... Read more