Oakland’s Grand Lake Theatre is a 1926 Art Deco show palace that first hosted vaudeville shows and silent movie screenings accompanied by the bass-note oscillations of a Wurlitzer Hope Jones Unit-Orchestra Pipe Organ. The classic venue is symbolic of its city, which made it the ideal spot for the Bay Area premiere of a the debut feature by another Oakland icon: activist, musician and now writer-director Boots Riley, who came of age as a moviegoer at the venue. “I saw Star Wars here,” he told an audience that packed the house during the recent San Francisco International Film Festival, where the […]

Watching Guy Maddin and Evan Johnson’s latest work Seances feels both familiar and utterly strange. Born from the knowledge that over 80% of silent movies have been lost, Maddin and his collaborators at the NFB wanted to resurrect as many titles — both real and invented — as possible: first in 2012 in production sessions at the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Phi Centre in Montreal that were open to the public, then last year in the feature film The Forbidden Room, and now in an interactive version called Seances that premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival’s Storyscapes event and is […]

It only seemed fitting that Portland-based folk musician Michael Hurley would perform a short set of sad songs before the screening of Guy Maddin’s 2003 experimental melodrama The Saddest Music in the World on Friday, March 25 at the Hollywood Theatre in Portland. Maddin himself was in attendance for the sold-out screening, which was presented as part of the Hollywood’s Mississippi Records Music & Film Series. In introducing the film, Maddin said it was a treat to “show this movie I barely remember making. I think what I recall is the movie is about a sad song contest, so Michael [Hurley], I […]

Growing up, no two things did more to define Canadianness than Tim Horton’s commercials, with their warm and fuzzy scenes of dads bringing hot chocolate to the hockey rink, and Heritage Minutes, vignettes reenacting “proud” moments ranging from Native Americans teaching early settlers how to make maple syrup to the moment Marshall McLuhan came up with the phrase “the medium is the message.” Too often Canadian film seems aimed at riling up the same hollowed-out brand of patriotism. The cause of this is at least partly due to the fact that its funding is frequently tied up in a government-sponsored […]

Pioneering electro-disco band Sparks just wrapped a two-night stint in Los Angeles of an orchestral concert version of their pioneering 1974 album Kimono My House. In an interview with Chris Willman at Billboard, the band (brothers Ron and Russell Mael) teases two upcoming film projects. The first is with Guy Maddin, news of whom seems to regularly filter out into the film blogosphere. The second, however, is with Leos Carax, who usually holds his upcoming project cards closer to the vest. Here’s Russell Mael on both projects: The other thing we’ve been doing is two movie musical movie projects. One […]

Given that Wong Kar-wai’s The Grandmaster and Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel kicked off the Berlinale the last two years, the response was less than enthusiastic when Isabel Coixet’s Nobody Wants the Night was announced as this year’s opening film (though, predictably, many a Twitter wag delighted in the film title’s pliability for expressing what it is that nobody wants). The Greenland-set period drama stars Juliette Binoche as Josephine, the wife of arctic explorer Robert Peary, and follows her attempt to rejoin her husband on his mission to reach the North Pole. When an Inuit woman comes to her aid on […]

Ben Kasulke has literally dozens of credits on his iMDb page, but running throughout his career are collaborations with two directors: Lynn Shelton and, more recently, Guy Maddin. And what’s remarkable is how different those collaborations are. With Shelton, Kasulke affects a seemingly casual, on-the-fly naturalism, never allowing his cinematography to deflect from the actors’ moments. With Maddin, however, Kasulke is working in service to an entirely different aesthetic, one in which a film’s look is part and parcel of its meanings. In Maddin’s work, Kasulke’s lensing takes us far away from the present, back to times when film both […]

The 41st annual Telluride Film Festival kicked off with a packed screening of Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now featuring Coppola, screenwriter John Milius (still recovering from his debilitating stroke but in great spirits), cinematographer Vittorio Storaro, producer Fred Roos, and editor and sound designer Walter Murch in attendance for a post-film Q&A. It was the kind of event that represents what Telluride does best as a kind of summer camp for movie lovers: presenting a great film impeccably projected before an appreciative crowd in a casual, conversational atmosphere. There’s something about the environment of Telluride — both the gorgeous Colorado […]

Are you surprised that this year, some of the most anticipated films at the Toronto International Film Festival actually are by (gulp) Canadian filmmakers? Largely known to many for their solicitousness, their skills in the rink, and their charming way of saying the letter “o,” the Canadians often inspire jealousy in their film-loving neighbors to the south because of the wide-ranging institutional support that they provide for national filmmakers. The National Film Board of Canada, for instance, both produces films and distributes them to the far reaches of the country… and has been doing so for over 7o years, when […]