two hundreds of beavers: the second/first time

I remember almost nothing except for isolated moments of a Vincente Minnelli film called The Cobweb about the battle over the design of some draperies in a psychiatric hospital, and a 2am Tupperware promotional short from 1965 featuring Anita Bryant before she lost her mind with hate for gays. (Fun fact about her: she's dead now.) This is all thanks to Turner Classic Movies.

November 2023 to November 2024 is a blur. During those months, I was unconscious only twice and not for that long, for two hip-replacement surgeries, spaced about eight months apart, but it's my conscious moments during that year that are now suspect.

I spent weeks recovering from both operations, which is where all that TCM came in. Did you cut your basic cable? If you think you'll soon be hanging out for a long time with your feet elevated above your heart after a major part of your body is cut open, removed, and replaced, you should jump back into that situation.

I watched Doctor Zhivago at one point after they installed the first hip. That's a great one to look at when you're in and out of sleep. It's snowing when you doze off and it's snowing when you wake up and rewind it to the approximate moment when you passed out. The people are attractive, the sweaters are good, the score is relentless.

I watched Billy Rose's Jumbo, kaleidoscopic trapeze hallucination; Tammy and The Bachelor, also extremely weird, slam dunking its theme song into my brain for a month; then another earnest middle-of-the-night short film about the scourge of teen vandalism which just made spray-painting buildings seem really cool. I had no capacity for anything demanding. Then Alonso got a review link for Hundreds of Beavers. He threw it to the TV, and we watched. Well, he watched. I was... there.

Hundreds of Beavers is a nearly wordless black-and-white comedy about a man (Ryland Tews) battling hundreds of beavers. It mixes live action and animation, silent-comedy slapstick with Looney Tunes pop-violence, all housed in the cardboard-and-puppets-and-$27 filmmaking aesthetic of Guy Maddin. It was shot outside in the dead of a Wisconsin winter, the beavers are adults in beaver costumes, and the man battling them is only occasionally clothed for the freezing temperatures, icicles hanging from his beard. He is the Coyote in a war, outnumbered by too many Roadrunners.

Its very production is its own political message. Its existence is the statement. Creators Mike Cheslik and Tews went around the outside of the usual channels of capital backing and filmmaking process and turned limited-everything into a masterpiece of precision gags, detail-obsessive visuals, DIY head-bonking insanity, and, most importantly, self-distribution, which took the form of a never-ending road show from theater to theater, long after other filmmakers would be watching their limited release head to streaming.

I can tell you all of this because I watched it again last night thinking I had seen the film before. And I had. But I had not. The first viewing was a post-op haze. I even talked about it with Alonso on Linoleum Knife at the time of its initial release. I'm sure I thought I was competent to speak about cinema at that time. I was not.

There's a thing Alonso likes to say about old movies one might remember fondly: "Was it great, or were you eight?" Is the past clouding your mind with good memories of a shitty film? Were you seeing it at the right moment in your life to really evaluate it properly? Did you change as you aged? Was that movie ever worth your time?

It counts for right now, too. Why did you love a movie or hate it? Did you see it after a bad night's sleep, after an edible gummy, after an argument with your significant other, after taking NyQuil, after angrily moving your seat in the theater to get away from the awful person with the phone they won't turn off and then you seethed for two hours? Were you just cranky? Did you watch it while the general anesthesia wore off? I did that with The Young Girls of Rochefort. But I had already seen that one about five times before, so I didn't have to go back and confirm its actual greatness and beauty.

But I did have to do that with Hundreds of Beavers. I had to see it again to remember entire sequences. To make sense of the plot. To admire its invention and crazed execution. To see it when I wasn't in a fog. Turns out it's still fucking rad.

Anyway, watch a movie twice, because maybe you just had an upset stomach.