More Fun to Watch than Maddin Probably Intended | Brand Upon the Brain! - Criterion Collection

Buy this movie | Brand Upon the Brain! - Criterion Collection | Sullivan Brown, Clayton Corzatte

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	• Brand Upon the Brain! - Criterion Collection Sullivan Brown, Clayton Corzatte Criterion Collection, 2008 average customer review:based on 8 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Indelible Impressions

In the "Special Features" section of `Brand Upon the Brain,' Director/co-writer, Guy Maddin explains that his black and white silent film is "97 Percent True". A Freudian "memoir" in "12 Chapters," only the names and location have been changed to protect the innocent--and well, probably the guilty, too.

The erratic black and white scenes tell a tragic tale of incest and transgender situations. Everything takes place on an island with a lighthouse. The indomitably manipulative mother (Gretschen Krisch) sits in her egg-shaped throne as she watches her children like a hawk. She makes butter tarts for Guy (Sullivan Brown/Erik Steffen Maahs [the elder]), the apple of her eye. Guy's father (Todd Jefferson Moor) is an inventor trying to tap into (sorry, pun intended for those who have seen it) the fountain of youth. He's already invented an aerophone, a device meant for mother to relay messages to summon her children and shake their emotional foundations. Sis (Maya Lawson) is a siren girl whom mother guards from any romantic adventures. (In the special features Guy's details are more horrible than the ones presented in the film.)

Orphans are staying in the dormitories, and mother's strictness made me wish I were watching `Annie' instead. John Savage is the leader of the orphans. He's a dead ringer for Jack in `Lord of the Flies' and their lot isn't that much different than the boys in the book. Teenage super sleuth Wendy Hale arrives on the island to spy on the parents and make her case to the authorities. Guy falls smitten for Wendy, but Sis falls in love with Chance, her incognito alter ego, creating a transgender element to the firmament.

"Everything happens twice," the narrator warns at the beginning and the screen reminds us throughout. It is irritating at times, and watching the film, I longed to watch the Spanish film 'Unconscious' again for comic relief or even revisit, `The Science of Sleep,' which I didn't even like. Seattle patron, Greg Lacouche, provided strictures which make elements of the movie mostly cohesive, at others haphazard with time restrictions requiring merely a week and a half to produce the script. Guy's old professor, George Toles, is a reassuring presence, though, and a collaborator who gets first credit for the screenplay.

It's not all silent really. Jason Staczek's score is eerily present with short, choppy string notes that draw upon `Psycho' and classical music in a way that won't draw complaints of copying. The narration, some singing, and sound effects are influenced by Japanese silent films as they transitioned to "talkies". The dialogue still flashes across the screen in vintage 1920's black and white while John Gurdebeke's editing employs a scrolling technique making images fast-forward in a way like "skipping stones over water".

In the end, `Brand Upon the Brain' does to the audience what the movie unfolds in its characters. I found this silent odyssey often unpleasant, but how could I have expected it to be anything else? It's a Freudian textbook take on an authentic story. What's treated as whimsy, often leaves a bitter aftertaste. Some deliberations will appeal more to the moviemakers than the audience, but I couldn't help but notice the images left an indelible impression upon my own brain hours after viewing, so I have to give them credit for a mission accomplished.

A J.P.'s ambivalent Pick 3*'s = Good on balance.

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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.

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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 ...

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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.

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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!

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In the weird and wonderful super-cinematic world of Canadian cult filmmaker Guy Maddin, personal memory collides with movie lore for a radical sensory overload. This eerie excursion into the gothic recesses of Maddin s mad, imaginary childhood is a silent, black-and-white comic science-fiction nightmare set in a lighthouse on grim Notch Island, where fictional protagonist Guy Maddin was raised by an ironfisted, puritanical mother. Originally mounted as a theatrical event (accompanied by live orchestra, foley artists, and assorted narrators), Brand upon the Brain! is an irreverent, delirious trip into the mind of one of current cinema s true eccentrics.

DIRECTOR-APPROVED SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES: New, restored high-definition digital transfer, Optional narration tracks by Isabella Rossellini, Laurie Anderson, John Ashbery, Crispin Glover, Guy Maddin, Louis Negrin, and Eli Wallach,
The Making of Brand upon the Brain!, a new documentary featuring interviews with the director and crew members, Two new short films directed by Maddin: It's My Mother's Birthday Today and Footsteps, Deleted scene, Trailer. PLUS: A new essay by film critic Dennis Lim

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