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I edited together this short homage to filmmaker Guy Maddin using clips from The Man in the Brown Suit, a 1980s TV movie adapted from the novel by Agatha Christie, starring Stephanie Zimbalist. Obviously I don't have copyrights to any of it. (Click here if no image appears.) Guy Maddin is an extraordinary, possibly insane filmmaker from Canada who often uses obsolete technology and silent-era filmmaking techniques to make films that are both deeply personal and deeply ambiguous. He's pretty much who I want to be when I grow up. Except the part about being from Canada. Why The Man in the Brown Suit? There's a long answer for that. Growing up in the early days of cable TV and VHS tapes, most suburban children had movies they watched over and over again until the tapes broke. The rotation was some variation of Indiana-Disney-Star-Trek-Grem-Goonie-Spiel-Wars, with Die-Lethal-Nightmare-on-John-Hughes-Alien-Predator-Terminator-Princess-Bride-and-the-Holy-Grail being added during adolescence. A wave of nostalgia swept over the land roughly 15 minutes after this period ended, but we won't get into that now. Anywho, while most Gen X and Gen Y children watched some or all of those movies, most individuals, families, or friend groups also allowed idiosyncratic and completely random-ass movies to creep into their rotation, movies that often have nothing whatsoever to do with our generation. For me and my brother, it was a Tony Curtis knights-and-damsels flick taped off TV called The Black Shield of Falsworth. For a friend of mine, who otherwise wouldn't know Cary Grant from the asteroid named after him, it was Arsenic and Old Lace. For my wife and her friends, it was The Man in the Brown Suit. One Christmas, my wife decided she would get MiBS as a gift for all her childhood friends, but both IMDb and Amazon agreed that MiBS was not available on DVD. So we laboriously captured her old VHS tape and then burned it to DVDs ourselves to send to her friends. I had all this footage and thought, I should edit this into something absurd to put as an extra-bonus-special feature on the DVD we send to her friends. And right after I did that, the real DVD appeared for sale on Amazon. Fun fact: check out my version of MiBS as a video clip on the official Stephanie Zimbalist page. -Peter Kovic, July 2010 |
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