Bikes vs Cars (2015)
Dir. Fredrik Gertten
Starring: Rob (Crack Smoking Ex-Mayor of Toronto) Ford, Denzil (Former Rob Ford Apologist and Toronto Deputy Mayor) Minnan-Wong, Aline Cavalcante, Dan Koeppel, Ivan Naurholm, Raquel Rolnik, Nicolas Habib, Don Ward, Don Ward, Joel Ewanick, Joshua Dysart, Christina Deckwirth, Liliana Godoy, Fabio Mendonça

Review By Greg Klymkiw

We are on the brink of worldwide environmental collapse. One of the biggest culprits in this deadly folly is the power held by the transportation and energy interests which have been plunging the Earth ever-deeper into an apocalypse we might never recover from. Filmmaker Fredrik Gerrten tackled the inhumanity of the Dole Corporation and its use of poisonous chemicals in the production of fruit with his powerful films Bananas!* and Big Boys Gone Bananas!*. Now, Gertten is back with Bikes vs Cars, a terrific new picture infused with his unique, super-charged, aesthetically dazzling cinematic style of activist cinema, providing a fascinating Around the World in 80 Days eye-opener into just how people get around in some of the biggest cities on God's Green Earth.


Personally, I'm an inveterate driver of cars. So much so, that when I lived in Winnipeg, I lived across the street from a supermarket and prided myself, not on walking to gather my groceries, but, in fact, driving my car across the street to stock up on my soda pop, potato chips, cookies, frozen pizza, toilet paper and plastic Glad garbage bags. In fact, though my apartment had an in-suite laundry and dryer, I shoved all my dirty clothes into the aforementioned Glad garbage bags and drove, from the extreme sound end of the city to the north end of the city for my Mother to do my laundry for me (until my mid-30s). When she was done her maternal duties, I'd make the long trek - by car, naturally, to pick up my Downy-fresh clothing.

I have to admit that anytime I see a movie or television program with pro-bicycle losers whining about cars and how evil they are, I want to punch them in the face. That said, Bikes vs Cars is a Fredrik Gertten film and as he's not the typical documentarian, but a REAL FILMMAKER, I did indeed have to gird my loins and grit my teeth and watch it.

And yes, I'm glad I did. It's not only great filmmaking, but it did indeed provide the kind of alternate viewpoint that was far from didactic. Not once did I feel like I was being clobbered on my noggin with a bag of fucking granola wielded by some granny-glasses-adorned, pony-tailed, bearded, sandal-wearing hippie who dared refer to me as "Man."

You see, I have not been on a bicycle for 40 years. I have to admit, though, that I loved this film so much that the next time director Gertten visits Toronto I might try to interview him as we take a bicycle ride through the streets of the city once ruled by the crack-smoking Mayor Rob Ford who fought mightily during his term of office in what he perceived to be a "War Against Cars". (Maybe we will even take a bicycle ride together to Rob Ford's house in Etobicoke and, of course, the infamous crack house where he sucked back the elixir that led to his troubles.)


Oh, uh, Rob Ford is in the movie, but frankly, Gertten introduces us to a lot more interesting people than that. (Though in fairness, Ford delivers plenty of outrageous redneck comedy relief.)

Focusing primarily on the cities of Sao Paulo, Los Angeles, Toronto and Copenhagen we meet a variety of cyclists, car drivers and everyone in between. We learn about various individuals and their love of cycling as a viable mode of transport, but we also experience, first-hand, exactly how their very lives are at stake on their bikes.

Gertten captures some unbelievably terrifying footage as insane car and truck drivers madly careen through the streets, narrowly missing cyclists, cutting them off, forcing them into near-deadly situations. These sequences are so harrowing, I must admit to even biting my nails to the quick for the filmmakers being out there on the mean streets to capture this footage.

Contrasting this, though, are clearly sequences where Gertten manages to capture the sheer joy and beauty of what these cyclists experience as well. Night rides on empty streets, group rides where the sheer amount of riders create safety in numbers, children utilizing cycling as part of their curricula and, strangely enough, we even experience the adrenalin rush of cyclists blasting through the most congested streets.

Of course, no documentary is without the facts and figures and Gertten does not shy away from presenting these, but never are they strictly informational, but are woven expertly into the fabric of his narrative.

He also provides so many moments that are heartbreaking - memorials and memorial services to fallen cyclists, ghost bikes of deceased riders, affixed to posts with clutches of flowers clinging to them, urban headstones and monuments to the dead.

One of the coolest sequences is when Gertten follows a cyclist through a neighbourhood in Los Angeles and we discover the ghost-town-like remains of a massive bike transport system which once allowed 25% of the city's population bike to and from their places of employment.

Contrasting all the urban nightmares where cars outnumber bikes, Gertten follows the daily adventures of a cab driver in Copenhagen. I have to admit, even as an inveterate automobile advocate, that it was pretty funny watching this poor schlub try to make his way through the sea of cyclists and admit. more than once, that he's a man with several tons of metal in his grasp, yet he is ultimately bereft of any real power on the streets.


As this is a Fredrik Gertten film, I'd be mightily disappointed if he didn't expose us to the sad and terrible truth of the matter behind the transport industry. I suppose I could have guessed this if I bothered to think about it at all, but Gertten provides us with the historical and contemporary secrets behind the corporate lobby of car manufacturers and the oil companies. Their money and power are responsible for blatantly squelching every form of alternative transport to the point where people believe that cars are the only way.

Bikes vs Cars is yet another terrific celluloid feather in Gertten cap of cinema. I especially love how the film is structured, paced and cut. He leads you in ever-so slowly and subtly and it doesn't take long before you're hooked on the narrative threads of his subjects and the overriding subject of them all - the conflict between bikes and cars. The movie stealthily and brilliantly draws you in, but as the film progresses, his canny approach is to catch you so off guard that before you know it your sucked into a compelling tale.

The movie, and by extension, Gertten's entire mise-en-scene and editorial structure, sneak up on you. Once he and the film have you in their clutches, there's very little to do but wend your way freely through the picture, perched very comfortably on what feels like a bicycle built for two.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: **** 4-Stars

Bikes vs Cars will be unveiled to the world at the esteemed South by Southwest SXSW Film Festival on Sunday, March 15, 2015 under the stars in the Republic Square Park, March 16, 2015, AND THEN at the VIMEO THEATRE (ATTENTION SAM TOLES from VIMEO, check this out in Austin - you're gonna wanna get your mits on this one) and finally, March 18, 2015 at the SXSW Satellite Venue: Alamo Slaughter @ 5701 W. Slaughter Ln. This will be followed by film festival screenings all over the world.

My interview with Fredrik Gertten and review of BIG BOYS GONE BANANAS!* HERE

My article on the crowd funding for BIKES vs CARS HERE

Remember The Night (1940)
Dir. Mitchell Leisen
Scr. Preston Sturges
Starring: Barbara Stanwyck, Fred McMurray, Beulah Bondi, Sterling Holloway, Elizabeth Patterson, Georgia Caine

Review By Greg Klymkiw

A fine script from Preston Sturges, solid Mitchell Leisen direction and an undeniably wonderful cast are what keep this It Happened One Night wannabe reasonably diverting. This ball of well-used yarn involves an inveterate kleptomaniac (Stanwyck) and the State Prosecutor (Fred McMurray) who's determined to bring her to justice. The picture then blossoms into an unlikely romance on the road.

All the requisite romantic comedy tropes of the period merge with Sturges's signature American Renoir microscope upon the values of middle class America as McMurray's character brings his criminal charge to spend the holidays with his family upstate, only to face an eventual conflict of interest when the reality of throwing the book at her legally, looms its ugly head.

This charmingly familiar item adds to the pantheon of Old Hollywood Christmas movies. Even in 1940, though, it must have felt a tad derivative, but there's no denying its first-rate entertainment value.

The Film Corner Rating: *** 3-Stars


Remember The Night plays Sunday, February 22 at 3:15 p.m. at TIFF BELL LIGHTBOX in James Quandt's amazing series "Ball of Fire: The Films of Barbara Stanwyck". The film is presented in 35mm. For further info, visit the TIFF website HERE. The film is also available on DVD and Blu-Ray via Universal Pictures replete with a phenomenal set of extra features. As well, there are many other Stanwyck films from this TIFF series which can be ordered directly below and, if so, you'll be contributing to the ongoing maintenance of The Film Corner.

Kidnapping Mr. Heineken (2015)
Dir. Daniel Alfredson
Starring: Anthony Hopkins, Jim Sturgess, Sam Worthington, Ryan Kwanten, Mark van Eeuwen, Tom Cocquerel, Jemima West

Review By Greg Klymkiw

By 1986, many young North American lads of distinction had abandoned the domestic brands of beer their fathers drank and opted for the prissy Dutch elixir of hops and brewers' yeast in the imported long-necked green glass bottles which adorned the majority of tables in many a university pub throughout the 80s. After all, its dashing founder Freddy Heineken had himself become a household name a mere three years earlier when he'd been kidnapped and held for ransom in a daring caper pulled off by five good friends with no criminal experience whatsoever and elicited the highest payout of the time.

All this would change, though, when David Lynch released Blue Velvet, which featured the notorious exchange of dialogue between upright young whippersnapper Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle McLachlan) and the sexually deviant thug Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper). It went thus:

Frank Booth: What kind of beer do you like?
Jeffrey Beaumont: Heineken.
Frank Booth: Heineken? Fuck that shit! Pabst Blue Ribbon!

This oft-quoted exchange, rather than sending the European brew of choice for North American academic effete elites even further into the stratosphere, managed to inspire a healthy return to the working class American beer of American Dads. No matter, though, as the aforementioned daring kidnapping and the dogged pursuit of the kidnappers and meticulous research of crime journalist Peter R. de Vries worked considerable magic upon the Heineken brand's worldwide sales for many years nonetheless.

It's taken over 30 years for a big-screen feature film to be made of this notorious abduction, but alas, the wait has yielded mixed results. A decent screenplay by William Brookfield condenses the intricacies of the massive de Vries text superbly and focuses mostly upon the close friendship of the five kidnappers as well as the claustrophobic and tense setting of the holding cell Heineken is held in.

The direction by camera jockey Daniel Alfredson, who helmed The Girl Who Played with Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest, the two remaining parts of the original Lisbeth Salander Millennium Trilogy based on Stieg Larson's bestselling novels, here, as in the two uneven followups to Niels Arden Oplev's superbly directed The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, yields mixed results.

Alfredson pulls of the early going rather well as he introduces us to the five young pals attempting to establish their own business during the early 80s economic downturn. Upon being turned down for bank loans, the men come up with a plan to kidnap Heineken.

Realizing they'll be pegged as amateurs by the authorities, the friends pull off a huge bank robbery to finance the perfect crime of abduction in order to make law enforcement believe they're a well-funded criminal organization. So long as Alfredson sticks to the intricacies of character, the film is reasonably compelling - especially during the sequences in their hiding spot one they have Heineken in their grasp.

As he did with the two Dragon/Millennium pictures, Alfredson displays his utter ineptitude with action and hard-core suspense. His herky-jerky, sloppily shot and edited action throw the film completely off-kilter and render a finished product that's infuriating since the writing and performances are so genuinely fine. (Anthony Hopkins, not chewing the scenery as per usual, delivers an especially engaging and revelatory performance as Heineken - maybe one of the best he's delivered in years.)

Kidnapping Mr. Heineken is pretty much a mixed bag of nuts. It's a story worth telling as a film, but as directed, the picture is spoiled by a few too many unripe or rotten ingredients.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: ** 2-Stars

Kidnapping Mr, Heineken opens today in a limited theatrical release day-and-date with access to VOD via VVS Films.

Standstill (2013)
Dir. Majdi El-­Omari
Starring: Atwena:Ron David Deerhouse, Meisoon Azzaria, Iohani:Io Curotte, Skawennati Madelaine Montour, Tatum Ieronhienhawi McComber, Jean Pierre Lefebvre

Review By Greg Klymkiw

…Gently she sleeps
With her fingers
in her ears
Gently she dreams
With her palms
on her eyes…
While her Mother sings,
"They Killed the fish
They Killed the bird
and the Little Girl in the house."
-Excerpt from Wedad's poem

Standstill is a powerful and deeply moving first feature film by the Canadian-Palestinian filmmaker Majdi El-­Omari. Set in and around the Quebec town of Oka, the city of Montreal and the Native Reservation of Kanehsatake, it tells the tale of a middle-aged member of the Mohawk Nation. Arihote (Atewena:ron David Deerhouse) is a former war correspondent who used his gifts as a photographer in Sarajevo, but now seeks peace and solace as an anonymous wedding photographer. Juggling the emotional turmoil of an at-risk son, a wife who left him - disappearing as if into thin air - and a father who, in despair, blew his brains out, Arihote shambles through life like a somnambulist.

One night, though, this all changes when he hears a disturbance in the apartment above his basement suite. Upon investigating, he discovers that a murder has been committed by Wedad (Meissoon Azzaria), a Palestinian refugee. The victim is her abusive lover. Arihote is consumed with a need to help the woman, but at the same time, he's equally concerned about personally involving himself in anything that will bring him in contact with the police.

There's a good reason for both of these compelling feelings. They're rooted in the personal, to be sure, but there is also a historical backdrop to his motivations.


Canada's ages-old apartheid, aimed at its First Nations, has been one of the most horrendous, foul and insidious policies of hatred and racism in the history of colonialism in the Americas. The country has also had its fair share of violent genocide, though it's a drop in the bucket, compared to its neighbours to the south (right from the USA and down to the bottom tip of South America). What's been especially infuriating in the Great White North is the "polite" Canadian approach to decimating its Aboriginal Nations through lies, deceit and bureaucracy. The Canadian apartheid has essentially been a cultural genocide; ignoring treaties, swindling land, attempting to smother cultural identity and a grim system of residential schools aimed at "whitening" Native children (and sexually abusing them at the hands of Catholic priests).

More often than not, Canadian Aboriginals have attempted to use legal means to address this infinite litany of injustices perpetrated upon them by politicians and bureaucrats feathering their own nests whilst kowtowing to the needs of old money and corporate pigs. Resistance, more often than not, has been peaceful.

In 1990, the resistance had only one way to go. A whack of lily-white-bread-inbreds living in the town of Oka, Quebec near the Kanehsatake reservation, decided willy-nilly to mow down a huge swath of forested traditional lands belonging to the Mohawks of the region. A sacred and ancient burial ground would have been desecrated and the land would have been decimated environmentally. The Canadian government, as per usual, reneged on old agreements and subsequent attempts to rectify the situation legally amounted to a hill of beans.

The reason? The town wanted a golf course.

Yes, you read that right - a fucking golf course!

The Mohawks had only one choice - they set up barbed wire fences, blocked roads and occupied the forest. And they were armed to the teeth. This led to yahoo vigilantes, Quebec Police and eventually the Canadian Army descending upon the Native People. The "Oka Crisis", as it was eventually dubbed by the lily-white-bread-Canadian-media (and many historians who should know better), was indeed one of the most severe, tension-ridden armed conflicts between First Nations and their Colonizers during the history of Canada in the 20th Century. (It eventually took an Aboriginal filmmaker, Alanis Obomsawin, to provide a proper perspective on this injustice with her now-immortal documentary Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance, a film which the publicly-funded Canadian Broadcasting Corporation shamefully refused to broadcast.)

It is within this almost-ghostly social, historical and political backdrop that the character of Arihote is haunted in writer-editor-producer-director El-­Omari's astonishing Standstill, the first feature film presented primarily in the Mohawk language (with a smaller percentage in English, French and Arabic). Shot in stunning black and white (save for the equally arresting colour bookends) by cinematographer Stephanie Weber Biron and underscored by jangling, forbidding, mournful and evocative music by Antoine Bustros, this might be one of the most important films to be made in Canada in some time. El-Omari's mise-en-scene includes a series of neo-realist tableaux and simple, but effective handheld camera movements (floaty-cam-style, not shaky-cam) to tell this story about two people forced by political and social upheaval to confront the past in order to move forward with the future. Arihote is a stranger in his own land whilst Wedad is most definitely a stranger in a strange land.


So much of the film's story unfolds in slow, but richly composed and always fascinating details of real life - the camera at once being a fly on several walls, but also revealing the extremely potent points of view of Arihote. These latter moments are especially extraordinary, because we get a sense of his "camera eye" and when we see what he sees, it's as if we're seeing it through the eyes of one who has spent a lifetime photographing death, destruction, exploitation and despair.

El-Omari places most of the narrative emphasis upon Arihote. He is haunted by his wife's disappearance after he left for Sarajevo as well as trying to raise his motherless son in a world of conflict, but all of it far removed from his own experiences as a war photographer. What's especially moving is when we (and his son) discover that Arihote, was more than an ineffectual husband and partner to his long-gone wife - that he did a lot more than look at the world through a camera lens. She was a major activist in the "Oka Crisis", as well as being a brilliant visual artist. She placed her life on the line in a serious conflict, but also exposed her soul upon canvas. Arihote was not dissimilar. He's described to his son as being a vital participant at Oka "with a camera in one hand and a semi-automatic weapon in the other."

In a sense, we're faced with the tragedy of a couple whose love is effectively torn apart by the weight of colonialism and the crisis of Oka. She sought solace in rebuilding their family and love. Alas, he sought solace in the bitter war of Sarajevo. The broken pieces of this marriage resulted in abandonment on both sides of the equation and in the middle, Arihote's brilliant young son without a mother, his distant suicidal father and a sense of not belonging to either Kanehsatake or Montreal.


Add to this mix the parallel tale of Wedad and Arihote's involvement in her crisis - a strange narrative choice which starts the story off, but fades into the backdrop until the hugely emotional final third of the picture. Doing the math on the whole, we have a colonized aboriginal man, a female refugee from Palestine and a young man who doesn't know where he belongs. As such, El-Omari delivers what might be the ultimate indigenously Canadian story of all, one that recalls the title and even thematic layering of Edward Everett Hale's classic of short American fiction, "The Man Without a Country" (itself an allegory for the American Civil War).

To be without a country seems to be tantamount to being without a soul, not unlike so many aspects of Canadian existence amongst its aboriginal peoples, the diaspora of the poorest European immigrants and their progeny and the myriad of recent immigrants often fleeing political persecution in their countries of origin. In spite of this, though, El-Omari doesn't let us or his characters muddle about for an eternity of identity crises. He provides, like any great storyteller, obstacles that must be overcome and in so doing, he creates a film that is as despair-ridden as it is eventually very moving, powerful and oddly, but genuinely uplifting in a completely un-sentimental fashion.

There are no easy decisions or answers for any of the characters. Like most of us, they are living within an existential quagmire - one brought about by the crashing waves of history. As individuals it is their despair, practically hard-wired into their very beings by external powers which force them to face a new world, fresh horizons and a future in which they can break through the wall of stasis permeating their lives.

El-Omari presents all this in a muted fashion, but by doing so, he actually creates a film which might be one of the few Canadian films to be imbued with the strength and power which we have, for some 20 years turned to the Belgian filmmaking duo, the Dardenne Brothers for. Their intense naturalism and concentration upon the lives of the disenfranchised have been reflected in such masterworks as La promesse, Rosetta, L’Enfant, Le gamin au vélo and their most recent stunner Deux jours, une nuit.


Where Standstill might occasionally veer from a completely naturalistic style are its occasional dream-like visions and flashbacks, though even these extraordinary sequences are imbued with a highly realistic approach within the context of both the narrative and as self contained units of dramatic action. There's no overt flash to these haunting scenes, though in retrospect they are as unforgettable as anything else in the more realism-infused sequences. Like the Dardennes, El-Omari delivers considerable poetry, cinematic magic and flirts briefly, but pointedly with the cerebral.

It seems fitting, of course, that during a critical point in the story, the father of independent Canadian art cinema, director Jean Pierre Lefebvre appears in a pivotal, important role. (Full disclosure: Lefebvre appeared in a not dissimilar role in a film I produced in the late 90s by Bruno Lazaro Pacheco entitled City of Dark.) Here, as a weary French Canadian police detective investigating the murder that sets the whole film in action, he brings a wise, knowing humanity to his role as a man who has suffered similar personal bereavements as those experienced by Arihote. Lefebvre plays his role as more bureaucrat than Sûreté du Québec crime fighter whilst Arihote has all but given up his past as an activist and photographic eye upon the despair of war. It is here where we come face to face with men who both, in their own way, have been victims of British colonization and recognize a common ground in each other's place in the world.

Standstill is a film that gives Canadian Cinema the hope and promise that our truly indigenous stories will be told, stories about those who do far more living and dying in this world than the country's oppressors will ever do. Such stories will indeed be in very good hands with Majdi El­-Omari and the handful of other film artists who bring far more to the table than merely ephemeral expressions of cultural experience. He's made a film that has every potential to withstand the sands of time.

I can hardly wait for his next movie.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: **** 4-Stars

Standstill is a Domino Films release playing theatrically in Toronto at The Royal Cinema. Demand your local independent exhibitor bring it to your town.

The cowardice of martinets are hidden behind policy, process and/or committee decisions.

When Good Film Festivals Make Stupid
(and boy, do I mean STUPID) Decisions

Commentary By Greg Klymkiw

Spring is in the air. There are two ways I know this. First of all, my ponies are being extra rambunctious. It's a beautiful sight. Secondly, though, and perhaps most importantly (in my world), it's the beginning of a whole new season of film festivals. The fall flurry of flagship events is a distant memory, the winter blues reflecting the importance of avant-garde and/or dour social exposes has just passed and now, we're about to plunge into the best time to see movies in the dark - when it becomes warm and sunny.

Film festivals have always held a high degree of importance in the world of cinema; celebrating and positioning new motion picture product to springboard into larger arenas of adulation (or in some cases, belly-flopping into quagmires of rank forgetfulness). During the past quarter-century, however, film festivals are becoming the primary venue for the exposure of many great films that will only be seen on big screens within that context. This doesn't mean the films are bad, but that the traditional exhibition and distribution industry as a whole has become incredibly lazy, greedy and bereft of vision. (It didn't happen overnight, either. One can easily trace the decimation of theatrical exhibition from the early 80s onwards.)

In many ways, it is the film industry itself that has placed so many pictures into what might once have been perceived as the ghetto of film festival exhibition, but is now, more often than not, the most important theatrical venue for many fine films to enjoy a shared experience initially and often only in film festivals.

Film Festivals, in this respect, must not make blatantly stupid decisions with respect to inclusion of product, but most importantly, with the omission of said product.

Some might argue that to err is human. That's all well and good, but a film festival in not human and as such should not err. Then again, like any first-rate computer, a film festival can only be as good as its programmers and in recent years, this is where I'm seeing some of the most egregious, abominable and downright boneheaded decisions/inclusions/omissions.

To that, some argue that the selection of motion picture product, especially within the context of a film festival, boils down to subjectivity.

To this I say, in my best John Huston impersonation, "BALLS!"

I expect film festival programmers to be beyond subjectivity. They are there to present product which, within the context of their festival (or section of the festival), is of supreme advancement of the art of cinema. As such, they might even need to include product they aren't especially fond of. This kind of inclusion (even if I as a viewer might also not be fond of said product) is, to a certain extent understandable, if not downright acceptable.

What's not acceptable, I think, are some of the omissions. The problem is that festivals set up expectations by their very hype. They hammer home the idea that they are presenting the best work, and as such, are the infallible arbiters of what's important in cinema. Far too many scribes, industry insiders and audiences fall for this nonsense.

The worst form of film festival puffery are the announcements from grinning festival directors, programmers and (ugh!) curators, which make a point of how many films were submitted for inclusion in their festival, how much hard work went into making their final selection and how the bevy of product on offer represents the highest level of cinema excellence.

To this I say, in my best John Huston impersonation, "BALLS!"

We all know there will be shitty, godawful films in the mix. We also know there are probably films - good and even great films - that were, for whatever moronic reasons, not invited to participate. Eventually, these "rejects", if they're truly good or great, find a way into the festival world and get seen.

Speaking from personal experience, one film I produced was rejected by a major film festival for some of the most moronic reasons imaginable. The bottom line is that politics and political correctness reared their ugly heads here. The happy ending was that the film was invited into an even more prestigious film festival in Europe, won a Best Feature Film Award there, then was invited to close to 200 film festivals worldwide, won even more awards and garnered to-die-for critical notices, substantial theatrical playoff in foreign (though not domestic) territories and numerous prestigious broadcast berths.

Why did it bug me, then, that one film festival chose to reject it? Well, I knew the film had already been invited to this other European Film Festival, buoyed by the kind of words of praise from the festival director that made me realize that he/she not only loved the movie, BUT, most importantly, that they "got it!"

"Getting it" is all important in the game and what concerns me is that now, more than ever, there has been a slow erosion of standards over a 20-year-or-so period wherein more and more film festivals just DON'T "get it". Sure, there are always going to be people who don't like certain films and like others, BUT, one always assumes that these arbiters of cinematic importance know their shit. What's almost intolerable ARE those who know their shit, but for whatever boneheadedly petty reasons, refuse to acknowledge the importance of certain films (whether they like them or not).

Ah, but here's the worst thing - arbiters of cinematic importance (and excellence) who DON'T know their shit. This is happening more and more. I'll be having a conversation with one of them (and yes, they're usually younger than I am, but THAT is no excuse, really) and upon my mentioning the work of a specific filmmaker, they're looking at me with the sort of blank eyes one finds attached to a cow chewing its cud.

It's infuriating and depressing.


Once, I suggested to a certain film festival that a specific filmmaker would be an ideal choice for a major career retrospective. This was a festival specializing in the specific genre/medium that this particular filmmaker PIONEERED. The filmmaker was not just an important practitioner of this form, but, A FUCKING PIONEER of the form. The grand arbiter of cinematic excellence I spoke to, just looked up at me with the eyes of a bovine cud-chewer.

I resisted going apoplectic - not an easy thing for me to do, either. I am, after all, a Ukrainian with the blood of Cossacks coursing through my veins, ready to plunge my sword into anyone and anything that stands in the way of my supremacy.

Resist, though, I did.

Excuses that festival types come up with that I especially hate are those in which they acknowledge the submitted film is very good, but that the competition was extremely fierce that year and that there was simply no room to accommodate a screening of said rejected title.

Too fucking bad, loser! MAKE ROOM!

In fact, there was one time where I had a film rejected by a major festival under the guise of there not being enough room, in spite of the fact that the programmer acknowledged the picture was just fine. Here, I was NOT going to accept this as an answer. I went above the head of the aforementioned arbiter of cinematic excellence and explained the situation to the Festival Director. The director in question, looked at the film, assessed the reasons for its exclusion, then decided that room HAD to be made for the picture.

This, is what I call a mensch.

Alas, there are others who will not sully themselves with such matters. They set up a military-government-corporate-style chain of command within their organization so they don't have to deal with issues which might upset their hallowed apple-cart.

These, I call cowards. They hide behind the bureaucracy they've created. They will use "policy" and "process" as their buffer of weasel-like protectionism. Sometimes, they won't even taint their process with needing to provide ANY reason at all.

To this I say, yet again, in my best John Huston impersonation, "BALLS!"

I have no use or respect for "policy" and "process" since it is the very thing that justifies cowardice.

I have no use or respect for martinets who hide behind "policy" and "process".

I especially have no respect for "policy" and "process" that hides behind committee decisions. It's been proven time and time again that good movies cannot be made by committee and frankly, the same goes for pretty much anything and everything. Committees are fraught with compromise. They're also a smokescreen for the real decision-makers to cower behind if and when the going gets really tough.

Now, I will say that I'm being especially harsh with film festivals and it's incumbent upon me now to declare that my aforementioned criticisms extend to virtually every nook and cranny of the film world.

It's sickening, really.

But here's the thing about festivals - I hold film festivals far above the standards applied by other segments of the film business. I expect them to be perched upon a pedestal, towering over studios, distributors, exhibitors, financiers, government investment/funding/production entities, industry awards and yes, even film critics (mainstream and alternative film criticism has become especially horrendous in respect to "knowing its shit"). I expect - nay, I DEMAND higher standards from festivals, especially now that they have become the manner in which alternative visions will be seen and celebrated by the world at large.

When good festivals make stupid decisions based on politics, lack of available space and NOT KNOWING THEIR SHIT, when they hide behind policy, process and committees to avoid admitting their cowardice (and/or stupidity), then I really and truly look upon this as yet another nail in the coffin of civilization.

The decline, ladies and gentlemen, is not imminent.

It's already upon us.

As Edward Albee placed, as a chant of despair during the final act of "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf":

"…sad, sad, sad."

Marv (Louis Negin) teaches you how to take a bath in THE FORBIDDEN ROOM

LOUIS NEGIN is MARV

The Forbidden Room (2015)
Dir. Guy Maddin
Co-Dir. Evan Johnson
Scr. Maddin, Johnson, Robert Kotyk
Addl. Writ. John Ashbery, Kim Morgan
Edit. John Gurdebeke
Prod.Design Galen Johnson
Cinematog. Stephanie Anne Weber Biron and Ben Kasulke
Prod. Co. PHI Films, The National Film Board of Canada, Buffalo Gal
Starring: Roy Dupuis, Clara Furey, Louis Negin, Céline Bonnier, Karine Vanasse, Caroline Dhavernas, Paul Ahmarani, Mathieu Amalric, Udo Kier, Maria de Medeiros, Charlotte Rampling, Géraldine Chaplin, Marie Brassard, Sophie Desmarais, Ariane Labed, Amira Casar, Luce Vigo, Gregory Hlady, Romano Orzari, Lewis Furey, Angela La Muse Senyshyn, Kimmi Melnychuk, Kim Morgan, Darcy Fehr, Jean-François Stévenin, Judith Baribeau, Graham Ashmore

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Ladies and gentlemen, it's time to take a bath with Guy Maddin in his closet of tantalizing shame, his forbidden room. God knows I have partaken on occasions too multitudinous to enumerate. So please, allow me to assure you, bathing with Maddin is a most gratifying and sensual treat for the mind, body and most of all, your very soul.

So then, my dear ones, do yourself a favour and hop into the stew with the Crown Prince of Prairie Post-Modernist Cinema and revel in the myriad of pleasures that motion pictures can offer: the fleshly, the ectoplasmic, the magically incorporeal, the visually and aurally celestial and, most assuredly, the cerebral complexities of all human existence in this world and the next, as filtered through the mind (within an enormous head of magma) of the great Icelandic Satyr who worships - nay, attends to all the needs of that Bacchus who rules over us all, the most holy and resplendent gift that IS the great silver-embossed photoplay, the magic bestowed upon our world by the immortal Brothers Lumière.

The Forbidden Room is 130 glorious minutes you'll want to experience over and over and over again. If, God Forbid, you find you're unable to experience it more than once, or worse, if you're compelled to not see it at all, you either don't care about cinema and/or have no taste and/or hold the unenviable dishonour of exhibiting little more than bone matter twixt thine wax-filled ears and behind eyes of cement.

I, for one, must confess to having seen the film five times now. My fifth helping occurred precisely at the scheduled time of the first public screening in Park City, Utah at the Sundance Film Festival, which I was sadly unable to attend.

I did, however, attempt to replicate the joy of said event, in an outdoor soft tub, located at the northernmost tip of the penetratingly puissant peninsula dividing the moist Great Lake of Huron and its clitoral Georgian Bay, surrounded by the glories of the natural world, the horses, ponies, donkeys, dogs, squirrels, beavers, hibernating bears, coyotes, wolves and chickens, puffing fine tobacco purchased from my Aboriginal Brothers on their cheap-smoke-shoppe and hunting lands down the road, with jets of hot water massaging my rolls of flesh and every so often, just now and then, mind you, the hand not gripping a stick of sacred, smouldering, oh-so natural leaves of First-Nations bliss, would plunge greedily into the bubbly water, seeking netherworlds of sheer exultation to grip, to manipulate, to squeeze and tug with abandon until finally, emitting an ejection, an eruption (if you will) of jubilant gratification, a cascade, a geyser, a blast of liquid force in honour of the grandiose cinematic pulchritude before me.

By a waterfall, bath-time with Guy Maddin is calling yoo-hoo-hoo-hoo!

As a matter of fact - pure and simple - I do not even wish to imagine how many more times I shall partake of this scintillatingly sudsy broth that celebrates the incalculable joys of life, shame, regret, sorrow, love, death and cinema, all those things which render our otherwise pathetic existence with meaning. Even one helping of The Forbidden Room can drain a feller (or lassie) more powerfully than several months of Sundays infused with gymnastics of resplendent amore. Yes, a drain in more ways than one:

Lo! This motion picture is most assuredly one drain we all must want to be slurped down, down, down into. Please, dear ones.

Let me try to explain why.

MAESTRO UDO KIER: DEEPLY OBSESSIVE WORSHIPPER of DELICIOUS DERRIERES

The Forbidden Room opens with an astounding credit sequence which stutters and sputters by like fragments of decaying film on nitrate stock (not unlike that of Peter Delpeut's 1991 found-footage documentary Lyrical Nitrate, unleashed upon North American audiences by Zeitgeist Films, who also gave us Maddin's Archangel and Careful as well as the similarly stylish work of the Brothers Quay). The imaginative way of placing gorgeous period title cards announcing key creative elements is an equally brilliant way to dispense with the ludicrous number of producers and the decidedly non-period acknowledgments to gouvernement du Canada et gouvernement du Manitoba agencies like Telefilm Canada and Manitoba Film and Sound, etc. (At least the National Film Board of Canada makes sense given the significance of Holy Father John Grierson's efforts during that historical period detailed in Pierre Berton's book "Hollywood's Canada".)

Once these are all dispensed with, the film opens proper with the John 6:12 passage:

When they were filled,
he said unto his disciples,
Gather up the fragments that remain,
that nothing be lost.

It's a powerful passage, to be sure, but its resonance, its weighty thematic substance and, in fact, the very Raison d'être for The Forbidden Room is clutched almost parsimoniously by John's recapitulation of Our Lord's words.

Though the film is comprised of several different stories, they represent fragments of cinema from days long-gone-by which, through the ravages of time and the lack of care ascribed to film preservation during the first half-decade-plus of its history saw so many pieces of time go missing without a trace, or indeed, pieces of time that never even existed, but should have. Maddin, not unlike Georges Melies is a magician of sorts. His film conjures up fragments of films lost, stolen or suppressed, brilliantly re-imagined (or rather, just plain imagined) by Maddin and his co-director Evan Johnson and the pair's co-writer Robert Kotyk. They have been gathered up, these fragments, these very ghosts of cinema, "so that nothing shall be lost".

The Forbidden Room is a structural marvel. Kudos to Maddin and team for creating it so solidly from what must have been reams of magnificent footage written, prepped, shot and cut during the over-four-years it took to make this grand epic that honours both cinema and the lives of ghosts. In fact, the movie astonishingly adheres to (an albeit slightly skewed) three-act structure in terms of story and tone. The first third establishes its series of problems and obstacles right off the bat. The middle act slides into a journey in which said obstacles must be encountered and hurtled over or deviated into delicious nap times of dreams and reveries which provide even more obstacles to be hurtled over or deviated into, well, nap time for sure, but in this middle section one will find some of the most heart-achingly beautiful and tear-squirtingly moving emotions and images. And then, there is the third act - more on this later, but suffice to say it's an insanely eye-popping affair.

Tonally, then, the first third is jaunty, fun and occasionally sinister.The middle act is supremely elegiac with dapples of madness, humour and absurdity.

The third act is a hurricane.

Many tales are interwoven throughout and our first story (the writing of which is additionally supplied by John Ashbery) is a garishly coloured industrial documentary featuring a flamboyantly bath-robed Marv (Louis Negin), our host on the journey to the joys inherent in taking a proper bath. Marv recounts the history of bathing, then narrates all the proper steps needed to take a bath. Twixt Marv's peacockish descriptions and asides, we're delighted with images of pretty young ladies (Angela La Muse Senyshyn, Kimmi Melnychuk) bathing each other, then followed by the buff fortitude of a male bather (Graham Ashmore) carefully applying Marv's instructions as he settles into a nice, steamy, frothy tub. The man is especially eager to get to Marv's most important instructions of all:

"Work down to the genitals. Work carefully in ever-widening circles."

The sensual digital manipulations within the steamily sopping froth give way to another tale, another film infused with the serous lifeblood (and yes, danger) of water itself. A submarine carrying dangerous explosives and rapidly depleting oxygen is stuck between a rock and a hard place as the pressures of the sea above will be enough to send the vessel into a massive eruption of its deadly cargo and though the necessary slow journey it undertakes to avoid disaster is the very thing that will guarantee another disaster, the lack of oxygen which could kill every man on board. Luckily, there is some solace taken in the constant serving up of flapjacks, which in spite of their culinary monotony, are found to be full of porous insides which offer added oxygen to extend the men's precious lives.

Roy Dupuis is a dreamy, hunky, handsome woodsman searching, ever-searching for his lady fair.

When a dreamy, rugged and brave Woodsman (Roy Dupuis) appears in the sub, the narrative becomes even more tied into other films and as the movie progresses, its literary properties seem rooted in a kind of Romantic period use of concentric rings (albeit skewed in ways they never should be).

One story after another, either recounted by characters in one film and represented by another or told as stories within stories or, my favourite, as dreams within dreams, flash by us ever-so compellingly, taking us deeper into a liquid-like miasma, a ripe flatulence of wonder, a churning, roiling sea of volcanic lava - DEEPER, EVER-DEEPER INTO THE VERY CORE OF EXISTENCE AND CINEMA!!!!!

We follow Roy Dupuis's Woodsman into a cave of scarlet-furred-lupine-worshipping barbarians who have kidnapped his lady love. We see his infiltration into this den of murderers, kidnappers and thieves as he successfully proves his worth during several challenges including:

- finger snapping;
- stone weighing;
- offal piling and, my personal favourite;

- BLADDER SLAPPING!!!!!

GERALDINE CHAPLIN THE MASTER PASSION Le Dominatrix des adorateurs derriere

When we meet the Woodsman's lady love, the film takes us into her mad dreamworld wherein she acquires amnesia and we're assailed with glorious images of native dancers, sexy crooners, and a delicious pitstop involving a sexy anal dominatrix, The Master Passion (Geraldine Chaplin) and then, an even more delectable pitstop involving a madman (Udo "Who the fuck else?" Kier) obsessed with bottoms who is then worked upon by an equally mad doctor who performs open brain surgery to slice out viscous portions of cerebellum afflicted with buttock obsession and climaxing with the ultimate fist-fucking as the doctor plunges his whole hand into the buttock-like brain of Udo Kier to attack the deep core, or prostate, if you will of the man's anal intrusions upon his very mind, his very soul.

There's the tale of a kindly bone specialist who operates upon a sexy motorcyclist who has 47 broken bones after a horrific accident in which she swerves to avoid a family of ducks in her path. Of course, the doctor must take special care to lay his hands upon her prodigiously in order to heal her broken breast bones and, in so doing, falls madly in love with her before being seduced and kidnapped by a bevy of sexy skeleton women who are under the control of a skull-headed medical insurance fraudster.

In DreamLand, Crooners Croon of Derriere Worship.

One yarn after another assails us and as they emit their fantastical glories, constantly astounding us as to how they dovetail in and out of each other - a tale of a mill keeper and his gardener, a tale of a train psychiatrist and his screaming patient and seductive ways, a tale of volcano worshippers always on the lookout for living sacrifices, a tale of a forgetful husband (Mathiu Almaric, that great French actor whom one can watch for an eternity) who ends up murdering his loyal manservant (Udo Kier - AGAIN!!!) to cover-up his gift-giving incompetence, a tale of the manservant in death as his moustache hairs dream about taking him for a final visit (or several) to his little boy and blind wife (Maria de Medeiros), a tale of a consular official and his gorgeous fiancé (Sophie Desmarais) and the man's obsession with a cursed bust of Janus which turns him into an evil Mr. Hyde-like defiler-of-women and the tale of . . .

Have I mentioned the vampires yet?

Oops. Sorry. My bad!

They're called ASWANG (pronounced ASS-WANG).

You will not want to take a bath with any of them - except maybe the ultra-sexy Aswangs.

Will the submarine blow up? Will the woodsman be reunited with his lady love? Will she be cured of her amnesia?

Will we be able to count how many times Louis Negin appears, Franklin Pangborn-like, in different roles?

Will we be able to count how many times Udo Kier appears, Eric Blore-like, in different roles?

Will we ever meet the mysteriously missing Captain of the submarine?

Will we meet his MOTHER!!!!!

Will we survive the mad, fever pitch of a climax, that flings us into the most mind-blowing trip of visual splendour since Stanley Kubrick's stargate sequence in 2001: A Space Odyssey (replete with . . . colliding zeppelins)?

What HAVE I missed?

Have I missed mentioning that the editing of John Gurdebeke and the production design of Galen Johnson are both as inspired and brilliant as Guy Maddin's most-assured hand? Have I missed mentioning that the exquisite lighting and camera work from cinematographers Stephanie Anne Weber Biron and Ben Kasulke provides the eyes to reflect Maddin's soul? Have I missed mentioning how astonishing the work that all of Mr. Maddin's creative collaborators proves to be in this, his greatest achievement?

I hope not.

I, for one, will take yet another bath with Guy Maddin.

We've taken so many together over the past 30+ years.

What's one (or a few) more.

The Film Corner Rating: ***** 5-Stars

The Forbidden Room is playing the Sundance Film Festival and the Berlin Film Festival. Its worldwide sales are being handled by Mongrel Media International.

CLICK HERE

My Winnipeg (2007)
Dir. Guy Maddin
Dialogue By: George Toles
Starring: Ann Savage, Darcy Fehr, Louis Negin, Amy Stewart, Fred Dunsmore

Review By Greg Klymkiw

"I dream of home." - The Time of Your Life by William Saroyan

We all dream of home. Even if our homes are one and the same, no two dreams will ever be alike. Most notably, those whose homes might have been fraught with the madly paradoxical emotions of deep caring and the most repellently denigrating, rancourous T-Bone piledrives might recognize the patterns, but will indeed experience details in their odious nocturnal reveries that will be uniquely all their own.

For Guy Maddin, he generously removes the top of his skull, dips a brush into the viscous ooze of his magma-like grey matter and splashes the torpid incubi, which roil about his puffy cauliflower mush almost Jackson Pollock-like onto the canvas of cinema. Though all his pictures are deeply personal, none cut quite to the marrow the way My Winnipeg does - his most wondrous, haunting and heart-achingly moving work to date. This autobiographical documentary, filtered through dreams of home that live and breathe on celluloid in ways no other filmmaker has quite managed to achieve, is a triumph of form, beauty and wit that's unequivocally unique.

Like every film by Guy Maddin, My Winnipeg works within a Holy Cinematic Trinity. First of all, there are all the important insights into the gentle madness and tantalizing repression which consumes Winnipeg, and as such, all of us. These, can be enjoyed, appreciated and worshipped by everyone - regardless of race, creed, colour and/or private predilections. Secondly, one discovers the provision of mirror images for all Canadians, but especially Winnipeggers, of the corners, back alleys and closets of shame which cascade throughout our nation (well, mostly Winnipeg). Thirdly, and perhaps more importantly are the elements which provide special meaning to about ten people in the world (and yes, full disclosure, I am one of them), though brilliantly they work just as splendidly for others, albeit on surface levels which can never be cracked open to reveal the depths of shame shared by God's Chosen, those who share specific experiences with Maddin that remain close to our breasts of joyful remorse.

Let us examine the first tine of the Maddin Trident. My Winnipeg is, perhaps, the most truthful, historically accurate and penetrating history of the Gateway to the West, Little Chicago, the former hub of western expansion - that beautiful winter city snow bubble which trembles with reticence at any sign of outsiders, yet emits swirling clouds of fluffy snowflakes, eternally floating amidst the pain and despair which all of us cling to like the warm blankets that we pull over our heads to hide our sorrow, to keep it private and, by extension, holy.

We all must escape the Winnipeg of our hearts and minds. Flight is inevitable. As Sherwood Anderson wrote in his book "Winesburg, Ohio" (Winesburg actually being Anderson's thinly disguised version of Winnipeg):

"The young man's mind was carried away by his growing passion for dreams… With the recollection of little things occupying his mind he closed his eyes and leaned back in the car seat [of the train compartment]. He stayed that way for a long time and when he aroused himself and again looked out the car window the town of Winesburg [really Winnipeg] had disappeared and his life there had become but a background on which to paint the dreams of his manhood."

Such is Guy Maddin. Such is Winnipeg. Such are all who have left love behind to temper the hatred of our new environs with the fleeting memories of that which shaped our very being.

Maddin, at the beginning of My Winnipeg, has not left. "I need to get out of here," he declares in his voice-over narration, "It's time for extreme measures." Yes, indeed. Extremity is, after all, what Winnipeg is all about - a city where temperatures plummet to such numbing lows that exposed flesh will freeze in less than 30 seconds.

With the threat of frostbitten limbs turning black and requiring amputation, it's best, really, to nestle oneself in a fluffy blanket of forgetfulness - and dream, dream, dream - if only to remember in the best manner of remembrance, through the clouds and mists of our foggy minds shrouded in the comfort of Nod's Land.

Maddin, however, chooses to be proactive with his documentary. He gets the kind of idea only a Winnipegger could (or would) get. "What if I film my way out of here?" his narration asks - mostly to himself, but, as an afterthought, the audience as well.

It's time for extreme measures, indeed.

Maddin does, what nobody in the history of cinema and the genre of documentary has ever done. He captures his flight from Winnipeg, by touring through it on the city's mighty trams which slowly wend their way through the city's grids. Even better, Maddin chooses an actor to represent himself so he can more conveniently concentrate upon directing the picture.

Darcy Fehr, who played Maddin in Maddin's Cowards Bend The Knee is the only man for the job. Fehr is Maddin's cinematic doppelgänger and acquits himself in the role perfectly. Having shared many naps with Maddin myself, I can attest to the fact that Fehr's naps as Maddin are matched only by Maddin himself. In fairness,though, actor Kyle McCulloch in Tales from the Gimli Hospital, Archangel and Careful does indeed give both of them a run for their money. For an actor to rival another actor portraying a living human being is one thing, but McCulloch's ability to nap onscreen comes very close to out-Maddining Maddin in the nap sweepstakes.

Winnipeg, of course, is the nap capital of the world and this is one of numerous examples where Maddin feeds us a delicious factoid about this sleepy, flat, midwestern Canadian city. Maddin informs us, quite accurately, that Winnipeg has "10 times the sleepwalking rate of anyplace in the world."

Somnambulism is hardwired into the DNA of all Winnipeggers. The natural tendency to sleepwalk is not restricted to such vaguely ambulatory acts as walking, but one will find that most, if not all of those who live in Winnipeg will happily operate moving vehicles under the influence of noctambulist impulses.


One fact Maddin neglects to mention, perhaps because it is not shameful enough, is that drinking and driving, whilst technically illegal in Winnipeg, is so socially acceptable that many party hosts will slosh more rotgut into one's beverage receptacle with the hearty toast, "Come on, have one more for the ditch" - referring, of course to the wide ditches of Winnipeg which fill up with snow for 10 months of the year and flood waters for the remaining 2 months, so that drunk drivers who go off the road can gently cascade, ever-so safely, into the fluffy-floaty cushions which prevent dangerous flips most associated with such activities.

It's quite perfect, really.

One waits quietly in one's vehicle, still sipping from the nectar floating in a jar of open liquor until the flashing lights of an RCMP cruiser arrives, waiting patiently on the side of the road for a tow truck to arrive until the scarlet-adorned officer of the law can then point the way for the burly trucker to skilfully winch the safely-stranded vehicle back onto the road, whereupon the smiling Dudley Do-Right offers up a knowing wink-n-wave so the drunk driver can continue on his (or her) most merry way.

But, I digress.

As Maddin's narration intones, Winnipeggers "dream while we walk and walk to where we dream." And here's the rub, the second tine of the aesthetic trident; Maddin not only secures an actor to play himself, but he rents his old West-end Winnipeg childhood home on Ellice Avenue which now sits atop an Asian tailor shoppe. He takes one bold step forward and casts actors to play his sister Janet, his living brother Ross, his long-deceased brother Cameron and then borrows his girlfriend's pug to step in for the equally-long-dead family chihuahua. A body, representing Maddin's long-dead father Chas, is shoved under a rug in the living room so he too may experience this grand experiment at discovering the past in order to move on. Now that Maddin assembles this surrogate immediate family, all parties can now live for one month as, well, as a family again, with cameras rolling upon the makeshift Maddin clan.

And here is the all important third tine of Maddin's aesthetic trident of shame.

Mother.

Mother love.

Mother all eternal.

The sweetly immortal Herdis Maddin will be portrayed by none other than the legendary "Velma" from Edgar G. Ulmer's 1945 film noir masterpiece Detour. Over 60 years later, in the middle of the first decade of the new millennium, Savage travels to Winnipeg from a rest home in California to take on her most iconic role since the Ulmer picture. She is perfection incarnate. Ann Savage proves to be as spry, powerful and sex-drenched as a century-worth of Fjallkonan Queens (super old Icelandic ladies wearing humungous head-dresses) who have been crowned during Gimli, Manitoba's Islendingadagurinn, then photographed and immortalized in a volume (available for purchase exclusively at Gimli's annual Icelandic Festival) which provides such delectable masturbation material that it effectively puts Playboy, Penthouse, Hustler, Oui and She-Male Love Tunnel collectively to shame.

This third tine might be Maddin's greatest achievement. In fact, it might well be one of the greatest achievements in all cinema history. If one has been intimately acquainted with Guy's Mother, the thought of Anne Savage playing her is tantalizing enough, but once one experiences the performance, there's the added pleasure of seeing a great actress embodying the indomitable spirit of Mrs. Maddin herself. Ah, and for those not intimately acquainted with Guy's mother, all is not lost, for the third tine still affords a brilliant performance by one of the genuine goddesses of the silver screen.

One of My Winnipeg's most breathtaking set pieces is a recreation of an incident from the Maddin family past when his sister Janet (Amy Stewart) comes home late at night in a disheveled state and tries to explain to her mother that she's had a horrendous car accident on the snowy Trans-Canada highway halfway twixt Falcon Lake, the cross country skiing haven for Winnipeg WASPs and Prawda, a proud rural enclave of hearty Ukrainian immigrants ("Prawda" is translated into English as "Truth") and home to the world-famous Yogi Bear Bistro. And here is where we all, no matter which side of the trident's tine we fall on, experience Janet's tearful recounting of a genuinely harrowing experience that is then transformed into a nightmarish, accusatory interrogation launched by Mrs. Maddin as she somehow concocts an imagined shameful sexual tryst twixt Janet and a kind man who helped her out on the highway.

This veritable Holy Spirit of the trident's tine indeed offers additional pleasures to those who have heard Guy recount the tale before (usually round campfires in Gimli under the stars and rustling leaves of elm and birch trees). The anointed few are blessed in ways that someone present at Jesus Christ's Last Supper would hold in their hearts forever. For those not-acquainted with this arcane piece of Maddin family history, the intensity does not abate since they're afforded the sheer joy of an octogenarian "Velma" from Detour abusively spitting out the bile of accusatory maternal concern over her daughter's potential to have succumbed to sexual depravity. This is the stuff great dreams and even greater cinema are made of.

For everyone, it's a win-win, especially since this and, in fact, all of the domestic dialogue in My Winnipeg has been written by longtime Maddin screenwriting collaborator George Toles with the precision, expertise and downright tasty floridity originally generated by only the greatest of Old Hollywood scribes who, of course, penned the very best studio and poverty row noir and melodrama. In particular, the words Toles infests Ann Savage with are singularly pungent in their malodorously bilious venom.


When I first saw the film, the aforementioned scene infused me with the most stratospheric levels of gooseflesh I'd ever experienced in the over 30,000 films I've seen in my life. It's that great! Subsequent viewings never disappoint.

As I was born, raised and lived the first 33 years of my life in that magical old winter city of Winnipeg, I thought I knew everything, absolutely everything about it. Well, that was before seeing My Winnipeg. Maddin stuffs his film with so many magnificently tasty globules of history, all of it glistening with the sheen of truth, that I must admit to being overwhelmed with shame - DEEP SHAME over all he reveals that I did not know.

For example, Maddin reveals that in its heyday, the grand old Eaton's department store in downtown Winnipeg was so popular that 65 cents of every Winnipegger's retail dollar was spent at Eaton's. God knows, it was one of the very few places my family shopped, but thanks to Maddin's deft research, I'm now aware of the precise amount of money my Mom and Dad shelled out into the large pockets of Timothy Eaton, founder of this majestic store. I suppose I could have guessed this, but the fact remains - I DID NOT KNOW IT!!!

SHAME! REMORSE! HOPELESSNESS! MORE SHAME! ANGUISH! These are what drive Winnipeggian existence, to be sure, but they are multiplied ad infinitum when faced with IGNORANCE!

Thanks to My Winnipeg, however, this ignorance is abated - somewhat.


Of course, no documentary about Winnipeg would be complete without focusing upon the fascinating hidden grid of the city via its network of back lanes. Back lanes were always a favourite route to travel, especially during the melancholic joy of the Christmas season when one desperately needed to avoid Winnipeg Police Department spot-checks in order to drive freely whilst blind drunk (often holding/guzzling the aforementioned jars of open liquor parcelled out by party hosts).

What I personally learned about these alleys by watching Maddin's film (and in so doing, admitting further my utter ignorance oh-so-very shamefully) that during a bitter rivalry between Winnipeg's two cab companies, the city fathers needed to put an end to the deadly, gangland tussles twixt porkpie-hatted cabbies and ordered one company the ability to use the main streets and the other to use only the alleys.

This must have seemed a brilliant solution to the City Fathers, but if truth be told, cabbies were now cluttering many back lanes that were exclusively the domain of those wishing - on foot or behind the wheel - to engage in surreptitious avoidance of prying eyes.

In spite of my ignorance of the cabbie rivalry, I was always aware of just how tantalizing and shameful these alleys were: filled with noxious trash, the abhorrent refuse of the odious citizenry, the dark shadows of despair one could happily stumble through when life seemed to have little meaning, wherein one could derive solace in knowing that it couldn't get much worse than urinating and vomiting behind someone's garage, or even occasionally using a pothole or two in Winnipeg's network of sorrowful alleys to squat and release fetid faecal matter when, on not-so-rare occasion it became nigh impossible to clench one's buttocks together (an almost vice-like grip ALL Winnipeg Mothers trained us in to avoid using public washrooms as children in order to avoid being molested by pedophiles - no matter how much WE might have craved such shameful fondling).

Ah! Winnipeg back alleys!

The preeminent fairgrounds in which to plunge madly into the nadir of one's horrendous existence, utilizing hidden, weed-filled crevasses of the murky cover of night to engage in filthy, shameful trysts with one whom you'd plied with cheap liquor at some vile watering hole and dragged into the lanes of despair, emptying foul seed within whatever orifice could be discovered upon the rank, near-comatose rag-doll; desperate thrusts, sloppy booze-addled pronging, only to leave the spent, bedraggled receptacle of manly juices, lying in a heap of its own offals to sleep it off in sub-zero temperatures whilst you, the bearer of shame, hailed a cab to take you back to a spartan flat to boil up a can of Puritan Stew on a hotplate before finally closing the weary ocular lids and diving, once more, into a very special dream of home.

These things I knew.

What I didn't know, before experiencing the truth infusing My Winnipeg was that the back lanes were ever-so tantalizing because they were shameful. As Maddin states in the film's narration: "It was inside these black arteries where the real Winnipeg is found - shameful abandonment."

Shame and abandonment were always the clarion calls of Winnipeg's foul sirens of doom.

Now, while this might surprise you, there is also sadness in Maddin's film to temper the joy. Maddin points this out, quite rightly and accurately when he reveals that "Demolition is one of our city's few growth industries."

The true pain of Winnipeg is the scourge of demolition - the violent removal of the city's history to replace it with thudding mediocrity.

Take, for example, the disconsolate tale Maddin weaves of the grand, old Eaton's department store. When bankruptcy forced the closure of this retail titan, the city did what it had always done best. It demolished this grand edifice of consumerism and in its place, erected an arena - an ugly, architecturally execrable slab of inadequacy that bore the horrendous corporate name: MT Centre. Empty, indeed. Empty of vision, of history, of promise and filled only with the pathetic hopes and dreams of the most mediocre of the city's denizens.

And why, pray tell, destroy a gorgeous old department store which could have been remodelled for any number of tantalizing purposes to build a new arena when a perfectly grand arena already existed - the famed Winnipeg Arena. It is here, Maddin tells the most doleful tale of all, one which is especially sorrowful to those of us perched on the third tine of Maddin's Aesthetic Trident.


The Winnipeg Arena was pure magic and Maddin captures the old rink's glory with the veneration it deserves. We also learn the astounding fact that Maddin was born in the home team dressing room of the Winnipeg Arena and, like other hockey children of the era, myself included, had been weaned in the Hockey Wives' Lounge during games. I am, in fact, deeply honoured to personally share these glories which Maddin imparts so movingly in his film. He tells the tale of the famed Winnipeg Maroons hockey team who were such an astonishing force on the ice that they were, throughout the 1960s, Canada's National Hockey Team - battling the finest teams of Europe, but most importantly, the dreaded Russians. What formidable rivals these were who went head to head in that arena.

Here is where, for me, the third of Maddin's aesthetic tines protrudes mightily, proudly and stiffly, burrowing itself deeply within me. Guy and I shared identical childhood experiences in that glorious Winnipeg Arena. Many years before Guy and I met, our respective fathers were colleagues and friends. Guy's father Chas Maddin was the business manager of the Winnipeg Maroons. My own father, Julian Klymkiw, was its goaltender.


Maddin, on afternoon visits with his Dad to the empty Arena would experience the "pleasure of flipping down every one of the 10,000 seats, admiring them, then flipping them all back up again." I too, on similar visits, though on different days, would do the same thing, though shamefully, I'll admit to never engaging in said glorious activities to the tune of 10,000 seats. I'd be lucky to accomplish a similar feat with a mere 3000-4000 seats.


The other shared reminiscence twixt two lads who wouldn't meet until years later in early adulthood was perhaps the most awe-inspiring of all - dressing room visits where we'd be eye-level to the soapy genitals of hockey players.

How could it get better than that?

You'd think it couldn't until Maddin wisely intones the following words of truth within his voice-over narration: "Urine, breast milk, sweat - the Holy Trinity of the Winnipeg Arena's odours." YES! THE ODOURS! They are with me also, permeating my olfactory senses on a daily basis.


My Winnipeg offers up fascinating bits of the city's storied history, but as outlandish as they seem, do not forget that these tales which Maddin regales us with are PURE FACT and proof positive that there is clearly no city in the world like Winnipeg.

There is, however, one tale to tower above them all.

It is a tale which exceeds even that of how downtown Winnipeg streets were named after venerated turn-of-the-century brothel madams and prostitutes, bearing their names to this very day.

It is a tale that tops one in which the entire city of Winnipeg reenacted what it would be like to be taken over by Nazis.

It is a tale which runs roughshod over the curious nugget of Winnipeg's only locally produced television soap opera, "The Ledge" which ran for over 50 years and starred Maddin's mother as a woman who, each episode, coaxed a different subject from taking a suicidal plunge to the filthy pavement below.

It is a tale which has no problem smothering the otherwise delightful recollection of how Winnipeg generated the highest point of elevation in the city by covering a massive hill of garbage with a fresh lawn to act as a summer picnic park and a winter toboggan slide (which still causes yearly accidents in which its victims break their necks and/or spines, then suffer lifelong paralysis).

Good Lord, it even bests the famed yearly Golden Boy pageants presided over by the city's beloved Mayor Cornish (Louis Negin) who lasciviously measured the buff bodies, paying particular attention to, well, uh, all manner of, uh, measurements, to arrive at a winner.

The story I refer to is none other than that of the notoriously near-Arctic Winnipeg Winter of 1926 wherein a squirrel fried itself on an electrical wire, subsequently causing a massive fire at the Whittier Park racetrack. The poor noble horses tore out of the barns in a mad panic - whinnying in sheer terror until they galloped into the icy waters of Winnipeg's mighty Red River and froze to death. The waters were so cold that the pain-wracked torsos and heads of the horses, froze almost immediately, dotting the tundra of the river and jutting out of the ice - frozen in time. This horrific sight actually became a favourite ice-stroll for young lovers who were so smitten with desire amongst these poor, dead animals that it resulted in a massive baby boom nine months later.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is Guy Maddin's Winnipeg, but be eternally grateful to him. It is my Winnipeg, his Winnipeg, but most of all, your Winnipeg too.

And, of course, it's one of the best pictures ever made.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: ***** 5-Stars


My Winnipeg is available on one of the greatest Blu-Rays ever produced. This magnificent package is courtesy of the Gold Standard of home entertainment, the Criterion Collection.

So magnificent is this release, that Winnipeg will play host to one of the world's most esteemed film critics, Jonathan Rosenbaum, who will travel from the real Chicago ("Big Chicago" as Winnipeggers call it) to "Little Chicago" (which Winnipeg was once referred to). He will present three fun-filled days of cinema celebration. Cinema in the Age of the Internet: A Conversation with Jonathan Rosenbaum will be featured at the world-renowned Plug-in Institute of Contemporary Art on March 9. This will be followed by Jonathan Rosenbaum's Global Discoveries: An Evening Of Clips and Commentary at the Winnipeg Film Group on March 10 and lastly, the crowning glory of this trinity of cinema-Bacchanalia is Celebrating the Criterion Collection release of My Winnipeg, featuring a special public chat twixt Rosenbaum and Guy Maddin at the University of Manitoba on March 11.

And this is surely a Blu-Ray to celebrate. It's a DIRECTOR-APPROVED SPECIAL EDITION that you will definitely want to own and cherish forever. It comes complete with an HD film transfer, supervised by Maddin and his illustrious producer, D.O.P. Jody (David O. Selznick/John Alton) Shapiro, an interview twixt Maddin and critic Robert Enright, a featurette entertainingly capturing segments of My Winnipeg "Live in Toronto" at the Royal Cinema, four striking cine-essays by filmmaker Evan Johnson (Maddin's brilliant collaborator on the all-new feature film The Forbidden Room) and Maddin himself, all focusing on - what else? - arcane tidbits about Winnipeg, a fine essay by critic Wayne Koestenbaum, the trailer, a gorgeous new cover design by famed contemporary artist Marcel Dzama and, frankly, the real supplemental treat of the whole package, five - COUNT 'EM - FIVE short films (three of which featuring intros by Maddin). The shorts include Only Dream Things, The Hall Runner and Louis Riel for Dinner - all excellent, but the golden feather in this Blu-Ray's cap are two shorts so moving and powerful that not only did they have me weeping like some old grandmother, but are clearly destined for short film classic status: Spanky: To the Pier and Back and Sinclair. The shorts are so amazing that I'll just let you discover them for yourself.

Just buy this Blu-Ray. In fact, buy two. You might just wear one of them out.

Late Night Double Feature (2015)
Dirs. Navin Ramaswaran, Zach Ramelan, Torin Langen
Starring: Jamie Elizabeth Sampson, Nick Smyth, Jeff Sinasac, Colin Price, Caleigh Le Grand, Sandra Da Costa, Brian Scott Carleton, Rich Piatkowski

Review By Greg Klymkiw

The tradition of comedy and horror omnibus films is a noble tradition which has generated a cavalcade of genuinely good and even great pictures - everything from the classic British Ealing Studios masterpiece Dead of Night in 1945 to the super-stylish 70s Amicus adaptations of E.C. Comics which yielded the superb 1972 Freddie Francis-directed Tales from the Crypt and Roy Ward Baker's Asylum. These were classy portmanteaus featuring several cool short horror snappers held together by clever wraparound stories.

In the 70s, a new hybrid of omnibus pictures entered the arena which attempted (often successfully) to recreate a slice of a broadcast day in tiny independent TV stations delivering a variety of commercial, news, gameshows and drama (usually of the exploitation variety) including the immortal John Landis laugh-fest Kentucky Fried Movie and Ken Shapiro's glorious celebration of cheese on the idiot box of the 70s called The Groove Tube.

What set these films on a pedestal of sorts is that the humour was often played so straight that the satirical jabs hit home in ways that had audiences rolling in the aisles because the material came so close to the thing that was being satirized, but at the same time, opened a window upon the social and cultural events of the day.

Late Night Double Feature attempts to go a step further, but on its way up, it plunges to the nadir of this genre hybrid. It offers us one fateful night in a small town indie TV station which is unspooling “Dr. Nasty’s Cavalcade of Horror” - live for the insomniacs of the world, or in this case, Peterborough, Ontario and Kawartha Lakes inbred country.


We get to see commercials, trailers, station IDs and host segments involving a mad scientist and a buxom babe sidekick in full nurse regalia. Just below the programming itself, we're delivered a wraparound plot involving abuse, exploitation and eventually, a mad orgy of violence.

On paper, it sounds just fine. In execution, Late Night Double Feature is a nasty, unfunny and incompetent mess which lacks anything resembling style or tone. The trailers and commercials are strictly bottom-feeding spoofs and the two features, “Dinner for Monsters” (involving a chef corralled into preparing a meal out of a dead human body) and “Slit” (an ugly bit of torture porn) are neither scary, nor funny. They do serve up plenty of violence and gore for those craving that and that alone.

The wraparound story is a cliched affair involving the female hostesses's dissatisfaction with the on-camera-and-off abuse she must put up with by the crazed host and the sleazy producer-director of the late night production. The tone of the pieces on-air seems rooted in a never-never-land which exists only for the film itself and the wraparound is obvious and bereft of any narrative interest whatsoever.

Late Night Double Feature has direct-to-VOD written all over it, though frankly, I suspect word will spread quickly amongst the geek brigades about how lame it is that the woeful film will find its way easily enough to illegal torrent downloads for less discriminating fans of gore for the sake of gore.

The movie might think its being clever, funny and fun but that's one of its biggest problems - just conjure up the most denigrating antonyms for the aforementioned words and you'll have a more than apt description for this steaming platter of viscous faecal matter that it attempts to force-feed us with.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: * One Star

Late Night Double Feature plays at the Canadian Film Fest 2015.

The Cocksure Lads Movie (2014)
Dir. Murray Foster
Starring: Lyndon Osbourne, Luke Marty, Edward Hillier, Adam McNab, Peter Higginson

Review By Greg Klymkiw

The Cocksure Lads (Lyndon Osbourne, Luke Marty, Edward Hillier, Adam McNab) are a contemporary British pop band with a decent following in Dear Old Blighty who are on the verge of launching themselves upon the North American marketplace with a tour beginning in Toronto. Accompanied by their trusty, faithful old Roadie/Driver Monty (Peter Higginson), the lads are chuffed to the gills as they set foot upon the urban hinterlands of the biggest city in the Dominion of Canada.

When an altercation erupts amongst our boys, it spells sure doom and within a few minutes of setting foot on the bland, cold streets of Toronto, they break up and go their separate ways - each one partaking of respective dalliances with a clutch of Canuck babes until the inevitable triumphant reunion on the stage of a Hog Town watering hole.

There's lots to be said for the dramatic premise of following a Brit Pop band in Canada a la Richard Lester's 1965 Beatles classic A Hard Days Night (not to mention John Boorman's delightful 1965 Dave Clark Five opus Having a Wild Weekend and the somewhat lesser blessed 1968 Mrs. Brown You've Got a Lovely Daughter, the Herman's Hermits' belly flop into similar territory).

Promise is one thing, execution is quite another.

Aside from a genuinely fun, funny, puckishly poppy song score by the picture's writer-director Foster and partner Mike Ford, some gorgeously shot musical numbers courtesy of ace D.P. Samy Inayeh (sprightly sliced and diced by editor Luke Sargent), a genuinely moving subplot involving the band's trusted codger-Friday Monty (and a great performance to match by Higginson), the picture pretty much takes a nosedive once the lads break up and wander about, finding romance where they least expect it, engaging in tedious soul-searching and otherwise aimlessly interacting with a variety of Canuckian denizens of T.O.


Look, this is clearly the movie Foster wanted to make, but there are far too many genuine missed opportunities here which could have spun the picture into a way more cutting edge satirical look at pop-singing Brits on the home-turf of the "colonies" - the former Dominion of Canada. I have to admit I unfairly, perhaps, kept waiting for the movie to address this in an almost self-reflective mode of fish-out-of-water-in-a-perverse-fish-in-familiar-yet-weirdly-skewed-waters.

Alas, that's a different movie, but one that might have had a lot more bite and humour than the often dreary meanderings of the plot The Cocksure Lads Movie is saddled with.

Most disappointing is the obvious chemistry between the actors playing the title characters during the opening ten minutes-or-so of the picture and then seeing that turfed by the wayside.

Ultimately, aside from the clever opening titles and musical numbers, the movie never begins to approach the anarchy and mad inspiration of the Brit-pics it's clearly modelled itself upon and we're saddled with yet another Canadian movie that fails to reach the heights of a John Paizs or Bruce McDonald, but instead feels like far too many dour slogs of the most Canadian kind - most often bearing the words "produced with the participation of Telefilm Canada".

What should have been ebullient is instead unenthusiastically dull.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: ** 2-Stars

The Cocksure Lads Movie is the opening night Gala of the 2015 Canadian Film Fest.

Relative Happiness (2014)
Dir. Deanne Foley
Starring: Melissa Bergland, Aaron Poole, Johnathan Sousa, Molly Dunsworth, Jennifer Kydd, Mary Lewis, Susan Kent, Joel Thomas Hynes, David Christoffel, Rob Wells

Review By Greg Klymkiw

She's 30-years-old, runs a bed and breakfast in Nowheresville, Nova Scotia, wears gaudy-chic clothes, sports a shock of straight red-dyed hair and among her other attributes, Lexie (Melissa Bergland) is a great cook. Flashing her almost insufferably perky smile, the comely lassie is what some might refer to as a pretty good catch. She's salt of the Earth, eh. She's good people, eh. She'd give ya' the shirt off 'er back, eh - well, that might not always be a blessing since her shirt, at least for most, would be a few sizes too big for even a baby hippopotamus, but still, she'd give to ye, eh.

Lexie's sisters (Molly Dunsworth, Jennifer Kydd) are mega babes and so's her Mom (Mary Lewis). One sis is married with children, the other sis is about to get married. Lexie's best friend (Susan Kent), also happens to be a babe and she's got a steady beau (Joel Thomas Hynes). Lexie is plumb without any steady bone in her life, save perhaps, for the occasional blind drunk (Rob Wells) trolling the local watering holes and campgrounds.

Worse yet, Lexie can't fit into her Maid of Honour dress and has immense pressure from Mumsy and sissies to come up with a date for her sister's round-the-corner nuptials. Life, it would seem, is pretty tough for a cute little porker in the land of fiddle playing fishermen. Luckily for her, a new guest in her B and B is a hunky photographer (Johnathan Sousa) and he seems to take as big a shine to her as she to him.

Our heroine might have a date for the wedding celebration after all. Unbeknownst to her, though, the shutterbug wayfarer isn't all he's cracked up to be and she's setting herself up for a big fall. Waiting in the wings, though, is a wonkily handsome, kind-hearted, good-humoured and charming roofer (Aaron Poole) who bemusedly catches her antics out of the corner of his eye whilst filling all manner of holes in her roof. If Lexie wasn't so blind to her houseguest's chicanery, she'd possibly be getting at least one of her holes filled by the hammer-wielding Newfie Mike Holmes.


The innocuous rom-com trappings of the film's first third eventually give way to all manner of melodramatic convolutions, some of which yield a reasonably amusing bevy of belly laughs alternating with mega-tear-squirting opportunities. How you handle this picture will be dependent upon your tolerance for regional cutesy-pie whimsy, but let it be said that both the writing, direction and first-rate performances do not let the genre down. If one's predilections are suited to such a romp, the entertainment value will be high indeed.

My 14-year-old daughter loved the movie to death and was laughing quite riotously throughout the picture, also responding emotionally to the more moving and tender aspects of the proceedings. This was enough to stop me from groaning throughout and spewing bilious invectives left, right and centre. That's something, anyway.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: *** 3 Stars

Relative Happiness is playing at the Canadian Film Fest 2015 in Toronto.

Barn Wedding (2014)
Dir. Shaun Benson
Starring: Emily Coutts, Kelly McCormack, Brett Donahue, Shaun Benson, Kate Corbett, Lara Jean Chorostecki, Kaleb Alexander, Christopher Hayes, Anthony Ulc

Review By Greg Klymkiw

If the sound accidentally cuts out during a screening of Barn Dance (AKA The Non-Discreet Lack of Charm of the Bourgeousie), the only thing you might hear in the cinema is snoring. This insufferably twee little excursion into the dull, bourgeois lives of twenty-somethings feels like an actors' vanity project and/or showcase piece rather than a real movie. (That said, all the actors acquit themselves well, in spite of the film's overwhelming emptiness and their solid thespian gymnastics might manage to keep a few bums in the seats half-awake.)

The dullsville proceedings involve a group of friends who were once tight, but are now, not-so-tight during the days leading up to a wedding in a barn. Ugh! Yes, a barn wedding! (Personally, I wonder why people don't choose basement banquet halls in motor hotels anymore, but don't mind me, I'm from Winnipeg, eh.) Seriously, though. I hate barn weddings - horrendously fake and phoney wedding locales for urban hipsters with disposable scads of income and/or mommies and daddies with deep pockets. And guess what? The movie promises, in spite of the not-too convincing hurdles that arise, to deliver a barn wedding as a major set piece during the final minutes of this 83-minute movie, which, by the way, feels about 83 minutes too long.

The wedding itself has been rushed in order to take advantage of holding a summer affair in the barn, but is postponed for a relatively dull, real-life reason and, once again, is rushed to do the barn thing in spite of the fact that it will be in the middle of winter. This makes about as much sense as anything in this picture. We are, after all, dealing with sickening bourgeois values. In fact, the entire marriage appears to be an excuse to generate cool snapshots to share on Pinterest and Facebook. Ugh!

The sheer pettiness and inconsequence of these people is even more depressing since it does feel rooted in something fairly realistic in terms of the horrific vacuity which infuses the generation these characters spring from. I tend to avoid people like this in real life since I'm too often compelled to punch them in the face.


What we get for donating 83 minutes of our lives is a clutch of extremely attractive, well-dressed couples (and one single fifth wheel) as the yakety-yak-yakking that spits out of their respective maws about days gone by, the immediate present and especially, the future, drags on interminably from the city to the country settings.

Two of our characters (luckily, both babes) share a secret yearning which could upset the apple cart if it's consummated. We wait, with baited breath for the inevitable to happen and hope we at least get a lollapalooza of a sapphic tumble for the investiture of our precious time on this Earth. Unfortunately the hoped-for coupling is an underwhelming bit of wheel-spinning which matches the rest of the movie's wheel-spinning.

I'm really not sure whom this movie is for, though I suspect there might be more than a few vacuous non-entities out in audience-land who will relate to this clutch of empty vessels. If you happen to be one of them, hey, knock yourself out.

As for me, I was even more disappointed that the music during the wedding reception wasn't provided by Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs, and instead of the horrendous trilling of the exit tune that's there now, a nice segue into:

Well now it's time to say goodbye to all these bourgeois kin,
And they would like to thank you folks fer' kindly droppin' in.
Yer' all invited back next week to this locality,
To have a heapin' helpin' of their hospitality…
Bourgeousie that is.
Set a spell, Take your shoes off.
Y'all come back now, y'hear?.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: *½ One-and-a-half Stars

Barn Wedding is playing at Toronto's 2015 Canadian Film Fest.

Nocturne (2014)
Dir. Saul Pincus
Starring: Mary Krohnert, Knickoy Robinson, Laytrell McMullen, Andrew Church, Celine LePage, Ian Downie, Marcia Bennett

Review By Greg Klymkiw

When we first meet Cindy (Mary Kronhert), we think she's an inmate in an asylum. Several extreme closeups revealing a pencil etching bizarre doodles, papers and file folders tumbling from a desk, a cardboard cup of coffee tipped over with its contents cascading through the drinking hole in the plastic lid, more sounds of pencil scratchings, no doodles now, just numbers entered tentatively upon a ledger, beautiful, but oddly cloudy green eyes, at first lit, as if in a dream, by what appears to be candlelight, then another ECU of the same eyes at a different time and place, awash with the same fluorescent glow prior to the dream shot, pensive looks, no movement save for the eyes, this way and that, then finally an over the shoulder POV through a window and revealing sterile industrial carpeting, office furniture, yellow sticky notes.

No, we're not in an asylum, but we (as well as Cindy) might as well be. Even though no windows appear in the space to reveal the time of day, we feel like it's deep night. If anything, it appears we're in an office devoted to data entry and no other humans, save for that of young, handsome Armin (Knickoy Roninson) at a desk, as if in a trance.

They're both in a trance-like state. Cindy is an insomniac. Armen is a somnambulist. As Robert Wiene proved in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, his horrific masterpiece of German Expressionism, somnambulism is super-creepy. If you happen to see a sleepwalker, though, it's impossible to keep your eyes off of them. This is exactly what happens to Cindy. She follows Armen out into the deep night of Toronto, a Toronto that has only looked as malevolent through the eyes of a very few - David Cronenberg, Bruno Lazaro Pacheco, Atom Egoyan and now, it seems, through the eyes of Nocturne's director, editor, producer and co-writer Saul Pincus.


For its first 45-50 minutes, Nocturne is positively spellbinding and you can't take your eyes off the screen. Mostly, we're following Cindy as she follows the sleepwalking Armen. At one point, she takes him back to her place. She's picked up a mess of groceries. Armen seems to have a sleeping predilection for shoving food down his gullet and rather than allow him to do it outdoors and in late night variety stores, he's seated at Cindy's massive dinner table and allowed to chew, munch, slurp and drool to his heart's content.

Cindy feels comfortable enough to remove all her clothing and sit naked at the table with him, uttering gentle sweet nothings such as this eminently, brilliantly and hilarious line of dialogue:

"I like carrots too. They're my favourite."

So long as Pincus keeps us in a strange, dreamy, expressionistic and even a somewhat cerebral Land of Waking Nod, we're convinced, thanks to the masterful visuals, a few first-rate performances (the camera especially loves leading lady Kronhert and there's a knock you on your butt piece of acting from child performer Laytrell McMullen), a mega-queer soundscape, strangely perverse dialogue, occasional cuts that are so breathtaking they feel almost orgasmic, and yes, even a series of haunting animated images, then we do feel that we might be plunged into masterpiece territory.


Alas, as the narrative slowly unravels into a kind of pseudo-Hitchockian mystery, we get a sinking feeling. It's the same feeling I started to get when I first saw Cronenberg's Dead Ringers and the narrative began to place far too much emphasis upon the ingestion of drugs. My response started to be along the lines of, "Oh God, is that all this is?" I started to feel exactly the same way during Nocturne as soon as it became apparent that an elaborate corporate conspiracy and "mere" deadly blackmail scheme was at work instead of, what? Well, to borrow the tagline used upon the original release of David Lynch's Eraserhead, "a dream of dark and troubling things." As long as Nocturne keeps plunging us into a similar world of nightmare and dream logic, a world of sleeplessness and waking sleep, then and only then do we feel like we're in the rare vicinity of a true Master.

Pincus even accomplishes the rare feat of taking us into the light of day and still making us feel like we're in the dark. It's too bad that the light also reveals something far more mundane, far too mainstream and tidy. And then, that the film eventually becomes interminable, running far too long and overstaying its welcome to unspool at a length of just shy of two hours, the movie begins to fall short of its considerable potential.

It's no matter, though. Pincus displays dazzling virtuosity as a filmmaker.

By the time the movie ends, whatever misgivings one might have, it's clear that he's the real thing and that he possesses a unique and strong voice. I'm already breathlessly anticipating his followup picture.

Let's just hope he doesn't feel the need to let the plot get in the way next time.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: *** 3 Stars

Nocturne is playing at the 2015 Canadian Film Fest in Toronto.

The Makioka Sisters (1983)
dir. Kon Ichikawa
Starring: Keiko Kishi, Yoshiko Kasuma, Sayuri Yoshinaga, Yuko Kotegawa, Juzo Itami

Review By Greg Klymkiw

I wanted to love this movie for three reasons.

First of all, I must admit that even after having seen over 30,000 movies in my life, there are still so many more to see. Japanese director Kon Ichikawa, one of the foremost masters of his country's cinema, is - for example - a filmmaker who inexplicably fell below my radar. I knew he existed, but bad timing forced me to keep missing the handful of massive retrospectives of his work at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) Cinematheque (now housed in the grand TIFF Lightbox complex in Toronto, Canada).

I had also been aware of Ichikawa's ongoing obsession with adapting the best of Japan's wealth of great literature and how this generally distinguished him amongst many of his contemporaries. Yasujiro Ozu and Akira Kurosawa were particularly interested in original screenplays - good on them, but I never look a road map in the mouth, so to speak. For me, Japanese literature (save for Yukio Mishima) continues to be an unknown commodity and I have been chomping at the bit to dine at the Ichikawa Buffet (as it were) to use his movies as a barometer and/or guide to some of these great literary works. In essence, I have been preparing to use Ichikawa like the "Classics Illustrated" comics from my childhood. They always promoted the notion of "now you've read the comic, read the full length book" and for me, that used to work wonders. I mean, really! What the hell! I'm technically not a kid anymore, but even adults with a bit of book learnin' can use some help now and again.

The second reason I wanted to love The Makioka Sisters is that the first half hour is utterly spellbinding. Though we focus only on the four sisters of the title (Keiko Kishi, Yoshiko Kasuma, Sayuri Yoshinaga, Yuko Kotegawa) and one husband (Juzo Itami, eventually a noted Japanese director in his own right), Ichikawa lays out an extremely complex backstory that forces us (not distractingly) to work overtime sorting out and digesting the relationships between the characters and the cultural/historical backdrop.

Add to the above, one of the most heart achingly beautiful visual set pieces imaginable - the sisters taking a lazy stroll to enjoy the cherry blossoms - and you feel like you're diving into what might be a life-changing masterwork (save for the intrusion of one execrable element I will mention much later in this piece).

The final reason I wanted to love this movie is that it's one of those potentially great Chekhovian stories I'm a sucker for - people looking desperately to make connections with each other (or ANYONE) against a major cusp period where it's easier to remain rooted in what's dying or dead than move forward and embrace or accept the new.

It's a world where the ghosts of the past - replete with all their sins and triumphs - want to be at peace, but the living will not let them go, much to the detriment of all concerned. Within this social/cultural/historical cusp period, some will make it, most will not - and out of this shift in the divide should come both tragedy and comedy - all the stuff of great drama.

Alas, The Makioka Sisters falls short of its goals. It is not even especially GOOD drama, let alone being great.

Its story is a simple one - as most great stories are. Four sisters in pre-war (1938) Osaka live a life of relative luxury. Buoyed as they are by the inheritance left to them by their late parents, all should be well. It isn't. Tradition dictates that the sisters marry in descending order of their age in order to qualify for their share of the loot - which is, essentially to be their dowries. This is all well and good for the two eldest sisters who are already hitched, but the third eldest is a major wallflower and the youngest is clearly a modern lass with a burning desire to get on with her life.

Tradition is holding her back, And ultimately, for the family as a whole to move "forward", marriage (and by extension, tradition) is seen as the only option - hence the central goal of the story being the marrying off of daughters three and four. Romance would be nice in the equation, but clearly low on the totem pole of what's seen as necessary for the preservation of the family. The needs of the individual are less than an afterthought. In fact, they're negligible.

What keeps the movie from soaring, even though it occasionally feels like it wants to, is Ichikawa's approach to rendering the narrative. He often hangs back in medium wide shots and lets long conversations play themselves out. God knows I'm happy to watch bearded warriors in lotus positions in Kurosawa pictures as they discuss WHY they're at war and HOW they will do battle. I'm especially happy to sit for hours on end while people talk to each other in tatami-level shots in Ozu. Their pictures are replete with emotion and narrative drive - unlike The Makioka Sisters.

For several reasons, Ichikawa's approach just doesn't cut it. Some will argue that his method is restraint - that he's avoiding the obvious pitfalls and clichés inherent in goosing every dramatic beat to the max. On the other hand, it could almost be argued that he's either lazy, incompetent or hampered by exigencies of production. Almost every single time he moves from his favourite (and I'd suggest rather dull) fixed camera position, so many of the cuts feel jarring and awkward (and not intentionally) while the variation of shots often seem to be from the wrong angle. Well, given the number of stunning set pieces in the movie, he's neither lazy nor incompetent, but I do think he was wrong to tell this story the way he chose to tell it.

This is a story that, while simple on the surface, is loaded with layer upon layer of complexity and yet, one is hardly compelled to even bother peeling back those layers as the director seems so disinterested in wrenching our guts for fear, I suspect, of being melodramatic.

Well, this is a bit of a problem when the story has all the hallmarks of great melodrama and none of the required execution. Ichikawa goes out of his way to mute every major melodramatic beat to the point where a handful of scenes compel you in a certain direction, then refuse to deliver up the goods. The movie has five major emotional set pieces (you'll discover those on your own) and they're exquisitely rendered on both visual levels and from the great cast (who are often wasted by Ichikawa's overall mise-en-scene).

Sorry, Kon. This is really annoying, bud. You need to loosen up a bit.

Ozu, for example, is able to wrench out drama from the smallest details and he is NEVER afraid of emotion. Some have suggested his approach is indeed restrained in order for the emotional core to open up and be real. I disagree. Ozu, like Kurosawa, is NOT afraid of being sentimental or even melodramatic. They are storytellers - first and foremost - and will use every trick up their sleeve to wrench emotion from an audience. As well, I'm not suggesting a measured, mannered approach can't work. It can. It just doesn't work in The Makioka Sisters due, at least based on this picture to Ichikawa either unwilling or incapable of achieving the heights his colleagues aimed for or worse, his inability to properly execute his own approach.

On a surface level, the movie's concluding moments come close to creating that heart breaking devastation that's as sad as it is soaring, but by then, it's too late. Ichikawa has spent most of the movie muting all the emotion, occasionally and sloppily tossing in a dollop of it here and there, then allowing it to all hang out at the end.

Great melodrama (or even straight-up drama) needs to build to such an explosion. Ichikawa seems so obsessed with his snobby attempts at restraint that he forgot he had an audience he needed to please.

I've thus far avoided any background on exigencies of production that might have lead to Ichikawa creating this supremely flawed work (wildly praised from people who really should know better). The above were my impressions knowing nothing about the making of the film (my preferred method of seeing anything for the first time). That said, upon discovering that Ichikawa was commissioned by Japan's Toho Company to make the feature as part of its 50th year celebrations and that he was subsequently and idiotically nickelled and dimed to death, is still not reason enough to change my mind. In fact, I watched the movie a second time and my conclusions stand - it's a movie with occasional beauty, tons of potential but finally, a mess.

I suspect this was probably not the best introduction to Ichikawa's work. I'll certainly see more and I'll eventually watch this again with the context of his fuller canon behind me. Maybe I'll change my mind., though I doubt highly I will - especially in light of the following:

The most bafflingly egregious element of The Makioka Sisters is the music. In spite of the fact that the movie was made in the '80s where the style of music chosen was popular for the RIGHT movies, it is completely, utterly and overwhelmingly incomprehensible to me why a movie that DEMANDED a full orchestral score is miserably fouled with synthesized music so god-awful it might as well have been crapped out by Harold Faltermeyer.

The problem with this is that The Makioka Sisters is not about a Detroit cop in Beverly Hills. Given the score, it might as well have been.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: *** 3 Stars

The Makioka Sisters has been lovingly restored and presented on a nice looking, but extras-lacking Criterion Collection Blu-ray.

Shooting the Musical (aka After Film School) (2014)
Dir. Joel Ashton McCarthy
Starring: Bruce Novakowski, Chris Walters, Rebecca Strom, Lisa Ovies, Rory W. Tucker, Gigi Saul Guerrero, Casey Margolis

Review By Greg Klymkiw

After film school, the talented young filmmaker Maximus Park managed to generate one highly revered short film after another and became the esteemed, multi-award-winning darling of the avant-garde. Having just completed the writing of his first feature-length screenplay, "Now They Are Nothing", he sits in front of his computer screen, wracked with emotion, trying desperately to hold back tears until he is able to, through pain-wracked gasps, inform us that he's just swallowed an entire bottle of sleeping pills and that he's creating this one last film, a Photo Booth video selfie to declare that his script is an elaborate suicide note and that he'll soon be dead.

Powerful stuff! A powerful opening to a powerful motion picture - so powerful that it delivers a whole new dimension to the word "powerful". I daresay, it might even be on a par with the subject of actor Perry King's immortal line of dialogue in Richard Fleischer's Mandingo when he opines, "That Big Pearl, she be powerful musky."

That's pretty goddamn powerful!

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, finally, a picture of such importance and delicacy is now blessing the silver screen. In fact, I'm compelled to state unequivocally that no film in recent memory has come close to the sensitivity displayed in Shooting The Musical, a stunning tribute to love, friendship and artistry of the highest order. So please, I respectfully ask - nay, demand - that Yasujiro Ozu, Jean Renoir, Francois Truffaut and all the other purported humanitarians of cinema, to just up and move right the fuck over.

Writer-director-editor Joel Ashton McCarthy is in town and he's locked and loaded his picture to splooge the buckshot of human kindness and understanding, square in the puffy, oh-so-concerned faces of all movie-goers expecting taste and restraint.

Yes, your faces will be lovingly desecrated with the dripping goo of McCarthy's cinematic ejaculate - especially, when after the on-screen death of young Maximus Park, his roommate Adam Baxter, requiring his pal to kindly lend him some weed, makes a surprise visit. He speaks and acts with the kind of delicacy one expects in friendships rooted in deep love and respect, and upon discovering that Maximus is "passed out", Adam procures a felt pen and etches a penis, replete with a grotty ball sack and pubes on his pal's face.

Yes, we've all done this at one point or another in our lives, only we probably haven't actually desecrated (wittingly or unwittingly) the face of a recently-deceased corpse.


Adam is also a filmmaker, though less celebrated than Maximus since his post-film-school desires are in the realm of making commercial films which, he suspects he'll probably never get a chance to make since he lives in Canada where more emphasis is placed upon indigenous art film purveyors and where many of the officially government financed non-art-films merely purport to be commercial, but are, more often than not, pathetic, pallid and often twee versions of what Canadian financing bureaucrats think is commercial. However, being a hustler, liar and opportunist, several key attributes for any filmmaker to have, he hides the contents of the suicide video, rewrites his old pal's script, rallies together a cast, crew and financing based upon exploiting the memory of his deceased roomie, then proceeds to make his own version of the Maximus Park screenplay.

He bravely, callously and delightfully sets out to make a musical about a high school massacre that makes Columbine and all other bloody mass killings in educational institutions look like by-law infractions of the parking ticket order.


Shooting The Musical (formerly known as After Film School) is one of the most outrageous, offensive and laugh-out-loud comedies ever made. Framed within a mockumentary approach (which happily adheres to the genre), McCarthy's picture is a triumph of the kind of fresh, skewed and utterly insane filmmaking that the best Canadian films are known for in the international arena.

The film is never played as a spoof and/or sketch comedy, but successfully adheres to its genuinely satirical and darkly comedic roots. The performances are pitched perfectly with the talented assemblage of bright young actors playing a variety of roles perfectly straight. Leading man Bruce Novakowski as the charmingly sleazy director Adam is a revelation and then some. The camera loves him, he's got an impeccable sense of comic timing and delivery and most of all, he embodies his scumbag character with all the qualities that allow us to root for his otherwise reprehensible behaviour throughout.

The movie is so full of surprises (including a magnificent shocker of a supporting cameo role) that I'm loathe to ruin it for an audience by regurgitating them here. Suffice to say, that Shooting The Musical has its share of familiar and not-so familiar targets of what life is genuinely like for the myriad of unemployed/unemployable graduates of film schools the world over. If the movie has anything in it that irked me at all, it's an opening title card which attaches a quotation from Mark Twain that reads: "The secret source of humour is not joy but sorrow. There is no humour in Heaven."

Arrrggggghhhhh!

This title card is so completely unnecessary that it feels like a cop-out excuse to give audiences permission to laugh. That might not have been the intent, but that's how it comes off. (As well, the production company logos are so funny and offensive, that they too come across in a similar fashion to the Twain quote.) If there's any justice in the world, the filmmakers will relegate the Twain quote and the two production company logos to the end of the film, so an audience can laugh as heartily as their mouths are agape at some of the picture's more delectably offensive elements are.

Yes, this is a genuinely abhorrent, repugnant, reprehensibly repulsive shock-mock-doc that's as surprisingly (occasionally) sweet as it is nauseatingly, screamingly, shockingly, knee-slappingly and hysterically laugh-filled. And guess what, the biggest non-surprise of all is that the picture is happily bereft of the most grotesque credits of all: "Produced with the participation of Telefilm Canada".

The Film Corner Rating: **** 4 Stars

Two Oddball feature length comedies are on view during the final day of the 2015 Canadian Film Fest in Toronto and those so inclined, will be served up a nice buffet of wonky yucks. TWO MOVIE REVIEWS FOR THE PRICE OF ONE - GOOD DEAL, EH?

Ben's at Home (2014)
Dir. Mars Horodyski
Starring: Dan Abramovici, Jess Embro, Schnitzel, Jim Annan, Inessa Frantowski, Craig Brown, David Reale, Rob Baker, Kimberly-Sue Murray, Emma Fleury, Ruth Goodwin, Sarah Booth

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Call it a generational thing, but I have a hard time believing and/or giving two hoots about Ben (co-writer, co-producer Dan Abramovici), a 30-year-old loser who's so broken up over his girlfriend leaving him that he decides to never leave his apartment again and only communicate with people via social media and/or deigning to interact with them when they choose to come over to his place.

At the risk of sounding like my father, which, to my horror, I seem to be doing more and more with each passing year, my initial response to this sad sack's supposed dilemma would be thus:

"So what, bud? In my day healthy young men didn't mope around. They'd either turn into stalkers and/or grab some pussy in North End Winnipeg's Green Brier Hotel Beverage Room. Plenty of fish in the sea, sonny boy. Go out and get fucked."

I reiterate, though, it's gotta be some kind of a generational thing. After all, one of my keystone pictures as a kid was The Graduate wherein Dustin Hoffman not only got to boff pretty Katherine Ross, but her mother as well (Anne Bancroft as Mrs. Robinson). These days, though, keystone titles for kinder, gentler sissy boys might well be movies like Ben's at Home.

Luckily, the picture is snappily directed by Mars Horodyski who manages to get Abramovici to lay off on the self-pity enough that we occasionally find him engaging. As well, Horodyski and her key creative team more than make up for the picture's potential to slide into a vanity piece for its leading man. Visually, the blocking and compositions always make the most of the primarily interior single set, the cutting expertly keeps the forward movement all fresh and breezy, whilst the gorgeous lighting and camera work at times feels too good to be true, but true enough it is.

Another bonus is that the screenplay populates the film with a variety of rich supporting characters, all of whom are far more engaging and interesting than Ben himself. Given that he's such a loser, one wonders why any of them would bother having anything to do with the guy (after all, he's planning to miss his best friend's wedding - the LOSER!!!), but again, the film is so well directed that the camera eye and perspective allow for the relationships to work as well as they do and soften the reprehensibility factor infusing the title character. As well, the film is superbly cast in these supporting roles and not a single actor is anything less than thoroughly engaging, especially the massively talented David "Someone Give This Guy More Starring Roles" Reale as Ben's brother and the sassy, sexy Jess Embro as the delivery gal who falls for Ben the whiny lug.

Of course, it would be remiss of me not to mention the finest performance of all, the multi-talented Schnitzel as Ben's most loyal companion and ultimately, the best bedfellow a single feller could ever want. I mean it - the BEST a fella could ever really want to share his sack with.

CANADIAN FILM FEST 2015 WRAP-UP: THE FILM CORNER ACCOLADES as selected by your most Holy and Reverend Greg Klymkiw


Okay, so the festival is wrapped.


I saw all the features - some of them more than once.


I know the Awards Jury have made THEIR picks……


but here are MINE:

Best Music - Lena Dabrusin, Stewart Yu, SHOOTING THE MUSICAL
Best Cinematography - Walter Pacifico, BEN'S AT HOME
Best Editing - Mike Reisacher, BEN'S AT HOME
Best Supporting Actor - Casey Margolis, SHOOTING THE MUSICAL
Best Supporting Actress - Susan Kent, RELATIVE HAPPINESS
Best Actor - Bruce Novakowski, SHOOTING THE MUSICAL
Best Actress - Mary Krohnert, NOCTURNE
Best Screenplay - Joel Ashton McCarthy, SHOOTING THE MUSICAL
Best Director - Joel Ashton McCarthy, SHOOTING THE MUSICAL
Best Film - SHOOTING THE MUSICAL

VLADISLAV ENJOYS, uh, IMPALING, or rather, POKING.

1. A Fine Mess 2. Erotic Dance 3. Big Grumpy Pants 4. Impaling is always Fun

I should have hated this movie, but I couldn't. It's too good-natured and funny not to like. We're talking mockumentary, here. The subjects are vampires in New Zealand in the modern world. Just imagine a slightly broader This is Spinal Tap with blood-sucking before you go in and you're going to be just fine. I went in expecting nothing, mind you, but was rewarded with consistent laughs and often found myself soaring with joyous ebullience.

The set-up is pretty basic. A documentary crew (who always stay behind camera and don't ever appear as characters a la Rob Reiner in Spinal Tap) is granted permission to capture the daily lives of vampires (with a solemn oath that they'll never be attacked).

We're introduced to a "family" of four bloodsuckers and unlike our traditional notion of the undead living solitary lives in out-of-the-way castles, these fellas live in a sprawling dwelling in Wellington, New Zealand as - get this - flatmates.

Viago (Taika Waititi) is a bit frilly and foppish and takes on the role of fuss-budget den mother - always reminding his co-habitants of their household duties (sweeping, dusting, doing dishes and not leaving bloody spinal columns on the floor).

Vladislav (Jemaine Clement) is a long-haired, moustachioed satyr who hails from an Eastern European tradition of impaling, though he prefers to call it "poking".

Deacon (Jonathan Brugh) is the youngest and hence, most immature of the bunch, complaining about having to lift even the slightest finger to fulfil his responsibilities as a flatmate.

Deep in the bowels of the basement lives the eldest of the group, Petyr (Ben Fransham), a grumpy, 8000-year-old Max Schrek (or depending on your cup of Nosferatu, Klaus Kinski) lookalike.

The camera crew conducts one-on-one interviews with the oddball assortment of vampires in addition to capturing their day-to-day activities. The lads especially enjoy nights on the town (save for Petyr, who seldom leaves the basement, preferring victims to be dragged downstairs for him) and we get to enjoy our sidewalk-sashaying nocturnal undead buds roaming about, making like Dion and the Belmonts'The Wanderers.

Vampire Jam Session

Alas, these oddly-attired "nerds" are refused entry to all the hottest clubs and usually end up in the same joint, a decidedly uncool watering hole full of others of their uncool ilk. Here they usually meet up with their human "slave" Jackie (Jackie van Beek) who not only cleans up their messes, but most importantly, procures victims for them to dine upon. Poor Jackie is infected with the vampire bug, but only enough to do the fellas' bidding.

Nick - Master Clubber

She longs for eternal life and wants it sooner rather than later. She feels she's in her prime and wants to stay that way forever. How long can a girl be expected to procure? One of the victims she does indeed appropriate for the lads is the youthful Nick (Cori Gonzalez-Macuer). Rather than decimating him entirely, he's drained completely of blood and turned into a vampire himself, thus becoming a new flatmate. Good thing too.

Nick's quite the man about town and gets his pals into all the hottest nightclubs.

IT-whiz Stu introduces our vampires to the INTERNET!

The only thing that troubles Nick, though, is not having the company of his best friend, the computer geek Stu (Stuart Rutherford). He cuts a deal with the other vampires to bring Stu into his confidence and into their private world - unmolested. This turns out to be the best deal ever for the fellas since Stu's an IT-whiz during his day job and soon has the vampires hooked on YouTube, Skype, FaceBook and all manner of cyber-shenanigans.

There's a tiny bit of conflict that creeps into the movie involving their natural rivals, the werewolves of Wellington and Nick's less-than-discrete bad habit of telling everyone he knows (or barely knows) that he and his buds are vampires. This brings far too much unwanted attention upon them including a genuine vampire hunter and visits from the local constabulary.

The film eventually builds to an absolutely insane climax when the lads attend an annual ball of vampires, witches and zombies which furthermore spills over into a potentially deadly conflict with the werewolves. None of this, however, is ever scary, though there's a decent amount of tension and plenty of surprises to be had.

All in all, this group of bloodsuckers prove to be genuinely charming and likeable fellows and the movie injects all the tropes and lore of vampirism into the proceedings to keep genre fans constantly delighted. The running time is mercifully short and the picture never overstays its welcome. Happily, the camera crew do capture more than a few chases and kills, but they're never offensively complicit in their actions like, for example, the filmmakers in the vaguely reprehensible Man Bites Dog. The mock-doc is true to the genre and we're never presented with the sort of gaffes that can, in lesser examples of the ilk, takes us completely out of the forward thrust of the piece.

WHOOPSIE-DAISY: A BLEEDING MESS!

Though I might have preferred some of the performances to be slightly less over-played, nobody is ever egregiously tongue-in-cheek. Surprisingly, the movie is full of moments that are genuinely sweet and, I kid you not, rather touching. God knows, mock-docs and vampire pictures have been done to death, but What We Do In The Shadows always feels fresh, funny and yes, occasionally original. The movie is also blessed with a terrific song score (including weird recurring themes of klezmer-like Romanian foot-tappers) wonderful makeup, digital and wire effects, plus some dazzling stunt work.

My only major quibble is that there are simply not enough babes in the movie. Yes, there are a few, but they take a major back seat to the fellas and what red-blooded genre-geek doesn't want a good amount of babe action?

Well, this writer, for one, but even I had to concede that my grumblings about the dearth of babes eventually fell upon my own deaf ears. These guys are a riot!

THE FILM CORNER RATING: *** 3-Stars

What We Do In The Shadows is currently in theatrical platform release throughout Canada via VSC (Video Services Corp). Upcoming playdates include:

February 13 opening:
TORONTO - Scotiabank Theatre
MONTREAL - Cinema Cineplex Forum
VANCOUVER - Cineplex International Village

February 20 opening:
OTTAWA - SilverCity Gloucester
CALGARY - Select CINEPLEX Locations

February 27 opening:
WINNIPEG - SilverCity Polo Park

Queen and Country (2014)
Dir. John Boorman
Starring: Callum Turner, David Thewlis, Caleb Landry Jones, Richard E. Grant, Tamsin Egerton, Vanessa Kirby

Review By Greg Klymkiw

In 1987 John Boorman (Deliverance, Point Blank) delivered his sweet, funny and happily (as well as sadly) nostalgic Hope and Glory, the autobiographical journey of Bill Rohan, a young lad growing up in London during the Blitz and his subsequent adventures when moved out to the country for safety. One of the strangest and most delightful aspects of Boorman's picture was how it focused on a boy and his chums discovering that their bombed-out city had transformed into one big playground. Tempering this were the more sobering realities of life, love, family and yes, even the realities of war when they creep into Bill’s view beyond his mere child’s eyes.

It's now 25 years later and the 82-year-old Boorman delivers a sequel, Queen and Country. Bill (Callum Turner) is now a young man and he's been called up for two years of mandatory military service to dear old Blighty. Much to the chagrin of the regiment's commanding officer (Richard E. Grant), he forms a veritable Dynamic Duo with his cheeky, irreverent chum Percy Hapgood (Caleb Landry Jones) in which the lads wreak considerable havoc in the barracks - from basic training through to the end of their short military careers.

The lads' chief nemesis is the humourless, mean-spirited, borderline psychotic, stiff-upper-lip and decidedly by-the-book Sgt. Major Bradley (David Thewlis) who proves to be the bane of their existence. That said, the boys turn those tables quite handily and indeed become an even huger bane of Bradley's existence - pilfering the beloved regiment clock, ignoring protocol during typing lessons (YES! Typing lessons!) and eventually using "the book" to gain an upper hand over their superiors.


The humour and events are mostly of the gentle and good-natured variety - from Bill courting Ophelia (Tamsin Egerton) a beautiful ice-Queen with a dark secret, to Percy wooing Dawn (Vanessa Kirby), Bill's sexy sister during a happy leave-time in the country where the entire Rohan family joins in the thrill of unboxing a television set, madly attempting to get the roof antenna reception just right and gathering round the flickering monochrome cathode ray images which capture the coronation of the young Queen Elizabeth.

There is darkness to Boorman's tale, however, and though our characters are far away from the explosive Hope and Glory rubble of the Blitz, the very real and scary prospect of being called up for active duty in Korea looms large. As well, the horror of war slowly creeps into the character of Bradley when eventually the shenanigans perpetrated upon him reveal why his mask might not be as firmly affixed as anyone thinks.

The final third of the film is imbued with one emotional wallop after another including a court martial, harrowing trips to a veterans' hospital, military prison and finally a very sweet and deeply moving tribute to both love and cinema.

Queen and Country is a lovely, elegiac capper to the long, illustrious career of a grand, old man of the movies. That said, I desperately hope Mr. Boorman has it in him to deliver one final instalment in the early life of Bill Rohan. We've been treated to the Blitz, post-war England and now, I do think an excursion into the Swinging 60s is in order.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: **** 4 Stars

Queen and Country is currently in theatrical release in Canada via Search Engine Films and in the USA via BBC Worldwide America.


The Wonders (2014)
Dir. Alice Rohwacher
Starring: Maria Alexandra Lungu, Sam Louwyck, Alba Rohrwacher, Luís Huilca Logrono, Monica Belluci

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Director Alice Rohwacher displays such love for all the tiny details of traditional farm life in rural Italy that we slip into the slow delicate rhythm of each day and come to view even the most mundane actions in her second feature film The Wonders with breathtaking awe and excitement. One thing we cannot miss, however, is the crumbling ancient farmhouse, the endless dirt and dust, often grey, cloudy skies and the filthy decrepitude of the honey extraction lab where the film's central character, young teen Gelsomina (Maria Alexandra Lungu) expertly plies the trade her stern father Wolfgang (Sam Louwyck) has encumbered her with; the family is comprised of four daughters and lacking a son, she is Dad's "natural" heir to the family business of beekeeping. Our gaze is so fixed upon every meticulously rendered action involving the bees and honey that we almost want to dismiss the clear visual signs that subtly symbolize a way of life that is sadly dying.

If you ever wanted to know how honey is brought to your table, the film is so infused with a sense of neo-realist style that there's an almost direct cinema documentary approach to the scenes of beekeeping. One of the most fascinating scenes involves the retrieval of a colony of honey bees that have swarmed. It's presented, as all the farm life scenes, as directly related to both character and drama. Here we really see and understand how brilliant Gelsomina is as a beekeeper, in spite of her innate desire to break free of the shackles of rural life. Upon discovering the empty hive, she's the one who leads the way to the escaped bees with a quiet intensity. Once she expertly locates them, Rohwacher trains her lens upon an almost nail-bitingly suspenseful scene in which Gelsomina climbs up the tree to where a veritable mound of bees, thousands upon thousands of them, have affixed themselves in the shape of a traditional oval hive to a branch high up. Wolfgang is not far behind with the open, empty hive while Gelsomina kicks at the branch repeatedly and waves the startled bees towards the box her father holds upwards which, the bees hightail into for safety and security. (Now I know what to do with my own daughter the next time we have a swarming amongst our hives. I'm sure she'll be thrilled. Or, maybe not.)


In spite of the film's measured quality, actually, even because of it, the central conflict the family faces is being shut down by local health authorities for running an old, fashioned honey extraction lab which does not conform to the standards of the bureaucracy. This is going to cost a small fortune and the family is dirt poor. They are getting a small amount of extra money when Wolfgang insists they take in a young juvenile delinquent (Luís Huilca Logrono) as a ward. He proves to be a decent added pair of "male" hands and to Dad's chagrin, a definite romantic interest for his burgeoning young lady of a daughter (whom he insists is still a child in spite of grooming her and forcing her to work as an adult). Gelsomina has plans to save the farm. Though Dad objects, she is inspired to enter her family in "Countryside Wonders", a cheesy reality-TV show searching for the most impressive traditional rural farmers. Taken with the gorgeous, gaudily-attired, Fellini-like host of the show (Monica Belluci), our plucky teen protagonist goes ahead and secretly enters the family anyway.

The film is full of stunning images, though none of them are of the picture-postcard variety. Captured on real Super-16 film stock, there isn't a single frame of picture that is not tied to the drama (albeit of the muted kind). Rohwacher continually dazzles us, but there's one set-piece in her beautiful film that is as magical and moving as any that have been captured in the grand history of Italian Cinema - the reality TV-show itself and the family's participation in it; especially a haunting, moving and almost-heartbreaking performance in which the family's juvenile delinquent ward whistles a strangely mournful tune as Gelsomina, often in extreme closeup opens her mouth to allow actual bees to slowly clamber from within and to walk gently upon her beautiful face.

There aren't a lot of films out there right now which qualify for instant classic status, but The Wonders, winner of the 2014 Cannes Film Festival Grand Prix, most definitely does.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: ***** 5 Stars

The Wonders is currently in theatrical release via FilmsWeLike.

The Resurrection of a Bastard (2014)
Dir. Guido van Driel
Starring: Yorick van Wageningen, Goua Robert Grovogui, Juda Goslinga, Jeroen Willems

Review By Greg Klymkiw

I've seen plenty of crime pictures in my time, probably more than most. As such, I've probably seen every conceivable act of violence concocted by filmmakers and/or reproduced from reality. I thought I'd seen everything, but until seeing graphic novelist/artist Guido van Driel's feature debut The Resurrection of a Bastard, I had never seen a criminal remove someone's eyeball through the intense suction of a vacuum cleaner's hose.

I'd say my life is now relatively complete.

This, by the way, is not the only shocking display of ugly, brutal carnage in van Driel's grim and darkly (at times, screamingly) funny existential crime picture, but the real joy in the work is found in its atmosphere of viciousness.


We follow two stories presented in slightly skewed order which eventually converge to yield a staggering conclusion. The primary tale involves Ronnie (Yorick van Wageningen), a (mostly) poker-faced strong-arm debt-collection thug for James Joyce (Jeroen Willems), a scumbag, guitar-picking drug kingpin. Much of the film involves Ronnie and his sad-sack right hand man (Juda Goslinga) as they drive about the Dutch countryside (where most of their activities take place) and the film slowly reveals the reasons behind the vicious thug's neck brace and his almost ethereal comportment.

The other tale involves Eduardo (Goua Robert Grovogui), a recent immigrant to Holland who is trying to build a new life and fulfil his dream of becoming a car mechanic like his father. Mostly, though, he's trying to forget the horror of the unspecified African nation he's fled from as a political refugee. We get a salient clue as to what this gentle man with haunted eyes left behind. When a friendly cab driver asks him about his father, Eduardo reveals that his Dad is now dead from, "Chop, chop, chop." (Given all the extreme violence in the film, this is, in fact, one of the most powerful expressions of it.)

Both men have pain and regrets. One has had a near death experience which is eerily reproduced, the other has more than likely experienced one. What we experience of the latter character are the implications of a literal (or even figurative) resurrection.

In one case we see a man whose viciousness gives way to contemplation, in the other, a gentle man whose pain explodes during a scene involving the cruel killing of a rat. Both men find each other in a place of seeming solace, but rustling with the leaves of despair.

While The Resurrection of a Bastard might occasionally veer too deeply into art-house reverie and utilize a couple of too-obvious nods to Quentin Tarantino, there is no denying the film's power and the fact that it signals the arrival of a brilliant new voice in filmmaking.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: ***½ 3 and-a-half Stars

The Resurrection of a Bastard is currently in theatrical and VOD release via Syndicado.


On the Trail of the Far Fur Country (2014)
Dir. Kevin Nikkel

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Canadian filmmaker Kevin Nikkel has achieved what might be considered an impossibility with his film On the Trail of the Far Fur Country. Literally following in the footsteps of groundbreaking filmmakers almost a century earlier, he presents a stirring document juxtaposing the lives of northern Aboriginal people then and now.

In 1919, Harold Wyckoff was hired by the then-mighty Hudson's Bay Company to shoot footage for a feature film to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the company's building blocks, the fur trade in northern Canada. The company had been granted one-twelfth of the world's available land to carry out their business from 1670 onwards. The land was not really "available" since it was essentially stolen from the indigenous nations living upon it, but such is the history of Canada. This rich, powerful British firm, self=proclaimed as "The Company of Adventurers" built itself on the backs of indigenous labour. The film was, in fact, meant to be a glorified advertisement for the company to inspire sales and settlement of lands the Canadian Government essentially stole to grant to a major corporation. (Again, not much has changed in Canada on that front.)

There was, however, another theft looming - aesthetic thievery of the HBC's film which, unlike the eventual thief, at least went out of its way to present title cards in the Inuit language.

The result of HBC's efforts was The Romance of the Far Fur Country, a groundbreaking motion picture which was comprised of footage Wyckoff and an assistant shot during a perilous, arduous journey years before Robert Flaherty would shoot and release Nanook of the North (often considered the first documentary of its kind, but actually pre-dated by Wyckoff's film). In fact, Wyckoff's shooting techniques were so ahead of their time that Flaherty pretty much ripped many of them off for his much more famous and somewhat spurious "document" of "Eskimos". Even though Wyckoff's film is fraught with numerous instances of ethnocentrism and stereotyping, he genuinely sought to capture life as he saw it and, unlike Flaherty he did not overtly manipulate footage to tell the story he wanted to tell, but utilized techniques of cinema that he was experimenting with to capture narratives that were unfolding naturally.


In 1920, the HBC presented Wyckoff's stunning images, captured in sub-zero conditions on nitrate film stock and early, primitive (by today's standards) cameras. The movie was released throughout Canada in major centres, often accompanied by a full orchestra. Sadly, Flaherty's film stole all the thunder a couple of years later. As the Hudson's Bay Company shifted their focus from the fur trade to a huge chain of department stores, Wyckoff's film was lost to the sands of time. Over twenty reels of original film were shoved into Britain's National Film Archives (eventually the British Film Institute) who wisely made a protection master of the film, but still kept everything buried in the vaults.

Nikkel, however, has found a fascinating way to honour both Wyckoff and the indigenous peoples who lived as they were captured on film. Following Wyckoff's trail as closely as possible, Nikkel recreates footage, shoots in the same locations and most importantly, brings footage of Wyckoff's film to screen for all the contemporary children, grandchildren and great grandchildren of those captured in the pioneering filmmaker's lens.

Watching real people who, for the first time in their lives are seeing images of their ancestors is deeply and profoundly moving, as are the comments of young contemporary Native peoples describing the exploitation, colonization and assimilation forced upon the forefathers and how the wilful theft on the part of the Canadian Government, their lies and deceit, continue to this very day.

Nikkel has made a very engaging and important work. I do wish the musical score had not felt so stereotypically spare in that way documentaries even now fall back on and though Nikkel's narration is superbly written and rendered, I do also wish the voiceovers of Wyckoff's letters and journals had been presented in a much-less hammy fashion than they are here. These are, finally, minor quibbles. Nikkel's film is a vital document which captures historical, anthropological and aesthetic details which shed light upon a period of Canada's history that is, in the overall scheme of things, so close and yet, so far away.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: ***½ 3-and-a-half Stars

On the Trail of the Far Fur Country is currently playing in specialty venues, including the mini-festival "DOCUMENTING THE ART OF EXPLORATION VII" presented by The Arts & Letters Club of Toronto and The Explorers Club of Canada on March 28, 2015. The film is released via The Winnipeg Film Group.



That Guy Dick Miller (2014)
Dir. Elijah Drenner
Starring: Dick Miller, Roger Corman, Francis Doel, Joe Dante, John Sayles, Allan Arkush, Mary Woronov, Corey Feldman, Zach Galligan, Lainie Miller, Belinda Balaski, Gilbert Adler, Tina Hirsch, Ernest Dickerson, Jonathan Haze, Larry Karaszewski, Julie Corman, Fred Dekker, Steve Carver, David Del Valle, William Sadler, Robert Forster, Jonathan Kaplan, Jack Hill, Adam Rifkin, Fred Olen Ray, Chris Walas,

Review By Greg Klymkiw

He's been in over 200 movies.

His career has lasted over 60 years.

We all know who him.

He's "that guy".

You know, when you're watching The Terminator and Schwarzenegger visits the gun shop, who's behind the counter? "That guy." Then there's the wiseacre, know-it-all owner of the occult bookstore in The Howling who chews out the legendary "Famous Monsters of Filmland" publisher Forrest J. Ackerman for browsing, but also provides a wealth of knowledge about lycanthropy. Again, it's "That Guy". And, of course, there isn't a kid alive who doesn't know the legendary character of Murray Futterman from Gremlins, but most of them don't know his name. He's simply "that guy" whom they seen in everything.

This is a supremely entertaining and good-natured documentary portrait of a genuinely great character actor whose arrival was signalled in early and immortal roles in two classic 60s Roger Corman pictures, first as Walter Paisley, the nebbish "artist" in Bucket of Blood and the hilarious flower gourmet who brings his own salt shaker to add flavour to the petals he devours in the Little Shop of Horrors.

As the title of the doc clearly states, he's "That Guy Dick Miller".

The film is a who's who parade of the best, brightest and greatest genre filmmakers and actors, all extolling Miller's virtues, sharing great behind the scenes adventures and telling a whole whack of personal stories. And there's Miller himself - amiable, intelligent, sharp and funny - a real mensch among mensches.


He's accompanied by his longtime, still gorgeous and sexy wife Lainie Miller (you might remember her as the stripper who catches Dustin Hoffman's eye in The Graduate). She loves him to death and the feeling is clearly mutual. One of the film's highlights is seeing this absolutely perfect couple in their august years, interacting with each other as if they'd met only yesterday.

It's a fun and informative picture which not only sheds light on Dick Miller, the man, but also serves as a fascinating history of six decades of cinema. So load up on some soda pop, beer and lightly salted flowers, sit back, relax and enjoy the delightful film-clip-packed ride with one of the most important, vital forces in American Cinema.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: *** 3 Stars

That Guy Dick Miller is currently playing at the MLT Carlton Cinemas in Toronto via Indiecan Entertainment.

FARGO gives Kumiko hope that one day, she will be happy.

KUMIKO THE TREASURE HUNTER
starring Rinko Kikuchi
opens theatrically across Canada

Kumiko travels from Tokyo to Fargo in search of treasure.

Kumiko, an office girl in Tokyo, is obsessed with the movie Fargo by the Coen Bros. She has been studying it so intently that her VHS copy eventually wears out. Convinced it's a true story, she creates a meticulous series of maps to find the treasure of riches Steve Buscemi hides in the snow - IN the movie. Eventually, she embarks upon a very strange, funny and harrowingly emotional odyssey.

American cinema, more than anything, has always exemplified the American Dream. Brilliantly responding to this notion, director David Zellner and his co-writer/producer brother Nathan, have created Kumiko The Treasure Hunter. It's one of the most haunting, tragic and profoundly moving explorations of mental illness ever made - especially within the context of the dashed hopes and dreams, at first offered, then reneged upon by the magic of movies and the wide-open expanse of a country teeming with opportunity and riches.

There isn't a false note to be found in this gorgeously acted, directed and photographed movie. It is not without humour, but none of it is at Kumiko's expense and when the film slowly slides into full blown tragedy, the Zellners surround Kumiko in the ever-accumulating high winds and snow under the big skies of Minnesota. We get, as she does, a bittersweet taste of happiness - a dream of triumph, a dream of reunion, a dream of peace, at last.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: ***** 5-Stars

THE ZELLNER BROTHERS

GREG KLYMKIW: When I first saw Kumiko I had this fantasy that you guys were born and raised in either Minnesota or North Dakota, but you were born in Greeley, Colorado. I know you guys are in Austin, Texas these days, but how long did you actually live in Greeley?

DAVID ZELLNER: 
We lived in Greeley until Nathan was 9 and I was 10. We loved Greeley and Colorado in general. We were very much into the outdoors there, camping, etc. It was our formative years, and it left a big impression on us. I was sort of obsessed with the state, probably idealized it a bit, but all throughout my youth I had a Colorado state flag on my wall, the prettiest of the US state flags in my opinion.


GREG KLYMKIW: Yeah, it IS a gorgeous flag.

NATHAN ZELLNER: 
Greeley is just north of Denver, in the plains. Sort of rural. Our parents were professors before they retired, so they taught there and then later moved to Texas when we were teenagers.


COLORADO STATE FLAG

GREG KLYMKIW: When did you move to Austin?


DAVID ZELLNER: I moved to Austin to go to film school at UT. Nathan got a computer science degree at Texas A&M and then joined me in Austin afterwards.


GREG KLYMKIW: 
I'm curious, living on the plains of Colorado can't be much different that living in Winnipeg or North Dakota or Minnesota. What did all that open sky do to you guys as little nippers? Was it something you drank in like really tasty soda pop or didn't it make much of a difference until later?




DAVID ZELLNER: 
We had fond memories of winter growing up, from the first fall of the fresh pristine snow, to the end of the season when the sides of the roads were caked with stacks of oily frozen sludge. We'd never been to Minnesota prior to making Kumiko, though we had been to Japan, but the idea of a winter-set film full of snowy vast landscapes was appealing to us at least in part on a nostalgic level.

THE ZELLNER BROTHERS

GREG KLYMKIW: Where in Texas did you guys move to after Greeley? Was the terrain/topography similar? I only know Dallas/Fort Worth areas, so I'm not sure what other regions of the state look like except from westerns.

NATHAN ZELLNER: 
We moved to a university town called College Station.
 Texas is pretty big and diverse, the major difference was the weather and lack of snow. Like David said, we missed the four seasons.

GREG KLYMKIW: Aside from being, uh, American, what was your family's ethnic background?


DAVID ZELLNER: A mix, our mom's side is mostly Irish, our dad's side had a lot of folks from Transylvania.


GREG KLYMKIW: When did you guys fall in love with movies?


NATHAN ZELLNER: We grew up as VHS kids, but always going out to see movies in the theatre - a lot of the early 80's blockbusters and further expanding our film-knowledge by reading the covers of VHS boxes in video stores. We've always gone to see movies in theatres, though.


GREG KLYMKIW: Did you guys always work together creatively?

DAVID ZELLNER: We've been making films since we were little kids with VHS and Super 8 cameras. Initially it stemmed from wanting to act/perform particular characters. Not knowing what a director or producer or cinematographer was liberating. It's fun at that age because you're just blindly creating things.


GREG KLYMKIW: So I assume film school is where you might have gotten a taste of the fact that maybe filmmaking WASN'T blindly creating things? I'm also interested in Nathan's academic background in computer science - is that something that brought anything to bear upon your film collaboration with David?


DAVID ZELLNER: Film school was great, but it was one of many elements of my education. The best part was access to 16mm equipment and meeting likeminded folks, many of whom I'm still close to.



NATHAN ZELLNER: We each have different strengths, David is the primary Director/Writer and I'm the primary Producer/Editor, but because of how we have worked since kids, everything overlaps. My background is more technical, and that has helped as filmmaking has evolved with the digital age. We ended up editing this film on the same computers it was written on.

GREG KLYMKIW: Kumiko floats around like a stranger in her own land. Or am I being too much of an egghead here?


DAVID ZELLNER: It's not something we really intellectualize or even discuss with one another, we just are drawn to outsider stories on some visceral level I guess.


GREG KLYMKIW: Why do you think you are attracted to stories about outsiders?


DAVID ZELLNER: I guess because we are outsiders.

NATHAN ZELLNER: Something about viewing the world from a different perspective seems to speak to us.


GREG KLYMKIW: How did you guys come up with this story? It's based on an urban legend, right?

NATHAN ZELLNER: We first came across a blurb about it on the internet, this story everyone assumed was true about this Japanese woman who went from Tokyo to Minnesota looking for the lost fortune from the Coen Bros. Fargo. It was before social media is like today, just a small bit of information on a message board that was being passed along like the telephone game. Maybe the lack of information made us more obsessed with it, but to satiate our curiosity, we started writing a script and developing a backstory and character to solve our own curiosity about the kind of person who would go on such a quest. Years later, after a couple drafts of the script, we checked back and more info was available, debunking the original story as an urban legend. At first we were taken aback, but because we had been living with our version of the "truth" for so long it was just as valid. We liked it even more, our addition to the myth, that is.



Reported in the April 7, 2002 issue: Takako Konishi died looking for FARGO treasure.

GREG KLYMKIW: When did Rinko Kikuchi come into the picture?



DAVID ZELLNER: We met her in 2008, we'd seen her in Babel and a few Japanese films, including a great one called Funky Forest. 

We hit it off with her right away and she immediately dialed into the tone of what we were going for, the balance of humor and pathos
.

GREG KLYMKIW: Was her involvement tied to financing the film?

DAVID ZELLNER: Her involvement helped there, for sure, but it wasn't necessarily the crux. We seriously didn't have a close runner up for the role really. Once we met her, we knew she was perfect for it.


GREG KLYMKIW: You said you had visited Japan. When? Why? (Other than making the movie obviously). Do either of you speak Japanese? 


NATHAN ZELLNER: We love Tokyo, it's an amazing city. We had visited Japan as tourists a year before we initially heard the story which, in hindsight, was probably one of the reasons we were drawn to it. We don't speak Japanese. We tried to learn it but failed.

GREG KLYMKIW: What was it like for a couple of boys from Greeley, Colorado to work in Japan?

NATHAN ZELLNER: We had a great relationship with the crew over there and they got the tone we were going for. They were on the same page and so excited to help make the same film. They helped us with some cultural questions and the language barrier. We did a ton of homework before too, especially since we didn't want to film a tourist version of Tokyo.


GREG KLYMKIW: What were some of the aspects of Fargo that inspired you guys in the writing/making of your movie?

DAVID ZELLNER: We like Fargo and the Coens' work in general, but the whole Fargo thing was inherently part of the original urban legend that we wanted to turn into a movie.


GREG KLYMKIW: Did you guys have to make contact with the Coens to get the movie made? I assume they've seen it. Have they said anything to you guys about it?

NATHAN ZELLNER: The negotiations mainly went through the studio. We had to convince the powers-that-be there that this wasn't a sequel or wanker homage or spoof, but that the film was part of the legend and a conduit to her journey. I don't think the Coens have seen it. Hopefully they will see it some day.


GREG KLYMKIW: It kinda shocks me they haven't seen it yet. Oh well. Guess they're busy or something. By the way, 
Fargo is part of a strange little group of movies I call the most Canadian movies never made in Canada and not made by Canadians. Growing up in Winnipeg seemed identical to the world of Fargo. The movie felt like it was made in my own backyard. It's something I never feel with other American movies, except movies in this weird, little sub-genre I've conjured up for myself in order to temper my inherent Canadian inadequacy. The other movies in this sub genre are Slap Shot and, of course, your movie, Kumiko.


NATHAN ZELLNER: I love hearing that feedback about Canada. We enjoy how different people have different points-of-view on the film, usually based on where they are from. I'm happy Kumiko connected with you in that way. I've always wanted to visit Winnipeg.

GREG KLYMKIW: I haven't lived in Winnipeg for 20 years, but I go back every chance I can. There's nowhere like it in all of Canada. It was, in its heyday, considered "Little Chicago". Now, it's not much of anything, but I kind of like its current state of utter decrepitude.
 It was also, of course, a cool place to be when I produced Guy Maddin's early movies.

DAVID ZELLNER: I have to say that Tales from the Gimli Hospital, Archangel and Careful were a massive influence on us. Seeing those films for the first time in the early 90's was a really formative experience. They really blew my young impressionable mind. I remember seeing Gimli Hospital, not knowing what or where it came from, other than that it had to be some ancient artifact from long ago and far, far away, and then a few minutes into the movie I see a Super Big Gulp cup in a shot. I was hooked from that point on.

GREG KLYMKIW: I'm sure Guy and his screenwriter George Toles will love Kumiko. It's opening in Winnipeg, so I'm going to insist they see it. By the way, not only are Big Gulps popular in our neck of the woods, but Winnipeg is the Slurpee capital of Canada. Anyway, one last question. Do you guys, like, live in the same house in Austin or do you indeed have separate lives?


NATHAN ZELLNER: We used to live together, but that was along time ago. We have separate lives, now. It helps to keep perspective with our work. Of course, we talk and see each other often though.


GREG KLYMKIW: 
Sorry that was, I guess, a semi-joke-question. I do, however, have this image of you two living in some kind of Austin version of PeeWee's Playhouse.


NATHAN ZELLNER: I wish we worked in a replica of PeeWee's Playhouse
.

Kumiko The Treasure Hunter is being released theatrically in Canada via FilmsWeLike. You can read the full version of my original review from its premiere at the Toronto After Dark Film Festival HERE.

Here are the venues and playdates across the country:

TIFF Bell Lightbox (Toronto, ON)
Starts Friday, April 3, 2015

Vancity Theatre (Vancouver, BC)
Starts Friday, April 3, 2015

Regina Public Film Library (Regina, SK)
Starts Thursday, April 3, 2015

Broadway Theatre (Saskatoon, SK )
Starts Saturday, April 4, 2015

Globe Cinema (Calgary, AB)
Starts Saturday, April 4, 2015

Bytowne Cinema (Ottawa, ON)
Starts Monday, April 6, 2015

City Cinema, (Charlottetown, PEI)
Starts Wednesday, April 8, 2015

Cinema du Parc (Montreal, QC)
Starts Friday, April 10, 2015

Hyland Cinema (London, ON)
Starts Friday, April 10, 2015

Revue Cinema (Toronto, ON)
Starts Sunday, April 19, 2015

The Royal (Toronto, ON)
Starts Thursday, April 23, 2015

Metro Cinema (Edmonton, AB)
Starts Friday, April 24, 2015

The Vic (Victoria, BC)
Friday, April 24, 2015

Winnipeg Film Group Cinemathque (Winnipeg, MB)
Starts Thursday, May 14, 2015

In anticipation of the upcoming 2015 Toronto Hot Docs International Festival of Documentary Cinema, herewith is a review of the Milestone Film and Video Blu-Ray of their Shirley Clarke restoration series featuring one of the greatest documentaries ever made: Portrait of Jason (screened during the 2013 Hot Docs festival) and now available to own. See this important work NOW and possess it FOREVER.

Ingmar Bergman proclaimed Portrait of Jason as being “the most extraordinary film I’ve ever seen in my life.” Its first screening in 1967 included an audience of Tennessee Williams, Norman Mailer, Andy Warhol, Arthur Miller, Elia Kazan, Ruby Dee, Ossie Davis and Terry Southern.

In spite of this, decades passed, yielding little more than a film that disappeared - so cast away that the original elements were thought to be lost, thoroughly and utterly untraceable. The prints that existed, crude 35mm blow-ups to begin with, were so worn and scratched, they were beyond salvation.

After a painstaking search that took years, Dennis Doros and Amy Heller, God's Gifts to saving what was thought to be unsalvageable, eventually found and identified mislabeled “outtakes” as the original 16mm inter-positive negative of Portrait of Jason.

For this, we must all feel beholden to these efforts.

Portrait of Jason is with us now and here to stay.

Forever.


Portrait of Jason (1967)
Dir. Shirley Clarke
Starring: Jason Holliday (aka Aaron Payne)

Review By Greg Klymkiw

To be gay in America right now shouldn't be so fraught with hate and invective, but attitudes and legislation in many pockets of the Red, White and Blue still seem so frustrating and backward. As such, gay bashing and murder are still a real threat.

To be Black in America right now is to also be a target of hate-filled repressive castigation, often ending in murder at the hands of racist police.

To be Black and Gay in America in 2015 - well, let's not even go there - especially not states like Alabama, Indiana, Mississippi or, say, Arkansas, to name but a few. Stay away. Stay far away. Don't believe for a moment that any useless amendments (or lack thereof) made to their boneheadedly hate-filled legislation will do anything to stem the tide of hatred.

Shirley Clarke's Portrait of Jason, a stunning, groundbreaking feature documentary has always held a place of importance in both cinema and, most notably, in its power and insight into what it must have been to be Black and Gay in American during the 1960s. First released almost fifty years ago, it's a window into racial and sexual politics as presented by one of the most fascinating subjects one will find in that period of documentary film. Clarke's picture will indeed have equal resonance in today's era of intolerance; maybe even more so, in light of the aforementioned current conditions plaguing much of America, land of the not-so Free.

Restored and released by the visionary Milestone Films and Video, the film's importance to the art of film and gay history can't be stressed enough. Current attitudes towards both the gay and of-colour communities that still exist in so-called "progressive" societies means, due to Milestone's commitment to saving, preserving and showcasing forgotten and/or lost works, that this vital film can now be experienced by whole new generations of audiences all over the world and, no doubt, for generations to come.

Portrait of Jason is the essential cinéma vérité doc that focuses upon the irreverent gay American houseboy, hustler and wannabe cabaret perfomer, Jason Holiday. Shot over the course of one very long night in Clarke's home in the legendary Chelsea Hotel in New York, the picture is essentially a monologue performed by her old friend as he tells the story of his extraordinary life with equal parts humour and sadness.

Captured in glorious standard-frame black and white 16mm film stock, the camera never leaves the realm of Jason save for cuts or fades to black and occasionally, to sound with no picture when the camera needs to change film rolls. This real exigency of production led to a superb, imaginative editing approach to the picture. Clarke uses the blacks as breathtaking exclamatory bridges between the various segments, which provide an indelible series of transition points in the "narrative" flow of the work itself.

Stylish, dapper and adorned in his trademark heavy-black-framed coke-bottle lenses, often armed with a fortifying drink in one hand and cigarette in the other, Jason recounts both his philosophies of life and extraordinary life story. For good measure, he tosses in plenty of hilarious impersonations and jokes. These are the bountiful maraschino cherries on the - ahem - ever-so delectable Chocolate Holliday Sundae.

His tales begin entertainingly and amusingly enough, but as the film progresses, Jason adds copious reefer ingestion and booze swilling by the bucketful, until the whole affair slowly unravels into a veritable Walpurgisnacht.


What we learn during the 105-minute confession seems mostly truthful, albeit tempered by Jason's abilities as a born raconteur. He gives us snippets of his childhood, his relationship with parents and other family, in addition to friends, employers and lovers, life on the streets, in the baths, in the bars and in the homes of those whom he worked for as a houseboy" (and the various permutations - mostly implied - of what that entailed). He shares his secrets in the arts of hustling, cajoling, stealing, "borrowing" and making his way through life with as little effort as possible.

"I'm lazy," he declares, "I've always really wanted to jump into it, but I kept avoiding it somehow. I always made an excuse for accepting other people's problems and putting down my own. I always became this one or that one's flunky - anything to keep from facing what I really wanted to do and now, I want to do it."

Doing it won't be as easy as he thinks.

His first order of business is a moniker makeover. Jason's given name not only brought back "unpleasant memories", but led to states of deep "despression." Changing his given name of Aaron Payne to the decidedly flamboyant "Jason Holliday" not only helped to erase (or at least suppress) the past, but ultimately gave him the strength to pursue his dreams.

"If the name rings a bell to you, makes you feel well, then take the name," he states emphatically when describing his epiphanies in San Francisco's famed Gay Mecca of Castro Street, a magical place where he met way too many cool "cats" with "hip" names, that he decided his own rebirth was in order.

Hence, a new name.

"I was created in San Francisco," he says with pride, then, with a smile, "and San Francisco is the place to be created in. Believe me!"

By the time Jason is in front of Clarke's camera, he's left San Francisco to be back in his beloved hometown of New York. Here, Jason hopes to rekindle his dream of being a nightclub performer. As Clarke's film proves, he's imbued with more than enough talent to do so and most notably, he's certainly not without material. However, he has one hurdle to overcome - not wanting to work. He relays an anecdote about a close friend who works as a teacher in the public school system; she's so devoted to teaching that after work, she goes from house to house in her neighbourhood teaching kids who either don't go to school or need the kind of additional tutelage and attention they don't get in school. What she says to Jason is as inspiring to him as it is a tool in which to morph his notion of hard work into doing as little as possible.

"One day she said something to me that was really hip. 'Jason', she said, 'everyone in New York has a gimmick. Mine is teaching school.' And from her I learned that mine was hustling."

Jason, of course, prides himself on the diverse nature of his skill. "I have more than one hustle. I'll come on as a maid or a butler; anything to keep from punching the clock from 9-to-5, because every time I've punched that clock it's been a job that's such a drag it makes you sick, and what I really wanna do is what I'm doing now [in front of the camera] and that is to perform."

In the same breath, he subtly drops the aforementioned subject of "performing" and brilliantly segues into a whole new patter. Well, it's an old patter, really, but Jason's crafty enough to know that everything old becomes new again. "I'm scared of responsibility," he continues. "I'm scared of myself, because I'm a pretty frightening cat, as people who know me will tell you." He's quick to elaborate: "I don't mean any harm, but the harm is done. A friend of mine keeps telling me that I'm always going to find a way of fouling it up, but I'm always trying to get in there and pitch." Then, just as smoothly and brilliantly, like he's been doing standup comedy for decades, he segues into a very telling, but funny story about seeing a psychiatrist:

"These head shrinkers are very interesting cats. Sometimes they let you talk. They keep wanting to know who you sleep with. Someone asked me, 'What do you do? ...Do you please them?' I say, "If I don't please them, it's because I'm not trying."

THEN, he uses this to leap into a riff on sex:

"I've spent so much of my life being sexy, as you can see!" he cheekily exclaims with the flourish of a runway model's twirl of the head, until, with his ever-impeccable timing, the requisite self-deprecation and a winning smile, he returns to the theme of his sloth: "Lord knows, I haven't gotten anything else done."

Jason is clearly gifted and it's to Clarke's credit that she's made this film if only to capture Holliday's crazy genius and by extension, fashioning a macrocosmic view of a life and lifestyle which feels at once, locked in time and yet, replete with resonance to our modern world.

He describes one of his employers as "a tall, lanky, sad looking blonde from Alabama." With giddy delivery he recalls, "She'd say 'Jason, fix me some of that chicken.' They always want chicken, cuz, of course, all coloured folks know how to fix chicken, so I'd be in the kitchen, frying the ass off this chicken, 'Yas'm, I'd say.'" He then takes a deeply racist slur and turns it into a joke: "One time she says, 'You know Jason, I never really much liked niggers, but you're the first one I ever really cared for.' And I said, 'Well that's very sweet of you, I guess that means I should have this job for a very long time."

As masterful as Jason's delivery is, it's tempered with seep sadness: "I think as a house boy I really suffered" he admits with genuine sadness before flipping it around with: "But this hasn't all been a waste. They think you're just a dumb, stupid little coloured boy who's trying to get a few dollars. They think they're gonna use you as a joke, but the real joke is this: who's using who?"

By expressing deep pain over the prejudicial views assailing him at every turn, he's clearly able to turn the tables on his oppressors. Though it doesn't seem like mere rationalization, one gets the sense that the tit-for-tat is probably more one-sided; that the notion of empowerment is imbued with a high degree of self-delusion. This surely speaks to anyone and everyone who has been the target of deep-seeded hatred and sought to fight back, only to find that they're using a shield to repel the blows that in fact, have virtually no genuine resonance upon the attacker.

Clarke deftly takes hours upon hours of footage and recreates a powerful dramatic arc in which Jason, by his words and actions, eventually takes his shield and transforms it into an ostrich hole of drug and alcohol abuse, and in so doing, Clarke captures an encapsulation of generations upon generations of prejudicial abuse and its effects upon even the most accomplished and intelligent human beings who were, and frankly, continue to be targets of ignorance.

This has got to stop. One hopes a fifty-year-old film will have the requisite power to do so.


As important as the film itself, is its restoration. Milestone Film and Video's work earned the company's founders Amy Heller and Dennis Doros a Special Award from the 2012 New York Film Critics Circle for preserving "the work of pioneering indie filmmaker Shirley Clarke." The greatness of Clarke's Portrait of Jason cannot be underestimated, nor, frankly, can the painstaking work of Heller and Doros.

The film must be seen by as wide an audience as possible and the Milestone Film and Video Blu-ray should be in every home of anyone committed to great cinema as well as work that stands as a testament to those who fought, lost and won in the battle for dignity and the most basic human rights.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: ***** 5-Stars (for both the film and the stunning Milestone Film and Video Blu-Ray)

The Milestone Film and Video Blu-Ray of Portrait of Jason includes: Where's Shirley? (25 mins) a lovely, heartfelt documentary from Milestone's original crowd funding plea to have the film restored and detailing a bevy of important information about the painstaking efforts to bring the film back into the public eye, The Lost Confrontation (7 mins), Jason in Color! (2:30 mins), Trailer (2 mins), Jason: Before and After (1:30 mins), Butterfly (1967, 3:34 mins) Shirley Clarke in Underground New York (1967, 9:37 mins), Jason Unleashed (Audio outtakes. 35 mins), Pacifica Radio Interview with Shirley Clarke (1967, 53 mins), The Jason Holiday Comedy Album (1967, 54:00 mins, audio) and SDH Subtitles

Read the original Film Corner crowd funding plea for the film's restoration in 2012 HERE

Feel free to read my RAVE reviews of other great Milestone Film and Video releases: ON THE BOWERYHERE. My Review of THE DRAGON PAINTER can be read HERE. And be on the lookout for my full-length Film Corner reviews of RAGS AND RICHES: THE MARY PICKFORD COLLECTIONHERE, CUT TO THE CHASE!: THE CHARLIE CHASE COLLECTIONHERE and ALFRED HITCHCOCK'S "BON VOYAGE"& "ADVENTURE MALGACHE"HERE.


Don't forget you can order PORTRAIT OF JASON from the Amazon links below and in so doing, contribute to the ongoing maintenance of the Film Corner:


In USA and the rest of the WORLD - BUY Portrait of Jason - HERE!

In Canada - BUY Portrait of Jason HERE, eh!

In the UNITED KINGDOM - BUY Portrait of Jason - HERE!