As anybody can see from the comments, you either 'get' Maddin or you don't. Ever since seeing 'Archangel' at the Toronto Film Festival in 1990, I've known that I am forever condemned to be one of his helpless, slavering acolytes. The way that he uses 'old film' tropes (jumps, scratches, bad post-sync, fuzzy sound, deteriorating film stock, deteriorating actors, deteriorating genres) is unlike any other director I've ever heard of. To some people it's a pointless exercise because who even watches REAL old movies, let alone perverse half-assed reconstructions of some old-movie half-remembered through a fog of delirium tremens. But the pointlessness IS the point, and so is the fact that he keeps obsessively returning to his obscure hometown of Winnipeg. This film is an apotheosis of all things Winnipegian, placing it at the heart of the world at least for 99 minutes. I love the local radio station that broadcasts to the whole world, and the montage sequences - Scotsmen, Africans, Mongolians all dropping everything and packing their instruments to flood into Canada for the titular song contest. I love the acting, which is pitch-perfect and never tilts over into smirking campery. I love the music and I love the full-blooded ending, which is as savage and as moving as the best of '30s melodrama. I love this movie, and I love the fact that Guy Maddin has now allied himself with Isabella Rossellini (they are apparently planning a biopic of her father Roberto) and from now on it will be much more difficult to sideline him as some backwoods dilettante with a silent cinema fixation. Tomorrow, the world!