The Saddest Music in the World

Mcmillan is magnificent and Maddin is the master of melodrama. "Roderick! You're a Canadian, born and raised!" "Until I walked down the streets of Belgrade for the first time I never felt at home... anywhere"

Reminds me of Lars Von Trier's Europa, but filtered through a pastiche of different genres (musical, comedy, et al). Its visual style is indebted to silent film: grainy black-and-white (with occasional bursts of color) cinematography, with expressionist influences. The story is bizarre (and, to a point, very gimmicky), but on the whole it's a very entertaining and consistently compelling narrative, involving love, betrayal, jealousy. Utterly unique and original.

The story's kind of silly and dumb but holy shit is it a visual masterpiece. This is my first foray into Maddin's work and I'm willing to forgive any story failures for how good this looks.

The glass legs filled with beer was kind of funny. How does he dream this stuff up?! Good casting of McKinney and Rossellini. They know how to work the material. Hitting the tone isn't enough for me, however. Maddin indisputably has one of the more original voices out there. Just not one I care for, it seems.

The wildly uneven Maddin delivers another movie more interesting for its aspirations than its content. The light approach doesn't pay off in watchability and an intriguing premise is left flapping in the wind.

Or, The Fatal Glass Leg of Beer. Despite an occasionally hilarious script, and the fact that it's filmed in glorious retro-vision, the film only lodges itself in your brain as a flabby incoherent dream, with not much to offer in the saddest-music (or beer!) department. Docked some points for behaving as if entire film-student seminars should be devoted to it.

Maddin's visual sense is so astoundingly unique. A pastiche of silent-era styles, heavy on the expressionism, with modern avant-garde touches. But goddamn it, he is simply incapable of making a story worth sitting through. Quirk built upon meaningless quirk, humor that falls completely flat, interesting premise utterly wasted, awful casting choice in McKinney. This is the closest Maddin has come to developing a decent plot, but ultimately it still feels empty and mindlessly gimmicky.

can something be sincerely ironic? as paradoxical as it is, this is the best way to describe this madness. a thoroughly engaging, melancholic film with wonderfully absurd lines.

The best Ishiguro adaptation yet

This is really stunning dark comedy. I thought that nobody do this kind of movies or if somebody does, it wont be shown in big cinema theatre. Glad that this opportunity existed. Magnificent experience.

Get up, get your boots on / Hurry up, hurry up / Time's a wastin' if you're not tasting' / Lady Port-Huntley beer

Stylistically brilliant, with a nice story to boot. Surprisingly great.

Slightly depressive, melancholy fun, but fun nonetheless. It's such fun absurdity yet feels completely emotionally sincere and that tone makes the fun so much better than silly laughs could. The performances are all good, but it's McKinney who stands out, really capturing the tonal mix of the film and giving it that needed energy and snark to push it through. Love the visuals too, really it's all great.

Star Rating: ★★★

Incredible dream movie about desire and destruction, it's a phenomenon to experience.

An exercise in nostalgia and style that failed to hold my attention.

I think it's stupid.

"Guy Maddin's snow globe cinema, hermetically sealed in ghostly adoration of silent cinema, is well matched to this darkly comic fable." - Joshua Vasquez

It seems like it's intentionally dense, inaccessible and cheesy. For not being a comedy, those qualities are a bad thing. I was amused by the throw back to german expressionism, but I'm not exactly sure I liked it.

A portal to your own dreams in an alternate 1930s Winnipeg.

The Weirdest Movie about Winnipeg. Love it.

Guy Maddin being weird, as usual. Sometimes threatens to wear out its welcome, but never quite does so

Unique and bizarre. There are people getting dumped into gigantic beers and a hockey player musical number. So what more could you ask for in a movie?

One of the strangest little films I've ever seen....

very inventive

This viewer found it difficult to form a clear opinion, but it definitely had something.