I posted something about this long ago---I had listened to an interview with Guy Maddin. He said at one point that he had read a bunch of comments on his work on IMDb and found it depressing. The reviews people posted were lousily written with bad use of the first person pronoun. Some people were annoyed by him, but the people who liked him apparently hurt his feelings, too.
I heard that and posted about it here and quoted him. I don't know how long ago that was. But for some reason it wasn't until a couple days ago that I bothered to read the comments he was talking about.
They were very long. Some of it was a little embarrassing. They should have been shorter, just hinted at an intellectual analysis. And, as Guy Maddin said, they should have laid off the first person pronoun.
Although. What are you supposed to do? Refer to yourself in the third person?
It makes me rethink some of the stuff I've written here. For example, my bitter attacks on the Utah-made family westerns Seven Alone and Against a Crooked Sky. I had seen Seven Alone when my entire school walked downtown to see it. I was surprised that you could show Indians being killed in a G-rated movie. I like violent movies, but I was generally on the Indians' side, especially against these terrible people. The father in the movie was in a constant rage. I didn't know why the children were upset when he finally had the good taste to drop dead. Everything seemed much more pleasant after that.
I thought Against a Crooked Sky was a sex movie. Why was the farm boy so attached to his suckling calf? Why was he spying on his naked sister? The movie made sure we knew the actress was really naked. She does that hand bra thing, holding a hand over each breast, then we see one buttock as she climbs out of the water. I would have assumed she was wearing a strapless one piece swimsuit if they hadn't done all that. She's kidnapped by Indians. The young fellow sets out to find her and is helped by Richard Boone who keeps talking about his Oedipal conflict with his son. "He took after his Ma," he said, which has more than one meaning. Boone says he murdered his son and they killed even more Indians in this movie and it still got a G rating.
People really liked Seven Alone. I almost never get comments, but they posted on here, enthused over it and didn't understand why I was slamming it. Maybe I was wrong.
Here's a filmmaking tip from Stewart Petersen, the Jean-Pierre Leaud of Utah regional cinema: If you film someone running barefoot in a field, put duct tape on the soles of their feet.
Any psycho-sexual elements in Guy Maddin's movies seem contrived. He knows what he's doing. With a movie like Against a Crooked Sky, the auteurs had no idea what perversity was gushing from their subconscious minds.
Against a Crooked Sky would have been pretty good if it had been silent, filmed in high contrast black and white, shot with several Super 8 cameras running at the same time and if the mother had been the villain.
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