 🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿 | 🎙️ EPISODE 620: 12.15.22 🇨🇦 𝙿𝙰𝚁𝚃 𝙾𝙵 𝚃𝙷𝙴 𝙳𝙸𝚁𝙴𝙲𝚃𝙾𝚁 𝙵𝙾𝙲𝚄𝚂 𝙾𝙽 𝙶𝚄𝚈 𝙼𝙰𝙳𝙳𝙸𝙽 🇨🇦 Looking for inspiration in all the wrong places actually turns out to be right sometimes. I found in this the third feature from the master auteur that kind of inspiration. What Guy Maddin does is a trick and, while — yes, perhaps — the same could be said of all the greats, his is a humble trick. His pictures reek of a DIY aesthetic that is not cute or comforting. He is saying "take my yoke and learn from me." And at first, like the geese shot dead over Grigorss the Young after killing the man who soiled his father's name in a duel, this seems like an unpalatable offer. But when you let it in — when you finally let it in — you'll see that the yoke is easy to digest and the burden of your prior ignorance is actually a light to guide the way. |
We gamble with life all the time. In fact, it took me twice as long to get to the gym to watch the first sixty minutes of this on my aging Kindle Fire. I could have gotten road rage and been shot dead in the streets. Oh, the avalanches we (humans) cause are constant. But only deadly if parsed by a metric of time. Every time I press play I'm waiting to see if today is the day that the $50 device will die. Surely, one day, it will die.
I keep thinking about the geese falling from the sky. Everything is some kind of omen in a Guy Maddin film; if you think of them as omens rather than themes and the watching as an act of devotion instead of a form of entertainment, than you'll be at least halfway there in terms of 'getting it'.
Being "careful" is a stand-in for being "silent" and that alone is some heady meta commentary on this whole shebang (self-made genre). This is a talkie interlaced with title cards and, though we don't 'need' them, their presence (or, more to the point: our inner voice reading the words) is necessary in achieving the endgame effect of [something new that feels old].
This is easily Maddin's most successful work to date and that's obvious for a variety of reasons. Sure, a bigger budget and more experience are the easy answers. But for my money — and this site is occasionally free and not-free so take it for it's worth (at any given time) — its success lies mostly in its escape from the constraints of history. No one would confuse Maddin as a historian no matter how many gooseberries they ingest. But the difference between Icelandic fishing communities and the Bolshevik Revolution and this is that you can google "swan feeder" and not expect to get ANY tangible results...
Ah, fiction! Yes... ha ha ha... YES! Using what is essentially a singular grain of the sands of time as jumping of point is fine. Like a video game quest, there were things in Gimli and , totems, one needed to acquire to get where we are now. But, by God, the story crafted here is transcendent. It was always fictitious (duh) but in the shedding of all ties to time, a new space opened up, one where the characters could flourish in their weirdness for the sake of the story and the story alone, and not simply be weird x in a strange y during bizarre z.
So I'll say no more. But leave you with this:
Consider the yoke. It's not always what it seems...
Now That's What I Call Foul!
UPDATE: Rescored this as a 10 when I was doing the final RANKING
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CHRONOLOGICALLY
⫷ EPISODE 619 - (YOU ARE HERE) - EPISODE 621 ⫸
⫷ EPISODE 619 - (YOU ARE HERE) - EPISODE 621 ⫸
Careful is a 1992 Canadian film directed by Guy Maddin. It is Maddin's third feature film and his first colour film, shot on 16mm on a budget of $1.1 million. At one point, Martin Scorsese had agreed to act in the film, as Count Knotkers, but bowed out to complete Cape Fear. Maddin pursued casting hockey star Bobby Hull, but ended up casting Paul Cox. It was released on January 28, 1992.
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