Cowards Bend the Knee (2003)

It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

Actress is magnificent and exudes a hypnotic screen presence in this affecting drama.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

It's not in Guy Maddin to make what Hollywood people would call a "normal" movie. Armed with 8mm cameras, loads of lights, sound effects (if not actual sound equipment), and a mind like a steel Dziga-Vertov trap marinated in Winnipeg and sex and murder, he makes movies the way he damn well pleases to do them, which usually are done like super-kinetic, libido-charged fever dreams that come to represent a kind of consciousness that could be misconstrued as a music video if not for the fact that it's a 1920's silent film about revenge-plotting women and blue hands ala Evil Dead that kill innocent victims while hockey is always a major subject (and, sometimes, with players in full wax museum mold).It might not always make sense- and by this I mean relatively to some of Maddin's best and strangest like Brand Upon the Brain! and The Saddestmusic in the World- but it's never less than boring and always more than enough for the open-minded. And by this I mean open-minded enough to find oneself in the horror-movie world of a hockey player named Guy Maddin (yeah, not the first time and wont be the last the director has a character named by himself), who goes through a psycho-sexual-homicidal journey through a pair of blue hands which belong to a devious girl's father. They aren't actually his hands put on his, however, they're just painted blue. But there's an effect that comes with this: the hands kill ala Evil Dead without Maddin really wanting to. So come a series of events involving wax-painted hockey players who can come to life, an abortionist that works out of a beauty parlor, another woman who cant stand how Maddin waxes her legs, and, yes, plenty of frenetic Canadian Hockey.That's what it's aboot, so to speak, but there's more, much more, particularly in Maddin's 10-chapter set-up, and featuring Beethoven's 7th among other classical selections (frankly I enjoyed the 7th in Saddest Music more, but this is even crazier, which helps). Everything moves at such a pace and clip you wont know what stops and goes. But Maddin's mind works wonders as a master of his craft and at relaying his own personality and life experiences in the framework of what is essentially a really demented B-movie. It's like with Jodorowsky: he makes movies with his you-know-what as opposed to his head. I wouldn't want it any other way.

I've seen many of Guy Maddin's films, and liked most of them, but this one literally gave me a headache. John Gurdebeke's editing is way too frenetic, and, apart from a tour-de-force sequence showing a line of heads snapping to look at one object, does nothing but interfere with the actors' ability to communicate with the audience.Another thing I disliked about this film was that it seemed more brutal than Maddin's earlier works--though his films have always had dark elements, his sympathy for the characters gave the movies an overriding feeling of humanity. This one seemed more like harshness for harshness' sake.As I'm required to add more lines of text before IMDb will accept my review, I will mention that the actor playing "Guy Maddin" does manage to ape his facial expressions pretty well.

Understand that I'm getting a bit tired of people comparing every strange movie that comes along to a David Lynch film too. Unfortunately, Lynch is the norm and just about one of the most accessible strange filmmakers out there, so sometimes the comparison is needed for a starting point, like in this case.This movie is, roughly speaking, the story of a swinging hockey player who gets entrapped in a bunch of relationships, including most prominently one with a scarred daughter who wants her father's death revenged. Her father's killer? Her mother. It includes but is not limited to perverse sexuality, weird psychoses, and severed arms.It's shot in black and white and is a silent film, which creates for it a sort of removed surreality/abstractness which is, honestly, reminiscent of Eraserhead and Lynch's Lumiere and Company short.What makes it Maddin's, though, is the use of imagery from his childhood (the barbershop, the hockey players, etc.) set to a blatant sexuality which goes beyond just being blatant but enforces it: you see the sexual image, and then the words follow saying exactly what you were thinking. No more subtlety and deranged fetishes, this is straight-forward Freud and primal scene.Because of this, this film as a whole remains true to itself and never lets go of its own private Universe, one that we could never live in and yet, terribly, can relate to, figure out, and eventually even understand.Beyond that, there's not much that can be talked about this movie besides the fact that it there's no common approach to it. It has no genre (besides maybe Silent film) and is disconcerting, requiring a certain level of viewer interaction that most movies don't ask for. For fans of strange and insane cinema, it's great; for anybody looking to be entertained, this is most definitely not for you.--PolarisDiB

Okay, I've tried and I've tried, but I STILL DON'T GET this Guy Maddin thing. Tales From the Gimli Hospital left me cold, that movie about the Austrian villagers and the one about the Ice Nymph were pretty to look but lacking in the story department...and this nudie movie about abortion and hockey is just boring. I'm glad Maddin has an appreciation for silent film, but I dislike his films for the same reason I dislike the films of Quentin Tarantino: they're empty homages to better, more imaginative films--films that advanced the art form or broke new ground--and are all style and no substance. No amount of jump cuts and odd camera angles can disguise the fact that Maddin is an unoriginal David Lynch wannabe, though he DOES have one advantage over Tarantino: he generally doesn't write embarrassing dialogue, because most of his films rely on intertitles. The bottom line is, Maddin's schtick is clever clever film-making for aspiring film majors.