Actuakers One of my all time favorites.

Steineded How sad is this?

Adeel Hail Unshakable, witty and deeply felt, the film will be paying emotional dividends for a long, long time.

Logan By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

tedg When you love someone deeply, everything seems deep. When you love them in reality, sometimes the experience is ordinary.Real films have that element of romance and in a way a filmmaker has arrived in my life if he or she makes a film that doesn't affect me. But of course that's after this person has already burned a door into my heart.Maddin is on my list of the very best filmmakers, and on a much shorter list of the ones that matter and are still working. He's changed the way I dream. Some of the visual humming I do to myself is his tunes. So I consider it a sort of triumph to have a relationship with him where he says something that matters to him, and he says/shows it with the same skill as before... and it doesn't matter to me.Its a sort of transcendent Zen thing to be able to know something so deeply to be able to discard it easily.This is a film put together from his own life. Its a different sort of narrative adventure than we usually get from him. Usually we have an inner substrate, a narrative model made explicit in the movie that is preserved enough for us to see the contrast between it and the way we are seeing it. A virgin's diary, a sad song. Here, the narrative is a life proper. The reason it fails for me is that I already know what I need to about this mind, because he gave us sticky artifacts that are sent out into an ether where souls flit. This time, he cannot do that, the artifacts stick to his embodied life, not mine. For me to accept this, I'd have to have some sort of resonance with him as a human.And I don't. I cannot. Its part of the arrangement when you begin as we have: he's the sender, I'm the lucid receiver. We both cannot be receivers, the way he has structured his art. I think I will advise you to stay away from this if you are serious about Maddin. It will take me some time to recover the ability to accept things from him as selfless, world-connected art.He knows this. There's a bunch of business about humans as wax statues.Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.

claudecat I've seen many of Guy Maddin's films, and liked most of them, but this one literally gave me a headache. John Gurdebeke's editing is way too frenetic, and, apart from a tour-de-force sequence showing a line of heads snapping to look at one object, does nothing but interfere with the actors' ability to communicate with the audience.Another thing I disliked about this film was that it seemed more brutal than Maddin's earlier works--though his films have always had dark elements, his sympathy for the characters gave the movies an overriding feeling of humanity. This one seemed more like harshness for harshness' sake.As I'm required to add more lines of text before IMDb will accept my review, I will mention that the actor playing "Guy Maddin" does manage to ape his facial expressions pretty well.

John Seal Okay, I've tried and I've tried, but I STILL DON'T GET this Guy Maddin thing. Tales From the Gimli Hospital left me cold, that movie about the Austrian villagers and the one about the Ice Nymph were pretty to look but lacking in the story department...and this nudie movie about abortion and hockey is just boring. I'm glad Maddin has an appreciation for silent film, but I dislike his films for the same reason I dislike the films of Quentin Tarantino: they're empty homages to better, more imaginative films--films that advanced the art form or broke new ground--and are all style and no substance. No amount of jump cuts and odd camera angles can disguise the fact that Maddin is an unoriginal David Lynch wannabe, though he DOES have one advantage over Tarantino: he generally doesn't write embarrassing dialogue, because most of his films rely on intertitles. The bottom line is, Maddin's schtick is clever clever film-making for aspiring film majors.

paulduane Well, this is quite probably one of the most uncategorisable films I've seen - you couldn't possibly call it a comedy, with its beauty salons that moonlight as abortion clinics/brothels, and its disturbingly self-lacerating portrait of the director as a cowardly lecher and cold-blooded murderer. But parts of it are hilarious. Go figure. In brief, the plot concerns Guy Maddin, hockey player for the Winnipeg Maroons, who takes his pregnant girlfriend to the above-mentioned clinic for a termination and then leaves her (literally in the middle of the procedure) for the brothel-keeper's beautiful daughter, played with incandescent and slightly scary intensity by Melissa Dionisio (that surely cant be her real name, can it?) only to discover that she can't allow herself to be touched by a man's hands (an uncharacteristically direct quote from Lon Chaney's 'The Unknown') until her father's murder has been avenged. And then she produced the jar in which she keeps, preserved, her father's hands... After that we get a twist on that old chestnut 'The Hands of Orlac', combined with a surprisingly explicit dose of sexual excess and weird psychology, as young Guy ends up in deep trouble of every sort imaginable, through his own inability to control his lusts. Told in ten chapters of six minutes apiece, this was intended as a gallery installation but it works just fine as a movie. As long as you don't mind a regular dose of jawdropping strangeness and a large splash of shocking, unfathomable directorial masochism.