Tales from the Gimli Hospital

Rating:
Summary: why the hype?
Review: This is ham-fisted moviemaking at its worst--or should I say best? Burdened by an impossibly cheesy plot which fills the movie with more dead-air time than your next laundryroom round, the movie is at once too insultingly imcompetent to be a homage to the great German expressionist films which supposedly inspired it, and too boring and poker-faced to be a send-up of anything but the director's own mediocrity. Go see any film by Murnau, Pabst, Ruttmann, or Lang from the 20s--or for that matter any silent films at random, whether Russian, American, French, whatever--and they'll be infinitely better than this puerile endeavor at self-indulgence.

Rating:
Summary: Early and terrific Guy Maddin
Review: This is the Guy Maddin film that's his best-known because of its relative easiness to get ahold of, although it's also his earliest feature. GIMLI shows all of Maddin's obsessions with early expressionistic film and early twentieth-century Nordic culture in full flower. There's also some of his trademark black humor (though not as much as in his later films--this film never gets funnier than the framing sequence with Amma and the children at the very beginning). Maddin takes more time here to show scenes of great visual beauty, something he sadly rushes through somewhat in his later films. His favorite male actor, Kyle McCullogh, is at his handsomest here--it's a good film to watch to be introduced to Maddin.

Rating:
Summary: Guy Maddin delivers !
Review: Visually stunning with great atmosphere and offbeat performances this is one of the most overseen films of the past 10 years. Guy Maddin is definitely a director to watch while the transfer of this disc was done very careful(got it?)ly. There's also a cool audio commentary with the director and two short films: "The Dead Father" (great !) and "Hospital Fragment".
For the record: buy this thing and be happy - period.