Dracula; Matrix #78

Guy Maddin has to be one of the most original and just plain strange directors around. I find his work hilarious, surreal and compelling to watch. He's been called the David Lynch of Canada but I think that does Maddin a disservice. Eraserhead has similarities to Maddin's work but that's where the comparison ends. We watched Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary, which is an adaptation of the Royal Winnipeg Ballet's stage production, and I think it's perhaps the best Dracula I've seen to date (not counting Bela Lugosi's, a class by itself). And speaking of Maddin, the newest issue of Matrix is back from the printers, featuring an excerpt from his "autobiographical" film, Brand Upon the Brain!. It's the Narrative "I" issue, film and autobiography all mixed together by yours truly, plus it includes a DVD of short vids and animations by such artists as Elisabeth Belliveau, Victoria Stanton, Yvette Poorter... Tell me what you think of it!

Fun; Zodiac

A pair of movies about killers, neither of them great, but Fun (1994) was downright awful. Neither Joe nor I remember (or would admit to) putting this film on the list, and so we're both baffled at why either of us would have done such a thing. I started with extremely low expectations, and so, I was actually pleasantly surprised, at first. It's nicely shot, in what looks like 16 mm black and white for the scenes set in the present, colour for the past. The first third of the film roped me in with what started as some fairly interesting characters, two teenaged girls who murder an old woman. The dialogue was stagey, as often are films adapted from stageplays (of which this is one), but sometimes it didn't matter. A couple of monologues felt like it was trying to ape David Mamet's Sexual Perversity in Chicago (which became About Last Night, a 1980s film starring Demi Moore). But Fun never breaks out of its theatricality, which becomes a burden that eventually sinks the whole film. The acting became stale and overdramatic without any insight, so I stopped believing, and after that, it was just a chore to sit through, especially when the horrible techno music came on and wouldn't stop. It became a fast-forward.

Zodiac, on the other hand, was a film that Joe had been looking forward eagerly, Fight Club and Seven being among his favourites. But Fincher, he said, you let me down! We weren't as enthralled by his newest work as we wanted to be, though that is a tall order. A detective film about the Zodiac killer who was never caught, it wasn't great, but it was, on the whole, quite watchable - except for the few scenes of murder and killing during which I simply left the room, not willing to endure explicit violence these days. Being a mother has made me super-sensitive, which I personally think is a good thing. I don't know why I don't mind Seven so much, maybe because the actual killings don't take place before your eyes, and the bodies are treated as incredible pieces of set decoration.