 🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿 | 🎙️ EPISODE 639: 01.26.23 🇨🇦 𝙿𝙰𝚁𝚃 𝙾𝙵 𝚃𝙷𝙴 𝙳𝙸𝚁𝙴𝙲𝚃𝙾𝚁 𝙵𝙾𝙲𝚄𝚂 𝙾𝙽 𝙶𝚄𝚈 𝙼𝙰𝙳𝙳𝙸𝙽 🇨🇦 There are movies, silent or otherwise, that dare to ask the big questions and then there is Guy Maddin's sixth picture, the first of his "Me" trilogy, 2003's Cowards Bend the Knee, which is brave enough to ask audience to consider the intertitle, "Guy tries to stop the ghost from having an abortion..." On the surface one might assume such a production asinine, a surrealist work simply for the sake of such. Keep Austin or Portland or wherever weird or what have you. A state of being, a want or desire, simply because it runs askew of some sense of normality. There is truth in that there wine, a certain contract one unwittingly signs off on when they enter the world of Maddin. But it's just a place it turns out. What you do there is up to you. |
What did I do to deserve this yearning to know, to understand, to care. It wasn't enough my just being entertained, though I am, consistently, in buckets. We only get to live during the time we are alive but the magic of art, of making it or consuming it, is that we get to pretend that isn't true. This isn't exactly what the movie is about or what I am trying to get at in this critique but it's certainly a "neither here nor there" which seems apt at this juncture.
The thing is, Maddin isn't really trying to make some new that feels old or some variant of that, vice versa, inside out, backwards, or forwards. His movies definitely feel a certain way and if you're a tourist to them, then I completely understand how that might come across as the whole enchilada. But having spent some ten hours or so with them now (just about at the halfway point of his career), I've fully become numb to the aesthetics. Which — trust me — is a shock to even me. I find myself seeing them more like dreams to be interpreted rather than "very clearly movies" movies they so immediately are (as put so accurately by film critic Geoff Pevere in the doc, Waiting for Twilight).
And so I'm at this delirious crossroads (and happy to be there!). But I find myself at a loss for words, even here in paragraph 5, as to what it is I want to make known: my OPINION as it were. I feel it is IMPORTANT even if I can't for the life of me articulate it.
UPDATE: Rescored this as a 10 when I was doing the final RANKING
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CHRONOLOGICALLY
⫷ EPISODE 638 - (YOU ARE HERE) - EPISODE 640 ⫸
⫷ EPISODE 638 - (YOU ARE HERE) - EPISODE 640 ⫸
Cowards Bend the Knee (also known as The Blue Hands) is a 2003 film by Guy Maddin. Maddin directed Cowards Bend the Knee while in pre-production on The Saddest Music in the World, shooting entirely on Super-8mm film with a budget of $30,000. It was released on October 26, 2003.
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