Interesteg What makes it different from others?

Catangro After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

Tyreece Hulme One of the best movies of the year! Incredible from the beginning to the end.

Lidia Draper Great example of an old-fashioned, pure-at-heart escapist event movie that doesn't pretend to be anything that it's not and has boat loads of fun being its own ludicrous self.

Michael Neumann The sophomore feature from Winnipeg director Guy Maddin confirms the promise of his offbeat 1988 debut 'Tales From the Gimli Hospital', although perhaps with a hint of understandable redundancy. Maddin's peculiar aesthetic is the same, borrowing extensively from the primitive vocabulary of early sound productions (circa 1928-1930), but this time the action is updated from Icelandic fable to the Russian Revolution, a popular setting for Hollywood melodramas during the late silent/early sound era. Every anachronism is flawlessly presented, from the flickering black and white photography to the scratchy music score and crude post-dubbed dialogue, but like 'Gimli Hospital' the macabre (to say the least) plot is pointed straight at today's midnight cult cinephiles. Only the details are different: instead of dead seagull therapy and ritual butt-grabbing duels to the death (both highlights of the earlier film), audiences can enjoy an odd, amnesiac love quadrangle, climaxing when one character uses his own intestines to strangle the Bolshevik barbarian who disemboweled him. Not surprisingly, comparisons have been drawn to the early films of David Lynch, who next to Maddin is more in the same league as Frank Capra.

tedg I only know a few of Maddin's projects. This seems to be the earliest available.I'm really beginning a deep appreciation of this man's visual soul. While this project didn't change my life, it demonstrated the power to do so, like a strutting policeman among weak minds.What I like about his mind is how he seats the thing first in the soul, then in the cinematic vocabulary instead of the usual path which values character, motivations, narrative clarity. What he's done here is revisit Eisenstein. I don't suppose many filmgoers have much truck for a Russian silent filmmaker who was primarily occupied in Soviet propaganda. He developed some important ideas about how a scene (never a movie — only a scene) can be constructed from visual fragments — what it means to "see."His particular solutions aren't popular today, and the whole idea of slicing the eye has been appropriated to the service of now-conventional values of storytelling and the cult of celebrity — some few jokes and even fewer emotions destinations.Eisenstein's idea is based on the notion of readable cells of retinal comprehension, more or less of the same size which when combined give an impression. The more discrete the components in presentation the more comprehensible the assembly, what he called the collage.What Maddin does here is make a metaEisenstein. The story is set in Russia and populated by international warriors, all of whom have only a groggy notion of why they are there. Our hero, like Maddin, is Canadian. It is essentially a silent movie. There is a parallel movie that is a talkie, into which this silent, main piece is embedded.Within the silent movie is a sort of "movie within," exactly as abstract from the silent portion as the silent portion is to the talkie portion and thence not to our world (as is the usual case with folding) but to the world of normal movies.That "movie within" is the "illumination" a set of stage tableaux depicting famous battles. If you experience nothing but these — or rather if you skate over all the surrounding context and focus only on these — you will be rewarded. There's so much reference there.The overall theme of the thing is the hard boundary of memory, where the continuity of knowing begins and ends. In the story, this exhibits as amnesia plus a sort of quantum identity shifts — of women, who else? That's good, its valuable. But the interesting thing is how this is seated in the collage itself. Eisenstein's idea is that each cell, each image, of the collage needs to have some reference to the others. The art is in the nature of that reference. Maddin makes that reference sit on the cells. In his case they are not bubbles in transparent foam that light can shine through. Instead they are stones, smooth stones with hard impenetrable skins that only know themselves and keep forgetting those they are nestled against. So they forget who they are.Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.

duke_manga_man This wierd, dreamlike film goes a long way on a limited budget, creating a completely unreal experience about a real historical event in Archangel, Russia during the Russian revolution.Like all of Maddin's other films, Boles is and anti-hero, his subversive obsession with Veronika could not be interpreted as love or heroic, a brillliant deconstruction of your average war movie.The ending is a bit disappointing (out of the brooding character with the rest of the film) but in all a great film.

jokey-2 Some movies can be called nightmare movies or like Lynch's Eraserhead, "a dream of dark and troubling things" and while Archangel is a film that falls into the "dream" genre, it is sort of like a whole bunch of mini-dreams that you get during catnaps strung together, and as such, is easily one of the most insane movies I have ever seen. Needless to say, I highly recommend it.