Last "Chance" for Guy Maddin's Brand Upon the Brain
Tonight will be the final live performance version of Guy Maddin's Brand Upon the Brain at the Cinerama, this time with Maddin in person as narrator, (instead of Karen Black, who we saw Wednesday night), backed up by the live orchestra and the "the Aono Jikken Ensemble" sound engineers providing weird, old timey Maddinesque style sound effects. After tonight, the film will be shown at the NWFF with a recorded soundtrack. This is part of the Local Sightings thing we mentioned earlier.
Two of Seattlest's harshest critics saw this last night and wholeheartedly recommend seeing the live version, because there's a lot of distracting fun in going back and forth between the movie and the live performers. In one scene when a dead body with rigor mortis is getting its arms and legs straightened out, one of the sound guys on the stage twists and breaks celery under a microphone. In another scene, where a woman is sucking the blood out of a kid who doesn't look like he's quite dead yet, another one of the sound engineers can be seen slurping what looked like a 7-11 Slurpee (seen from a great distance). The sound people wear white lab coats and when they're not providing sound effects they're swaying in time with the music.
The movie is allegedly shot in Seattle but we had a hard time trying to pinpoint the location shots. Say Anything this ain't. Although the scenes with the winding staircase in the lighthouse looked a lot like the inside of the Volunteer Park water tower, but who knows? There's probably a website somewhere that itemizes all the location shots, but we don't know how to work the google on the internet machine.
The film itself is great. All of Maddin's usual themes of heartbreak, family conflicts and mixed up Freudian goofiness shot in his Old Timey-scope(TM), with some funny gender bending hijinks and mad scientist conspiracy action. Tons of fun. Five stars.
(The "Chance" bit in the headline above is a reference to the name of one of the main characters, hence the quotes signifying hilarity.)
