This is the fourth Guy Maddin film I've seen--the others are The Dead Father, Tales From the Gimli Hospital, and Twilight of the Ice Nymphs--and I have yet to be impressed. Maddin's obsessive need to reproduce the conventions of old film styles isn't the problem, it's his utter inability to tell a compelling story. And while Careful looks quite good--though the tinting is at times oversaturated--his insistence on having his cast read the script in an arch deadpan style is simply annoying and frankly an insult to the films to which he is supposedly paying tribute. Maddin is the arthouse equivalent of Quentin Tarantino--reasonably well versed in film history, in awe of his cinema predecessors, and woefully unable to turn his love and knowledge into anything more than a game of spot the influence.
