I heard an interview with Guy Maddin once. He said he plunged into depression after reading comments about his movies on the internet. The people who liked him depressed him as much as those who hated him. He referred to people of my ilk as "basement boys".
It doesn't matter. He won't do that again. His life isn't perfect enough? Let him walk a mile in my moccasins.
Maddin tends to film on elaborate indoor sets, presumably because he's in Winnipeg, one of the coldest cities on Earth. Archangel resembled an early Soviet sound film, although it was pro-Czar, about a Canadian soldier in Russia during World War One fighting both Germans and Bolsheviks. There were scenes where there was no sound but scattered lines of dialog. No actual jokes, but very funny at times.
A cowardly, mortally wounded father turns into a veritable Siberian tiger when Bolshoviks attack his family. People die in combat and their ghosts rise from their bodies.
There was an old western Ed Wood directed. He didn't have a coffin for a funeral scene, so he used a cardboard box which looked ridiculous. In this movie, they had small urns containing cremated remains which seemed weirdly plausible.
Lost love, amnesia, child discipline, burial at sea, prosthetic limbs. Huns, Communists, Czarists. Bizarre folk remedies.
78 minutes, available on the Criterion Channel.
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