Icks Cured by Gay Bison

There has not been a lot of activity or interesting activity on the blog recent due to some distractions, also known as chronic, crippling depression. I don't go into those sort of things here and hate too much of vomiting up personal emotions, but I'll just leave it that I've felt there has been so little of value here recently and that I've been leaving sometimes comments on other blogs that border on inappropriate. I have come close to retiring from the blog world and knew I needed something to snap me out of it.

Tonight I went to see Guy Maddin's My Winnipeg which was the perfect downer movie to make me come away feeling healed, restored and ready to return. There is lecherous Mayor Cornish who serves as the only judge to crown the golden boy at the man pageant held on the fifth floor of The Bay department store, a mother that is tortured by her children with a parakeet, gay bison whose lovemaking causes a stampeded on Happyland, homeless people hidden on tops of the city's buildings, horny prepubescent boys who torture the director's eight-year-old self with hairless boners, a sister who hides her sluttiness with deer flesh and blood on the hood of the car. It's all there, and I took summer comfort in the solace of the coldest city in the world. Ninety percent of the film is narration by Maddin himself, his recent narration of The Unkown at the Silent Film Festival echoing in my mind. He uses Winnipeg much the way John Waters uses Baltimore in his films but is much sicker, stranger and creative.

To borrow the catch phrase of a fellow blogger, Maddin is beligerantly nonsensical, mixing fact, fancy and fiction. Did a group of Rotarians actually dress up like Nazis during World War II and stage a mock siege of the city? I don't need to know the "facts" to accept this truth. While I've always loved Maddin short film which I've felt is his best format for his hodge podge of ideas, his manic, surreal narration built like a wacked tone poem that ultimately merged into what was truth rooted in dreams and the haze of memory and was deeply, unexpectedly moving. I am sure I'll end up seeing it again.