Bring Me the Head of Tim Horton

Filmed during the shooting of Paul Gross's Hyena Road (2015), Bring Me the Head of Tim Horton is an amalgamation of behind-the-scenes footage shot. Halfway between experimental art and documentary film, it can be seen as a scathing sarcasm of the making/mocking of big budget war films. Acclaimed director Guy Maddin is part of the film crew, he winds up taking solace in the ramshackle desert as an extra. This is when he decides to take things up his sleeves and manages to represent a state of generalized anxiety, reflecting on his life that envelops the whole film, making it credibly contemporary rather than futuristic. His dissent is towards the depiction of Hollywood war films and a broke nomad wandering in the desert as a freelance is the boiling point for Maddin to come up with his own design of Gross's big budget film. Maddin alternates the sequences filmed from another angle, the underside of the shoot, the back of the set. The film is almost surreal, feels like a psychedelic video game epic and in black and white in few parts. But it is not just the experimental film, because Maddin intends to overcome the state of torpor provoked to draw his film towards the Hollywood metaphor in a funny way.

I've heard it said that there are only seven or eight stories, all retold in various forms. I was always skeptical of that notion, but with Bring Me the Head of Tim Horton, Guy Maddin proves the theory dead wrong, just like he's done countless times before. And this one is as original as they come!

Purported to be a behind the scenes look at the making of another film, Hyena Road, this is anything but. Sure, the filmmakers were no doubt shooting footage of the making of that film, but it is edited together and narrated in such a way that only Guy Maddin could get away with. It's fun and hilarious, much like his masterpiece My Winnipeg, though on a smaller scale and often times in different ways. It still has that old Guy Maddin flavor to it, but it's nonetheless a unique work that stand all on its own.

Despite the fact that this film is readily available online, I put off watching it for quite some time, as the description of it didn't interest me and also because I had been bored by some of Maddin's other shorts that I'd seen in the past, although I still consider him to be one of my favorite filmmakers. But once I started it I loved it. It was so much better than I could have imagined. It never got boring and it never had the chance. It's only half an hour long, so there's really no reason not to watch it. I only wish I had put of watching it for even longer, so that I could go and watch it for the first time!