Shocks me that I'd never seen it; Visually arresting in a grand, dominant-color scheme that appears to have been cast from the imagination of some storybook character. It's really. Just. Otherworldly. The tale itself is told with the typical aplomb of this time: Silly, physical cartooning with a penchant for the balance of  Disney-minted sterility and the perversion and darkness of Grimm.

More like blind recitation; I've realized this go-round that I watched this puppy a wildly indulgent fourteen billion times when Victoria was young. And how lame am I: The excitement of unveiling a Disney film made in the 1990s may date me, but it was a real pleasure to watch London get all wrapped up in the tale of Simba's maturity amidst his uncle's determination to drag Hamlet into the Disney template. Timoncranz and Pumbastern still, inexplicably, work terrifically as foils.

The non-commital narrative meander of Guy de Maupassant gets up to the Ophuls washover without so much as a spike of the needle - I could've taken or left pretty much any oof it, but found myself enjoying its atmosphere in spite of the film: The terrific nineteenth century locations in the city and the country, the bordellos, the perfectly aged art studios, the voyeuristic photography, the undending camera movement, the lovely Joe Hajos score and on and on and on. Stanley Kubrick's favorite film (as of 1957, the imdb so helpfully points out) is deliriously empty.

After the first six chapters, I was convinced that this was the first full-on Maddin failure and I couldn't say why. There was no conceivable deviation from the oddball twists in stories about often perfectly random events and elements all filtered through the same proto-silent film technique. I was ashamed to find myself bored. Its like getting an erection in church: Any way you slice it, you feel fantastically guilty. The second half of the film is funnier, but the whole thing still seems to take forever to get back to the already uninteresting "present day" scenes of Guy and his wicked mother. That anyone is working in silent films is still a minor miracle in my opinion: There just aren't filmmakers out there anymore who grew up watching silents first. Brand Upon the Brain! falls back into the same groove Maddin seemed to spin his wheels feverishly to maintain pre-Cowards Bend the Knee. I really think the difference, still, was the general lack of thirty-five more minutes. But there's no way you walk away from any of his films not believing wholeheartedly that the guy has a deeply eccentric and worthwhile gift.

Possibly the only recent Hollywood film I could bring myself to see twice.

The songs were a bit much, but the interplay - and the sense of Big Ideas in fluffy, small-ish vignettes - is wonderful. It seems to anticipate the New Wave more than either of the other Ophuls films I've seen, unspooling candidly and with an almost naked ambition.

Why did I put this off for fifteen fucking years!? I waited and waited to watch it when the snow came. Every opportunity was dashed in some respect. But, sweet Jesus, what a wonderful, twisted, horribly scary vision of lucid madness. It occupied my mind for days and days after I watched it. But, then, I've *always* been the caretaker.