Better Late Then Never

I have absolutely never seen anything like this movie before. You have to see this movie.

This is a must-see and one of the best documentaries - and films - of this year.

Amazing worth wacthing. So good. Biased but well made with many good points.

Here's the problem: Maddin is an impressive filmmaker. He is important and has made at least two films that are important to me. But he is not a very interesting person. So when he applies his mastery to making a personal film - a film essentially about his dreams and demons, it turns into something of a tragedy for the opportunity misspent. This really is a wonderful film in the way it is put together. The whole team seems be closely attuned, with a central role played by the editor. The sound effects are astonishing - and this is a silent film. The references, duly abstracted, from past masterworks are copious and respectful. The narrative structure is suitably complex with manifold overlapping metaphors. The problem is that what we actually get directly from him is boring. Sex and mothers matter; dreams are real; nothing recedes. But we knew that better and more deeply than he shows. Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.

I have to admit, as much as I've loved Guy Maddin's work that I've seen up to now, I don't think I've ever seen anything quite so enjoyable from him as this. His work can always be considered, in a sense, Freudian (but beyond the obvious it shows he has a sense of humor about it), but here he mixes in some Jung and Pavlov and creates a mish-mash of androgyny and feverish displacement along with his usual cornucopia of matriphobia, isolation, and anxiety. It also has such immortal lines as "What is a suicide attempt without a wedding?" and "To hide his death from his mother, he replaced the father's body with a hamster and a metronome." Guy Maddin is certainly an idiosyncratic director, there's no arguing that. What I like is that he is much more than a one-trick pony. There are moments of hysteria in here you cannot help but get sucked into, and somehow even the most outrageous of content makes perfect sense in the worlds and realities he creates. At times you want to draw comparisons between this film and Psycho, Frankenstein, etc., but in the end it's only its own thing, and even as a Maddin film isn't QUITE like his other movies. The voice over is a lot of fun, especially later in the movie when it's used more sparsely, and above all the musical aside just hits the nail on the head--one of those uncanny moments when you didn't even realize the movie was missing something until it happened, and suddenly everything just seems right in the world.Definitely a movie, if any, to get into this director if you haven't, and if you have you'll certainly not be disappointed.--PolarisDiB

This is an undeniably powerful film, for all its unorthodoxy; but the only word I could really find to describe it, again and again, was "bizarre". Bizarre to such a degree that, in the demented world shown here, even the most impossible and incredible occurrences can be accepted and taken for granted as part of the plot -- after the first five minutes or so, with the atmosphere of mad-scientist exploitation schlock firmly established, the audience were apparently taking the film on its own terms, over-the-top intertitles, tendentious voice-over, feverish cutting and all. The laughs that followed were not for the fraught nature of the story-telling, but in response to the deliberately scripted jokes inserted in the scenario: the hamster simulating a scientist, the butter stuck on the wall, the corpse in a harp.The picture is shot, intentionally, at extremely low quality, more akin to closed-circuit TV than Super-8 home movies, let alone the silver/midnight shimmer of the silent screen. (This indistinct resolution is perhaps just as well, since the imagery includes some material rather more explicit than I'm comfortable with.) The acting, on the other hand, is fully up to the standard of the silent era; a contemptuous turn of the head, a self-pitying look, the dawning of a sudden idea, all explicit without a word... and the director clearly understands how to tell a story without resorting to pantomime or wordy scripts. The intertitles are consciously overwrought and populated by an insane density of exclamation marks, but never unnecessary or over-long.In fact, I felt that the picture would very probably have been better if shot entirely as a silent with synchronised effects; especially at the beginning, the voice-over becomes actively intrusive, breaking into the flow and repeating or pre-empting what is being equally and much more elegantly expressed by the use of imagery, background sound and a few economically-written title cards. The impression given is that the director was afraid of losing his audience if he started off with a purely silent-style presentation, and added a superfluous narrating track on top -- unfortunately, the voice-over is not quite redundant and cannot be omitted, since it conveys certain important pieces of information that are not otherwise apparent. The combination is awkward.This jarring effect, however, may of course be intentional. Another recurrent 'tic' is the way that many intertitle screens are displayed twice, in a sort of visual stammer: once in an almost subliminal flash and then a second time, long enough for slow readers to take them in. I assume this is some kind of reference to the frequently reiterated theme that all things happen twice, or can be made to repeat themselves... or else is simply deployed for its disorienting effect! The visual style of the film, with its distressed footage, weird camera angles, and spasmodic cuts back to significant motifs, reminded me of experimental film I'd seen from the 1960s. The difference is that this picture engages the audience, creates meaningful characters and actually tells a coherent story with emotional content, wild and lurid or not. For all its parody and sheer weirdness it manages to succeed on a cinematic level rather than as an abstract avant-garde statement. And it manages to get us to swallow some quite incredible scenarios with a straight face. The director clearly has a gift for world-building and a feel for visual narrative: this isn't really my type of film, but if it were not a contradiction in terms I'd love to see him take on a subject in a more 'straight' silent style, with less visual damage (though I suspect this may be an aid to disguising an ultra-low budget), less heavy-breathing potential, and above all less frenetic pop-video cutting. As another reviewer has commented, Maddin can compose beautiful shots... it's just that we never get to see any of them for longer than a few seconds.But I assume that such an ambition is unrealistic, as I imagine that it is his trademark presentation that gets the audience to swallow silent film at all these days."Brand Upon the Brain!" is a considerable achievement, and has already made sufficient stir in the United States for me to have picked it out by title from a strand of London Film Festival programming I wouldn't normally dream of attending (and, looking round at familiar faces in the auditorium, I may not have been the only one!) It isn't entirely to my taste, which is why I've knocked a point off the rating I would otherwise have given it, but as an experience it was otherwise definitely worth the entrance price.

I didn't know this was a silent movie with narration. I don't care for silent movies - the corny humor, flickering lighting and film, etc. I'm sure that attributes to the low score I assigned it. It was about chapter 8 before I found any interest in this story and had I had popcorn I may have thrown it at the screen. Maybe this appeals to the sci-fi crowd? The only thing missing was a zombie scene and a brain transplant. I went with two other people on a Friday night and there were a total of 6 people in the entire theater. Isabella Rosselinni narrated this movie - the one enjoyable aspect of the movie. No one left commenting how much they enjoyed this nor appreciated the unusual approach to telling this story. I cannot recommend this movie.