Brand Upon the Brain! - Criterion Collection (2006)

Why is this an overpriced Criterion release?

I'm a longtime fan of Guy Maddin - I own every one of his feature films on DVD from "Gimli Hospital" up to "Brand Upon the Brain". I anxiously await the video release of "My Winnipeg" since there is no arthouse theater around here where I could have seen it. I have long felt that Maddin's movies deserve to be honored with the prestigious, pretentious, pricey Criterion label ...

But not this one.

I hate to say it, but Guy is slipping. He's starting to repeat himself, and the spastic editing style does not help to conceal that fact. It actually makes the movie LESS watchable. I appreciate the effort that went into chopping up the movie so it looks like a deranged chimpanzee had a seizure whilst gripping the jog-wheel of a DVC deck .. but after about 15 minutes the edit pace stops meaning anything, and the flickering images blur into a sleepy incoherence. We've fallen a long way from "Saddest Music in the World," in which the pace of the editing varied to match and magnify the emotional intensity of the scene. Here it is ridiculously fast & choppy throughout, and it just seems to be style for style's sake, nothing more. I was disappointed.

Of all Guy Maddin's films, this one least deserves to be released on Criterion. It is worth seeing, but not at this price. November 13, 2008

More Fun to Watch than Maddin Probably Intended

Judging by effort alone, this is a five star movie. Alas, only the final product is rated. Guy Maddin deserves props for creativity and refusing to make a typical movie. The craft is decidely personal but the story is merely a compendium of previous, better stories.
Brand upon the Brain is presented as biographical in tone. If so, Maddin had a childhood that was some bizarre combination of City of Lost Children, Lord of the Flies, Flowers in the Attic, and a Victorian orphanage that would make Charles Dickens gasp with horror. Are Maddin's parents still alive? Have they seen this? I wonder what they thought.
The characters in the movie aren't characters; they're grotesques. Maddin's homage to silent movies borrows heavily from German espressionism, especially Metropolis and from D.W. Griffin. Mom runs the orphanage and acts like Lillian Gish on heroin. The southern gothic madwoman in the attic if there ever was one. Dad is a mad scientist in the basement complete with Frankenstein bubbling cauldrons and white smock and bizarre experiments he conducts on the orphans & his own children. If nothing else, the movie is fun to watch as an unintentional black comedy. Watch it with some friends Halloween night. Turn out the lights and light some candles. Hopefully, it'll rain very hard. Gotta have that atmosphere.
Maddin, whether he's kidding or not, has some pretty serious sexual/body identity issues and the moviemaking seems to have functioned as an act of therapy for him. No stone is left unturned in the kinky sex department. Homosexuality is the bare minimum in a movie like this. Here we have incest, pedophilia, role reversal, sexual misidentification, necrophilia, electrical play, urine fetish, foot-boot fetish, and so on. Yadda, yadda, yadda. Watch it with someone you love and play "spot that kink!" There is plenty of nudity but the naked body is presented in such a way as to make it look creepy, vile and unclean. Mom is, of course, a Victorian superpuritan who obsesses over hair.
From the melodramatic and intrusive voiceover to the melodramatic violin soundtrack to the R.E.M. camerawork, Maddin shoots himself in the foot by overplaying his hand. There's really too much here. Less is more, Guy. October 5, 2008

Guy Maddin's masterpiece.

This review is for the Criterion Collection DVD edition of the film.

Brand Upon the Brain! is what I would consider an experimental film direcred by Guy Maddin. The film has no dialogue but only a voice over. The DVD has the voice overs by multiple people each narrating the whole film. It also includes a soundtrack by foley artists.

The plot is about a man who lives with has family and a group of orphans on the grounds of a lighthouse. Other than that it can be confusing to follow

The DVD has some special features which are also nice. It has two new short films by Guy Maddin "It's My Mother's Birthday Today" and "Footsteps" both exclusively on this DVD release. Also is a documentary "97 Percent True" about the film's production, a deleted scene, and voice over narrations by Isabella Rossellini, Laurie Anderson, John Ashbery, Guy Maddin, Louis Negin, Crispin Glover, and Eli Wallach.

This is an unsusal film but worth checking out. October 5, 2008

Buy this movie

You won't be sorry. This is easily the most original film of 2007 and the disc is loaded with extras. You'll be screaming "Romania! Romania!" for weeks after you see this movie.

From some unknown corner of heaven, F W Murnau is looking down at this movie and smiling ... September 18, 2008

Guy Maddin's universe

Brand Upon the Brain at first looks like a film from the silent era, black and white with scratches and so on. But in this case it is intended, and unlike the most silent films this explodes with images in a high tempo and in an almost dreamlike way. The result, I think, is very watchable and very well made. The basic story is a mix of childhood memories and horror story: tha adult Maddin returns to the island where he grew up and remembers macabre things involving orphans whose brains are used to make longevity nectar, and this is controlled by the dictator mother and mad scientist father... It is of course possible to read in a lot of interpretations from psychoanalysis or whatever. But I don't even try - the film is entirely watchable without this, and presents to us a slice of Guy Maddins personal universe. Even if you don't like this universe, the film is still worth watching because of it's unique style.
The DVD contains different narrator tracks, a documentary and two short films by Maddin. Highly recommended! September 7, 2008

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