What a waste of my time!!!

disgusting, overrated, pointless

It's not great by any means, but it's a pretty good movie that didn't leave me filled with regret for investing time in it.

This movie feels like it was made purely to piss off people who want good shows

I spent the whole time asking myself whether I was enjoying this. I tried, but I'm still not sure. I did appreciate the film making. The director clearly asked 'what can we do with the camera?' and the answer was 'anything'. There were many beautiful shots that had me hitting the pause button. A lot of it had an experimental feel - but that wasn't the problem. The story, based on an original screenplay by Kazuo Ishiguro (perhaps they should have stuck to the original), felt like it was concocted by different people trying to outdo each other with silly ideas (tapeworms, beer-filled glass legs, sleeping in the snow, a character based on Gavrilo Princip - you quickly stopped asking why) - but that wasn't the problem either.The film might have been a collaboration between David Lynch, Orson Welles, Eisenstein, and the Brothers Quay - each of them disagreeing what the film should be about. It was worth trying. I quickly got used to the extremely smudgy effect - as if the lens had been smothered in vaseline - and I appreciated Isabella Rosselini (looking and sounding like her mother) and the big-eyed Maria de Madeiros.The backdrop was a music contest between international contestants to find the world's saddest music. The face-off heats was pure Python but it was all kept strangely distant. There were several problems: the emotional drama between the father and the two sons was dreary, as such issues always are. Secondly, it wasn't funny, and that was because it was all art and no emotional intelligence. Thirdly, it said nothing. It was full of ideas, but they were all microscopic, worked out at scene level - or even frame level. The whole thing put together didn't add up to anything. In the end, the images were everything, and that is always going to be disappointing.

This was my first film from Guy Maddin, a Canadian director well-known for doing his own thing. Most of his films, I hear, recreate the look and feel of 1920s silent cinema and early talkies – 'The Saddest Music in the World (2003)' is no exception. Not only is the film set in Depression-era Winnipeg, but it actually looks as though it was shot around that time. Maddin shoots his film on washed-out and grainy Super 8 film blown up to 35mm, uses irises and other outdated storytelling techniques, badly-synchronised audio, and lots of Soviet-style montage. Several scenes are shot in colour – and they jar strikingly, like the dream sequence in 'Shock Corridor (1963)' – to imitate the aesthetic of early two-strip Technicolor. Even the use of Isabella Rossellini is a stroke of anachronistic genius: at times you're fooled into thinking that Ingrid Bergman is on screen.The story is bizarre to say the least. A Canadian beer company, under the instruction of baroness Lady Port-Huntley (Rossellini) (who lost her legs in unfortunate circumstances), holds a competition to discover the "saddest music in the world." Competitors arrive from every country to vie for the $25,000 prize, including a smug washed-up Broadway producer (Mark McKinney, of 'Kids in the Hall' fame); his cellist brother (Ross McMillan), a hypochondriac nursing a broken heart (quite literally); and their father (David Fox), an alcoholic war veteran who is in love with Lady Port-Huntley. Not bizarre enough, you say? Well, Lady Port-Huntley gets herself a new pair of legs, made entirely out of glass and beer. As you do. This film is perverse, surreal, and extremely wacky; you can't deny that Maddin's got a quirky sense of humour. I don't know exactly what to make of it, but I didn't mind it.

What makes this movie such a wretched experience to sit through is that the director obviously hates music, or at least hates the musicians and music lovers who people the profession. Why else would he keep interrupting perfectly good musical performances with buzzers, inane, insipid voiceovers, and stupid visuals -- and a plot that moves, well, nowhere? If you happen to like music, as I do, and not just think of it as a background part of your life, you're sure to be thoroughly annoyed by this idiotic outing. There ARE good Canadian movies out there, but this isn't one of them. One of the two stars I've given it is for the interesting use of faux disintegrating film black-and-white images throughout (if it were furniture, we'd called it stressed), but that by no means could save this dud.

In order to 'get' the films of Guy Maddin, it helps if you understand cinema. George Toles and Guy Maddin are in LOVE with Silent Films. George tends to enjoy, from what I've learned, melodramas while Guy is more involved with Expressionism. If you were to ask Guy about references and intertexuality, chances are you would open up a vast discussion. If you were to ask George, chances are he would dismiss the notion that you need to 'read a book' to enjoy his film.There are audiences that probably won't enjoy Saddest Music. But for me it was a truly magical tragicomedy, with characters I cared about, an outcome that seemed suited for everyone, and music sequences that were haunting and daring.Ross McMillan is a wonderful performer in this film. Incidentally, he's also a wonderful playwright and a really nice guy.It isn't surprising that one reviewer on this list dislikes the work of Guy Maddin despite being drawn into the work of Svankmajer and the Brothers Quay. What Guy Maddin and George Toles create for us in this work is 'sadness as a subject.' Raw human emotion. And while there is plenty of work for the intellect, the post-modernist tends to avoid emotion as if it's an alien thing. But in the work of Maddin, you will not find the sort of self-congratulation that is so easy to spot in the work of self labeled avant-gardists.I recommend that folks open up their minds and HEARTS to the world of Guy Maddin. Take a trip to Winnipeg. Start here....