It used to be that only old people whined about today’s cinema. These days, practically everyone, youthful and aged, is complaining about filmgoing in the year 2001. How to shake the celluloid blues? For something passionate, rousing, and inventive that will knock your booties off and shake your socks, I recommend the comic and visionary cinema of Guy Maddin, whose marvelous features Careful (1992) and Tales from the Gimli Hospital (1988) play the next two Tuesdays, July 17 and 24 respectively, at the Brattle Theatre.

Never heard of Maddin? Get in line. His pictures were too wild and bizarre to have been exhibited in provincial Beantown at their release. You had to travel to New York for midnight screenings at places like the Bleecker Street Cinema. So who is he? A true cinema original who makes his delicious comedies, Monty Python meets Sergei Eisenstein, on elaborate sets built on a sound stage in his frigid home town of Winnipeg. While it dips below zero outside — often!! — Maddin shoots away, utilizing a peculiar cast of snowed-in locals.

Careful, a claustrophobic farce of incestuous desire, takes place in an Alpine village where a loud noise — a hacking cough? — could unleash a fatal avalanche. Tales from the Gimli Hospital is an expressionist fever dream set among hospital victims of a smallpox epidemic. Both are howlingly hilarious, with eye-popping visuals informed (Maddin is a movie freak) by the early history of cinema, from Nosferatu to Triumph of the Will.

A bonus: Careful screens with Maddin’s great new short “Heart of the World,” which is perhaps the best film made anywhere on earth last year. Like all his works, it’s damned hard to describe, except that the cast includes a heinous, obese capitalist and dueling Jesuses inspired by passion plays. “It’s the most fun I’ve ever had,” Maddin told me at the Rotterdam Film Festival. “I’ve always wanted to use a montage style, and I did 800 shots in five days, a blizzard of celluloid, and there are about 650 cuts in the five and a half minutes of the movie. No shot lasts longer than 30 frames.”

Unlike what Baz Luhrmann does in Moulin Rouge, however, the cuts mean something, and there’s content in every set-up. Maddin’s next project? “An original ballet based on Bram Stoker’s Dracula. I hope to make a real film of it, the way Michael Powell did with The Tales of Hoffmann.”

THE MOST ILL-FATED PRODUCTIONS in the history of Hollywood? First, The Conqueror (1956), which was filmed in the desert near A-bomb testing. Many of the cast, including stars John Wayne and Susan Hayward and director Dick Powell, died of cancer. Second, Rebel Without a Cause (1955), which had four actors — James Dean, Natalie Wood, Sal Mineo, and Nick Adams — come to horrific ends: car accident, drowning, murder, suicide. And third, The Misfits (1961), which screens this Friday, July 13, at the Harvard Film Archive. Four venerable leads — Clark Gable, Marilyn Monroe, Montgomery Clift, and Thelma Ritter — were gone within a few years. Gable led the way, suffering his fatal heart attack only days after his final shot. Many have implicated director John Huston for pushing him to do risky stunts roping wild horses in the torturous Nevada sun. As for Monroe, she arrived on the set with then husband Arthur Miller, who had written The Misfits’ screenplay especially for his fragile wife. But she was hooked on pills during the production, and she and Miller separated in the middle of it. Drugs (and some Kennedy brothers?) soon did Marilyn in. The Misfits was her last completed film: she died August 5, 1962.

Although a mess off screen, Monroe rocks in The Misfits, a poignant, enormously touching presence as sadhearted ex-dancer Roslyn. She’s come to Reno for a disheartening divorce but gets hopeful when she meets Gay Langland (Gable), a grizzled modern-day cowboy. A romantic, she doesn’t know yet that he makes his dough by rounding up wild mustangs and selling their carcasses by the pound. But MM brings Gable around to her humane values, and somehow this romance of monumental Hollywood stars feels like the modest stuff of real life.

ALSO NOTEWORTHY AT THE MFA: this Monday, July 16, Lev Kuleshov’s The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West in the Land of the Bolsheviks (1924), an unclassifiable Russian silent comedy about a Babbitt-like American who’s duped by anti-Communist scalawags during a visit to Moscow. He finally sees the Marxist light and writes to his wife back home, “Dear Madge, hang a portrait of Lenin in the studio.” His sidekick for the trip is a rowdy cowpoke who brings to starchy Soviet cinema some primitive, two-fisted, B-movie brawling.

Issue Date: July 12-19, 2001