Eastwood and Jolie are in top form

It’s always a thrill when Clint Eastwood directs a new movie.  As intriguing as he was when playing Dirty Harry and The Man with No Name, Eastwood is even more fascinating as a director of films than as their star.

The former action star is a master at building thoughtful, character-driven stories, which is one of the reasons he has two Oscar statuettes on his mantel today.  Eastwood’s latest project, Changeling, isn’t quite in the same league as Unforgiven or Million Dollar Baby, but it is an absorbing period mystery that offers Angelina Jolie another shot at Oscar gold.

I Served the King of England mirrors old and new

This week’s offering in the Arts and Education Council’s Independent Film Series is a new Czech film by famed director Jirí Menzel, I Served the King of England. Known best for his masterful 1966 adaptation of Bohumil Hrabal’s novel Closely Watched Trains (available on DVD from The Criterion Collection), Menzel again refers to the Czech author’s work as inspiration for this historically panoramic fable.

I Served the King of England is the story of Jan Díte, a Czech native whom we meet as he’s being released from the Prague Correctional Facility.  After 15 years of imprisonment, Díte is on parole to go work in the mountains.  Thus, the film is told in flashback; think Forest Gump, but in Czech.  Through his narration, we quickly learn that Díte has had one dream all his life: to be a famous millionaire. 

A New Heritage of Horror:  The English Gothic Cinema updates a classic

In 1973, a young British film fan named David Pirie published a remarkable book, A Heritage of Horror, in which he made the then-startling claim that the Gothic horror film was “the only staple cinematic myth which Britain can properly claim as its own,” analogous to the American Western.  Certainly no previous writer had taken horror films, particularly the output of England’s legendary Hammer Films, so seriously.  Pirie’s book was a major success of its type, influencing critics and filmmakers (among them Martin Scorsese) to re-examine the work of such previously dismissed directors as Terence Fisher and Freddie Francis with greater attention and respect. 
Originally printed in modest numbers, A Heritage of Horror quickly sold out; for years the book was nearly impossible to find, and used-book dealers demanded small fortunes before they would reluctantly part with their copies.  Pirie’s career took off, and as he moved into screenwriting (he collaborated on Lars Von Trier’s controversial Breaking the Waves), any hope of updating his influential tome seemed dim indeed.

Canadian director Guy Maddin takes on his hometown in My Winnipeg

That kooky Canadian, Guy Maddin (The Saddest Music in the World), is back with another moc-doc-fantasy-surreal thing, this time supposedly about his boyhood home and current residence, Winnipeg.

Unless you are a fan of avant-garde films, you may never have heard of Maddin, but he’s been making movies since the ’80s, and has a large following among independent film folks.

He’s often called “the Canadian David Lynch,” and many bios of him cite as a seminal childhood moment “a piggy-back ride from Bing Crosby,” but, as with the scenarios of his films, distinguishing fact from fiction is part of the journey.

Opening this Friday at the Bijou as part of the Arts & Education Council’s Independent Film Series, My Winnipeg is in Maddin’s signature black-and-white, with the silent-filmesque inter-titles and “We were big!” style of acting.

Supposedly drawn from episodes in his boyhood, the film’s mood is set by Maddin’s voiceover at the beginning, as he dramatically insists, “I must leave,” but of course, never does. The “Maddin” character is played by an actor, and though we are told the character of his mother is actually played by his mother, that’s also untrue.

Maddin intersperses actual facts and history about Winnipeg with information that he simply makes up—for example, Winnipeg does not have ten times the sleepwalking rate of any other city in the world.

The director also invents a ’60s TV show called Ledge Man, in which the title character threatens to hurl himself from a different high-rise each week.
In other words, if you like immersing yourself in someone’s off-kilter, ironic and frequently hilarious imagination, your destination this weekend should be My Winnipeg.