Snobbin: Beautiful Trash in the Pop Culture Gutter

6. Withnail and I -- This film surprised me as I was completely unprepared for its premise and picked it due to its poster because it was drawn by Ralph Steadman. Later, I learned that it was one of my best friend's favorite films and wondered how I missed it. Bruce Robinson based it on his life in London in the 1960s, and it follows the lives of two struggling actors,  the manic Withnail (Richard E. Grant) and the more sedate Marwood (Paul McGann)  who take a disastrous holiday to Withnail's Uncle Monty's (Richard Griffiths) cottage. The two men cope the best they can in their daily farcical struggles for alcohol and drugs, running into strange characters and stranger situations. The film is dark, yet laugh-out-loud funny at times. 5. My Winnipeg -- My favorite film for purely visual, surrealistic inspiration. Complete with reimaginings of hockey teams and horse heads which appear near the Red River, Guy Maddin's My Winnipeg is a stunning pseudo-history, what he...

Guy Maddin's My Winnipeg is one of the oddest and most charming films I have watched since I started this project. In a love letter/rejection notice to his beloved hometown, he creates an oddball documentary that blends the fantastic and the real, while purportedly portraying Maddin's escape from the ever-wintry city. Personal history vies for space with historical vignettes, all filtered through a dream landscape that obscures reality. Maddin uses recurring characters, such as his mother, played deftly and domineeringly by Ann Savage (far removed from her femme fatale roles of yesteryear like Detour ), and himself, played by Darcy Fehr, usually asleep on the train that never can leave the city. The film has to be seen to be believed, and I highly recommend it. The eerie narration and dead pan humor of the narrator's script are worth the price of admission alone. I will mention a few other high points because I cannot capture them all. Here are a few key scenes/events/v...