NYFF: The Forbidden Room

How can you knock the chance to watch Udo Kier have multiple brain surgeries for his derriere dependence? Or the shot to experience the languid afterlife of a few stray mustache hairs? And what about the opportunity to contemplate the oxygen levels of flapjacks? You really can't, and Guy Maddin's latest ode to the ticklish underbelly of film archival offers all of that and more, so very very much much more. The Forbidden Room presents itself as a series of nested-doll silent films, fanning in and out of each other at rhythm's whim, and structurally it's audacious stuff with a trance-like atmosphere. You hear the drums, drums against the air, you feel the drums, you feel the air. There simply is nothing else like this, no other movie experience that will roll you around under and inside of this exact dream.

Perhaps the closest thing I've experienced, the most similar singular sensation, (besides other bits of Maddin's own work, of course) was portions of David Lynch's Inland Empire, but Maddin is Lynch's looser trickster double - Guy will always reach for the fart joke if handy. The Forbidden Room is ultimately too much of a too-much-thing, but also like Inland Empire its mind-numbing length and, uh, girth, is intentional - how better to sand off the edges of your audience's eye-line and sink them truly and completely under your spell? The outside world, like centenarian film-stock, dissolves in acid-hued pools right around you. Outside world? What outside world? We are all film down here. And by the time you stumble out of The Forbidden Room you're probably gonna be seeing inter-titles when you try to speak.

The Forbidden Room -- Teaser 02 from Guy Maddin on Vimeo.

The Forbidden Room opens in extremely limited release in one week

Secret in Their Link

DListed - Ralph Fiennes breaks out the dance moves at the Venice premiere of A Bigger Splash
NYT Aretha Franklin suing to block festival showings of Amazing Grace, a recently finished documentary about the making of her album filmed in 1972.
Variety looks at the swift progress of new distributor Broad Green Pictures which surprised everyone with its acquisition of and good numbers for A Walk in the Woods. They also have Learning to Drive in theaters
The Globe and Mail an evening with Udo Kier (!)

 

AV Club in his continuing bid to not ever be remotely as cool / likeable as he once was Johnny Depp is joking about eating his dogs
WSJ Magazine "A day in the life of Danny Strong" a profile of the diminutive Emmy-winning ever busy actor/screenwriter of Buffy and Girls fame behind the scenes of Empire's second season
Yahoo Judy Carne (Laugh-In) dies at 76
MNPP Who Wore it Best: Luke Evans speedo edition 
Playbill Magic Mike ....the Musical may start its stage run in Las Vegas rather than on Broadway
Boy Culture Jean Darling of Our Gang silent serials has died at 93 
Comic Alliance on the "very serious" "no-jokes" "grimace" of Batman Vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice. Good conclusion
Variety Will Smith has replaced Hugh Jackman in Collateral Beauty and Rooney Mara has exited the project, too
The Broadway Blog looks back at The Pajama Gang which got a movie version in 1957
MNPP Jake Gyllenhaal gifs from Demolition. Sweet medicine. I'm seeing this Thursday night. woooo 

Oscar Season Cometh
Awards Daily on emergent Telluride Oscar contenders from Black Mass and a lot of praise for Spotlight
The Hollywood Reporter from Telluride: a lukewarm reaction to Carol (?), Black Mass's hilarious and haunting moments, great performances in Room, and not loving Suffragette

Image of the Day
How perfect is this photograph of Chiwetel Ejiofor from Interview by Sølve Sundsbø? Director Cary Fukunaga interviews him so it's double-handsomness).

FUKUNAGA: You have how many movies coming out this year?

EJIOFOR: Well, there's Secret and The Martian, and, next year, Triple 9. And then I'll be shooting the Doctor Strange movie.

FUKUNAGA: It's exciting. And I've done one thing that whole time. [Ejiofor laughs]

A brief history of faux-Frankensteins

Tim here. All this talk of the great-looking movies we can’t wait to see, and the Sundance crop of interesting (or semi-interesting, or bad) indie films is pulling focus from the reality of filmgoing as most of us live it. Which is that it’s January, and unless you’re still cleaning off the last end-of-year films as they trickle out into medium-wide release, the options for seeing a movie in theaters right now are dire.

Case in point, tomorrow finds the release of I, Frankenstein, which, if I’m being honest, is very much I movie I’ve been looking forward to as much as anything on my official We Can’t Wait ballot, though for entirely different reasons: the combination of Frankenstein, demons, and chiseled abs promises bad movie awesomeness of a sort that I don’t expect to be replicated anytime soon.

It’s not the first nominal Frankenstein adaptation to go so far afield from the source material, either; not even the first outrageously bad one. There is a grand tradition of Frankenstein-derived films so utterly bizarre and off-the-wall and divorced from Shelley that they make I, Frankenstein look dull, sedate, and conventional. After the jump, let's take a quick look at some of the strangest.

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Tuesday Top Ten: MADONNA Day!

Madonna then'ish and now'ish.

Has anyone hogged more mental, academic, celebrity, music, sexual and pop culture real estate combined than Madonna over the last 25+ years? I think not. We salute the Queen today on her birthday. August 16th ought to be an international holiday. Make it happen, citizens of earth.

So herewith two top ten lists and one of them is catered specifically to The Film Experience so as to make this post more at home! Madonna has had a problematic journey with film, aside from three indisputable highlights: time capsule 80s comedy Desperately Seeking Susan (1985), the wondrous super quotable documentary Truth or Dare (1991) and her Golden Globe win as Evita (1996). Will she be able to add a fourth success to that list when her Oscar-seeking directorial effort W.E. (2011) comes out? [All previous posts on W.E.]

Two+ Lists If You Continue...

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Peeking through the "Keyhole"

Andreas from Pussy Goes Grrr here, with some good news for cinephiles! Guy Maddin, the Wizard of Winnipeg, will be premiering his new movie Keyhole at TIFF. It's been four years since My Winnipeg, and for one of the greatest living directors, that's clearly four years too many. Here's the official synopsis for Keyhole via The Playlist:

A gangster and deadbeat father, Ulysses Pick (Jason Patric), returns home after a long absence. He is toting two teenagers: a drowned girl, Denny, who has mysteriously returned to life; and a bound-and-gagged hostage, who is actually his own teenage son, Manners. Confused Ulysses doesn’t recognize his own son, but he feels with increasing conviction he must make an indoor odyssey from the back door of his home all the way up, one room at a time, to the marriage bedroom where his wife Hyacinth (Isabella Rossellini) awaits.

All of Maddin's usual tropes are here: amnesia, psychosexual tension, overwrought family melodrama, and voyeurism (it's right there in the title). This time around, it looks like he's mixing in some noirish atmosphere and hints of the supernatural. Furthermore, he's stacked the deck by casting his favorite actress Isabella Rossellini along with Lars von Trier's lucky charm, Udo Kier. All in all, this sounds like about the most characteristically Maddin-esque movie that Guy Maddin's ever made.

Does that mean he's repeating himself, though? I doubt it. Over the past two decades, Maddin's proven himself extraordinarily inventive and versatile, jump freely between war dramas, musicals, and autobiographical "docu-fantasias." According to Rossellini, Keyhole is "crazier than a Turin horse." I can't wait to see it so I can figure out what the hell that means.

Udo Kier and X-Ray via Guy Maddin

Are you a fan of Canada's weirdest son? Which of his snowy dreamscapes have you visited?

Related Articles:

• For a good Maddin primer, turn to Robert's "Modern Maestros" over at the old Film Experience site.
• If you're interested in Canadian cinema, Twitch has a detailed list of all the homegrown offerings that will be playing at TIFFL