[ThisWeek] The Saddest Music in the World; Trio of Four; David Nevin at the Kenworthy

[thisweek at kenworthy.org]

This week at the Kenworthy-


The Saddest Music in the World (NR)


Thursday, October 21
7:00 PM
Friday, October 22
7:00 & 9:30 PM
Sunday, October 24
4:30 & 7:00 PM
Tickets $5/adults, $2/children 12 and under
KFS passes accepted for Sunday shows
See Review below
* * *

EEMCD presents


Wally Gator Watson and a Trio of Four


Saturday, October 23
7:30 PM
Tickets $30 at Rosauers & Keeney Bros.
http://www.eemcd.org/


ACLU of Idaho presents
"Lessons Learned from the Trial of Sami Omar Al-Hussayen"
a talk with David Nevin
Monday, October 25 at 6:30 PM
FREE
* * *

Also in October-

Rocky Horror Picture Show Experience (R)
Oct 29 & 30, 9:30 PM & Midnight
Tickets $10 at Eclectica and BookPeople
http://www.kenworthy.org/

Frankenstein (1931)
Oct 31
5:00 PM
FREE
Doors open at 4:00 PM for pre-movie treats
Wear a costume and get free popcorn
* * *
Coming in November:
Libby, MT; Intimate Strangers; The Corporation; Spiderman 2

Regular Movie prices:  $5 adults, $2 children 12 and younger.  
KFS passes accepted for Sunday movies
* * *
This week's review-


The Saddest Music in the World


Directed by Guy Maddin. Written by Maddin and George Toles
Running time: 1 hour, 39 minutes
No MPAA rating: some adult themes, but no nudity or foul language

As reviewed by Sean Axmaker writing for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Natty, glib, big-city heel Chester Kent (Mark McKinney of "Kids in the
Hall") licks the wounds from his Broadway failure by returning home to
Winnipeg. It's 1933 and McKinney bites off his lines as if he just wandered
in from an old Warner Bros. comedy, while Winnipeg looks less like a city
than a cross between a chintzy roadside theme park and a Yukon gold camp. 

That's just one of the affectations of Canadian iconoclast Guy Maddin's
latest film, which combines silent-movie imagery, snappy '30s urbanity and
old Hollywood stage musicals with his usual surreal stories of misery and
madness.

Chester brainstorms a get-rich-quick plan while wandering the snowbound,
mud-soaked streets with his nymphomaniac girlfriend, Narcissa (Maria de
Medeiros), an amnesiac with a talking tapeworm. Local brewery magnate Lady
Port-Huntly (Isabella Rossellini) gives Chester his chance when she sponsors
a song contest with game-show flair: The winners slide into a vat of beer.

The absurdly dense melodrama puts Chester in competition with two relatives:
His father, for both the song contest and Lady Port-Huntly's affections
(they were both once her lovers, until they inadvertently made her a double
amputee), and his brother Roderick, now posing as a Serbian cello master
under a fake mustache and a shroud of black mourning clothes. 

Striking color musical sequences and a soundtrack packed with incidental
background detail add to Maddin's trademark anachronistic style of murky
black-and-white images and artificially aged film. 

As Reviewed by Roger Ebert writing for the Chicago Sun-Times

So many movies travel the same weary roads. So few imagine entirely original
worlds. Guy Maddin's "The Saddest Music in the World" exists in a time and
place we have never seen before, although it claims to be set in Winnipeg in
1933. The city, we learn, has been chosen by the London Times, for the
fourth year in a row, as "the world capital of sorrow." Here Lady
Port-Huntly (Isabella Rossellini) has summoned entries for a contest which
will award $25,000 "in Depression Era dollars" to the performer of the
saddest music.

This plot suggests no doubt some kind of camp musical, a sub-Monty Python
comedy. What Maddin makes of it is a comedy, yes, but also an eerie fantasy
that suggests a silent film like "Metropolis" crossed with a musical
starring Nelson Eddy and Jeannette McDonald, and then left to marinate for
long forgotten years in an enchanted vault. The Canadian filmmaker has
devised a style that evokes old films from an alternate timeline; "The
Saddest Music" is not silent and not entirely in black and white, but it
looks like a long-lost classic from decades ago, grainy and sometimes faded;
he shoots on 8mm film and video and blows it up to look like a memory from
cinema's distant past.

The effect is strange and delightful; somehow the style lends
quasi-credibility to a story that is entirely preposterous. Because we have
to focus a little more intently, we're drawn into the film, surrounded by
it. There is the sensation of a new world being created around us. The
screenplay, by Maddin and George Toles, is based on a work by the novelist
Kazuo Ishiguro, who wrote the very different Remains of the Day. Here he
creates, for Maddin's visual style, a fable that's "Canadian Idol" crossed
with troubled dreams.

You have never seen a film like this before, unless you have seen other
films by Guy Maddin, such as "Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary" (2002),
or "Archangel" (1990). 

To see this film, to enter the world of Guy Maddin, is to understand how a
film can be created entirely by its style, and how its style can create a
world that never existed before, and lure us, at first bemused and then
astonished, into it.

As Reviewed by Marjorie Baumgarten writing for the Austin Chronicle

Canadian director Guy Maddin is one of the most unusual and distinctive
filmmakers in the world. His movies defy comparison and resist ordinary
explanation. He is at once an avant-gardist and an antiquarian, if such a
combination is indeed possible. With The Saddest Music in the World, Maddin
has now delivered his most accomplished and accessible film, yet I can
guarantee it looks and sounds like nothing you've ever seen before (except,
perhaps, another Guy Maddin film). 

Although the movie is a semimusical set in Maddin's home town of Winnipeg
during the Depression, Maddin doesn't re-create the appearance of a
Depression-era musical so much as he uses several of the techniques and
visual touchstones of the era to invent a universe that is his alone. 

Maddin's world is expressionistic, and he employs anachronistic techniques
(i.e., gauzy black-and-white imagery that is occasionally pumped up with
shocks of color tinting). Saddest Music has none of the ice nymphs and other
weird creatures that have populated Maddin's previous films. In fact, this
time he has attracted a couple of international stars, Isabella Rossellini
and Maria de Medeiros, to his Winnipeg haunts. Their inclusion doesn't make
this film any less weird than usual, but Maddin's expressionistic style is
grounded with greater realism and familiarity (even if that familiarity
sometimes derives from our overall knowledge of the Thirties). 

Film reviews researched and edited by Peter Haggart
* * *
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~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
PAMELA PALMER, Volunteer
Mailto:ppalmer at moscow.com
Film and Events Committee            
Kenworthy Performing Arts Centre

http://www.kenworthy.org
To speak with a KPAC staff member, 
call (208) 882-4127
Mailto:kpac at moscow.com
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~  

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