My Winnipeg shows you can't always get away from home

I will film myself out.

So remarks the director (Guy Maddin), as he declares that his escape from this gritty snowy town will only be accomplished from his filming of hatched memories, documented by his own dreamy imaginations, and the accompaniment of some local actors.

My Winnipeg, like a lot of Maddin's previous films (Saddest Music In the World, Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary), uses old style filming of the silent times. Iris shots, grainy black and white, throwbacks to a long gone dead film-style era. He uses scenes from times past, and blends in scenes from the present, but you never can distinguish between the two. The other characteristic of Maddin's film is a madness and Eraserhead qwerky-ness that is hard to pin down.

Maddin decides to narrate the film (voiced by another actor) to recreate memories of Winnipeg and describe the cities past where he grew up. What the viewer ends up with is something completely unexpected and difficult to describe. However, once the films gets its bearings (it does have a slow start) the beauty of Maddin's imagery can't be ignored.

It's the vivid imagination that Maddin shows the audience that keeps you captivated. While blaring words appear you are witness to some of the most creative scenes displayed on film. Certainly seeing a batch of dead horses frozen in a river, to a séance that transpires to a dance sequence filled with floating catails and wild grass. You couldn't make this stuff up if you tried and Maddin somehow provides a valid explanation for all of it.

Whether you have a hard time determining Maddin's reasoning or truths, and there certainly seems to be a lot of inside jokes that only Winnipegers themselves would get (trust me our writer is an ex-Winnipeger himself), it's an enthralling display of a pseudo-tripout-documentary that you can't say you'll ever forget. You realise within an hour that nobody could ever make a film like this, but somehow... even with the details of being born in a hockey teams dressing room, Maddin has.

Memorable, enthralling... out there... certainly one to see, and definitely something you haven't seen before.

Screening of American Teen at SilverDocs, or how I survived my angst ridden festival days

The nut returns from the SilverDocs screening of American Teen, on a long awaited absence from writing about films.

I couldn't help but watch this film and think how incredibly empty it was. When if anything it should be the opposite.

The makers of American Teen place themselves in the lives of a senior year's class of school. We are to witness the usual cliques of several teens who go through the growing and learning pains of life.

In the end though, the dramatic moments and the loud soundtrack, quick editing, sound bite moments end up making the real people in this film come across as caricatures in their own movie.

The film is bombastic and in your face, when it needs to step away and tone down. When the intimate or poignant moments are described in someones life, it becomes flashy and gimmicky with distracting animations.

When it's suppose to be in depth, it's two sentences and over. You really don't get to know these kids other than what is described in the first 10 minutes of the film.

Scenes are played out of teenage life that everyone can relate to, but with the cameras around, it feels forced and coerced, regardless of whether the incidences are true to life. Someone is dumped by text message on their cellphone, so how do the film-makers capture that in real-time??? You get the sense the viewer is being cheated. A documentary is suppose to let the story unfold by itself, at it's worst American Teen actually becomes "predictable".

The idea of getting into a high school and capturing every detail of intimate moments with the kids, seems to have created a world that almost feels like its scripted when the cameras are around, and overly dramatic, when it doesn't have to be.

All the senior adults in the movie that are related to the kids (parents, teachers) even come across as nothing but pure buffoons who we don't get to know either.

It really does feel like the film-makers project some sort of ideas as to how this one town is a template for every high school in America, when it's really not that simple.

In the end though I wouldn't discourage people from seeing it, but the American teen is way more complicated than this, and the film-makers just haven't got it.