Dave Barber, A Tribute

These are sad days at MMC! Dave Barber, filmmaker and beloved programmer of Winnipeg’s Cinematheque, passed away earlier this week at the age of 67. Dave was a champion of Canadian and independent cinema and a tireless advocate for his theatre and the films it featured.

I met Dave at a get-together hosted by a mutual friend eight years ago. Attended by professional, semi-professional, and amateur pop culture nerds, we were invited to share lists of our favourite films and Dave’s list expressed his love of music as well as his love of cinema at its biggest and most minute.

• The Blues Accordin’ to Lightnin’ Hopkins (Les Blank, 1968)
• Message to Love: The Isle of Wight Festival (Murray Lerner, 1995)
• The Thing (John Carpenter, 1982)
• Vinyl (Alan Zweig, 2000)
• The Fabulous Baker Boys (Steve Kloves, 1989)
• Jazz on a Summer’s Day (Bert Stern, 1959)
• Plan 9 from Outer Space (Ed Wood, 1959)
• Jackie Brown (Quentin Tarantino, 1997)
• 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968)
• The Magnificent Seven (John Sturges, 1960)
• Crime Wave (John Paizs, 1985)

In the years that followed, we would watch movies together when we ran into each other at a screening, we would text about programming ideas and other movie stuff, and we would share festival discoveries. I would give him rides home when he needed them, he would hook my son up with Godzilla stuff, and my wife would restrain her urge to make him a sandwich. When I discovered he was in the hospital, I sent him a message wishing him well and asking him to reach out once he recovered, hoping he would find the message once he was discharged. Sadly that won’t happen, but I’m very grateful for the time I got to spend with Dave and I wish him the best on whatever new project he’s now moved on to.

In celebration of Dave, MMC! offers this brief tribute to the man on screen and there’s no better place to start than Dave’s 2014 short film Will the Real Dave Barber Please Stand Up?, a hilarious account of Dave being awarded a Queen’s Diamond Jubilee medal.

You Cannot Kill David Arquette (David Darg and Price James, 2020) – Fantasia International Film Festival

FROM STUMBLING TO RUMBLING!

Branded as the most hated man in professional wrestling after winning the WCW World Heavyweight Championship in 2000, actor David Arquette attempts a rocky return to the sport that stalled his promising Hollywood career. Despite having two stents in his heart, being under treatment for depression and anxiety, and exhibiting functioning alcoholism, the 47 year-old actor dangerously commits himself reclaiming his self-respect in the squared circle. Arquette’s journey takes him to the backyards of amateur wrestling in Virginia, the fast-paced style of Tijuana’s lucha libre shows, and near-fatal hardcore deathmatches. Along the way, he puts his health, his credibility, and his marriage on the line, but Arquette’s determination to earn a respected place in the world of pro-wrestling cannot be denied.

Part car-wreck, part inspirational Rocky-docky, You Cannot Kill David Arquette is a fascinating look into the closed world of pro-wrestling and a portrait of the physical toll and unbridled passion required to perform in its peculiar brand of theatre. Appearing alongside David Arquette are his wife/producer Christina McLarty Arquette, his siblings Patricia, Rosanna, and Richmond, his ex-wife Courtney Cox, and wrestling legends including Ric Flair and Diamond Dallas Page.

Special Edition Contents:

• High Definition Blu-ray (1080p) presentation
• 5.1 DTS-HD Master Audio and Uncompressed Stereo PCM
• Optional English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
• Two feature-length audio commentaries, one with directors David Darg and Price James and one with David Arquette and Christina McLarty Arquette
• Full matches between David Arquette and Nick Gage, RJ City, Mr. Anderson, Jungle Boy, and others, with introductions and alternate commentaries by Arquette and City
• Outtakes and extended interviews
• This is the End, a new interview with wrestling historian Dave Meltzer on David Arquette’s reign as WCW Heavyweight Champion
• New video tribute to the song “You Cannot Kill David Arquette” by The Black Math Experiment
• Original theatrical trailer
• Reversible sleeve featuring two artwork choices

FIRST PRESSING ONLY: Collector’s booklet featuring new writing by wrestling critic Andy Murray

Ticket of No Return (Ulrike Ottinger, 1979)

The Criterion Collection, a continuing series of important classic and contemporary films presents Ticket of No Return.

The it-girl of the West German art subculture, Tabea Blumenschein, stars as a nameless, silent stranger with a one-way ticket to Berlin and a plan to drink herself to death. While touring high class bars, queer nightspots, and seedy dives, she befriends a struggling homeless woman and runs across a trio of prim, judgemental women known as Social Question, Accurate Statistics, and Common Sense. With Blumenschein’s extravagant costumes and writer/director/cinematographer Ulrike Ottinger’s eye for a city still struggling to lift itself out of the bombed-out depression of World War II, Ticket of No Return is an unforgettably unique tour of Berlin and a deliciously shrewd example of feminist camp.

SPECIAL FEATURES:

• Restored 4K digital transfer, overseen by director Ulrike Ottinger, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition
• New interview with Ottinger
• Berlinfever – Wolf Vostell, Ottinger’s 16 minute short film of a 1973 Happening organized by artist and friend Wolf Vostell
• Gallery of Ottinger’s workbook used to develop and produce the film
• Gallery featuring rare behind-the-scenes production photos
• An excerpt from Gérard Courant’s Cinématon (2009) featuring Ottinger
• New English subtitle translation
• PLUS: A new essay by critic Michael Koresky

Dirkie: Lost in the Desert (Jamie Uys, 1970)

“One of the most…
TRAUMATIZING AND SADISITIC ‘FAMILY MOVIES’ EVER MADE.”
                                                 The San Francisco Bay Guardian

The Most Amazing Adventure A Boy Ever Lived Through
Now On Blu-Ray For The First Time Ever!

Filmmaker Jamie Uys (THE GODS MUST BE CRAZY) cast his own son as a sickly eight year-old boy stranded with his pet dog in the Kalahari Desert, “one of the most rugged and desolate regions on the face of the earth.” The result is a children’s feature so punishing and merciless that it has been nicknamed “The Passion of the Dirkie.” Severin Films proudly presents the “sadistic yet hilarious” (Ilovehotdogs.net) South African survival movie about a boy menaced by plain crashes, infernos, hungry hyenas, angry elephants, spitting cobras, stinging scorpions, dwindling cough medicine, dehydration, and a grueling landscape. Beautifully rendered in Techniscope and Technicolor despite nightmarish shooting conditions that took the film’s crew almost 7,000 miles through the wilderness of Namibia, DIRKIE: LOST IN THE DESERT set South African box office records on its release and traumatized select children all around the world.

“We’re all the better for receiving…
THIS ODDBALL ALL-AGES TRIP INTO AN ARID APOCALYPSE.”
Birth. Movies. Death

Special Features:

• English and Afrikaans Theatrical Release Versions
• New Commentary with Star Wynand Uys and Film Scholar Ernest Mathijs
• … And Your Little Dog Too – An Interview with Producer Boet Troskie
• Trailers
• Poster Gallery
• BONUS FILM: Papam Pasivadu, a Telegu-language re-make from India

SFFF Day 6 – Into the Unknown

The final day of the Saskatoon Fantastic Film Festival opened with Matthew Rankin’s The Twentieth Century (2019), a fictionalized portrait of Canada’s weirdest, longest-serving, and middlest-of-the-road Prime Minister, William Lyon Mackenzie King. The film side-steps Mackenzie King’s secret spiritualism and instead creates a broader, stranger fantasy of Canada at the dawn of a new era. Rankin’s prerecorded introduction for the film described it as “nightmarishly Canadian” and his words were apt. The Twentieth Century is an Eraserhead/Isle of Dogs-esque imagining of Canadian history and culture, one obsessed with maple walnut ice cream, the scent of fresh timber, passive-aggressive manners, Indian leg wrestling, and medicinal “puffin cream.” Inspiration was taken from the Prime Minister to-be’s personal diary and Rankin connected with Mackenzie King’s tendencies toward vanity, repression, self-righteousness, and self-pity. Played by Dan Beirne with petulant primness, Mackenzie King struggles to achieve his maternally prophesied political and romantic aims (and sublimate his dominating shoe fetish), and the film traces his misadventures through the brutalist interiors of Rideau Hall, the frozen utopia of Quebec, a sunny and freshly logged, new age Vancouver, and a baseless and fetid Winnipeg.

A former Winnipegger himself, Rankin carries on the prairie post-modernism of Guy Maddin and John Paizs, and like his predecessors, Rankin finds ways to make a hard earned dime look like an eccentrically spent dollar (or loonie). Hand-painted and animated in sections by Rankin himself and utilizing a palette that evokes the colours of Canadian banknotes, The Twentieth Century’s stunning production design recalls earlier film eras with its intertitle chapter cards while it also embraces the fresh Canadianness established in the aesthetics of Group of Seven painters like Lawren Harris and York Wilson and the modernist designs of Expo ’67. Rankin even loads his historical subject with a gleeful perversity and a shameless phallocentricism that would do Ken Russell proud – watch out for that ejaculating cactus and that narwhal horn! The Twentieth Century is an acid trip-take on peace, order, and good government and it is staunchly glorious.

Oscilloscope Laboratories has picked up the rights to Rankin’s brilliant film and we can only hope that its eventual hard media release will not only include The Twentieth Century but also many (if not all) of Rankin’s short films including Negativipeg (2010), the most Winnipeg-ish thing I’ve ever seen committed to film.

Keep An Eye Out! (Quentin Dupieux, 2018) – Ithaca Fantastik 2018

Designed for the film lover in mind, SHOUT SELECT shines a light on films that deserve a spot on your shelf. From acknowledged classics to cult favorites to unheralded gems, SHOUT SELECT celebrates the best in filmmaking, giving these movies the love and attention they deserve.

TO THE POLICE STATION!

When Louis Fugain (Grégoire Ludig) finds a dead body in front of his apartment building in the middle of the night, he makes a terrible mistake and reports it to the police. Obsessive police superintendent Buron (Benoît Poelvoorde) makes Fugain his chief suspect, leading to an absurd, all-night interrogation set in a campy ’70s police station and Fugain’s increasingly compromised memories. Soaked in dark humor and bloody fun throughout, Quentin Dupieux’s latest opus, Keep An Eye Out!, is a twisted celebration of classic French police procedurals through the lens of his own nonsensical brand of quirky, offbeat humor, performed by France’s most refreshing comedic talents.

Special Features:

• Audio Commentary With Director Quentin Dupieux
• Being Flat – Quentin Dupieux’s 2015 Short Film
• Quentin Dupieux’s Music Video For “Night Owl” by Metronomy
• Actors’ On-Set Rehearsals
• US Theatrical Trailers And Teasers
• International Theatrical Trailers and Teasers
• Hidden Bonus Content