Spring break is now behind us. I hope everyone is refreshed and ready to enjoy both work and play, and the season ahead. We’ve made it through another Wisconsin winter — though there was more light snow and cold temps this week (welcome to Wisconsin!). Students took a break from their day-to-day routines of books and laptops, lectures and classrooms while working folks and others have been to that sunny beach and returned home to see the trees bud and flowers bloom. Thousands of others, including me, have emerged from darkened movie theaters after eight days and more than 150 films during the 17th Annual Wisconsin Film Festival. 
This year I saw 11 films over the course of the eight day festival. Like other years I also bought two tickets for films I didn’t end up seeing. Once again, I tested one of my rules— buying tickets for movies that begin at 9:00 or later. As in the past, I ran out of film-going steam and all I wanted to do was return home and go to bed. I skipped both Friday and Saturday night’s late movies. Lesson learned until next year when the excitement of having the 2016 film guide in my hands overtakes me again. All in all I saw 10 documentaries (three were packaged together under one ticket) and three narrative films.
Once the film festival ended, the film-viewing continued. Read the bonus material after the festival review. Due to the passionate work and their love of films, the UW Cinematheque, Wisconsin Union Directorate Film Committee and Wisconsin Film Festival, MMoA (Madison Museum of Contemporary Art), plus Robert Redford’s Sundance 608 theater venue, a rich array of classic movies, independent films and restorations are always accessible throughout the year in Madison.
Here are the highlights and takeaways from this year’s festival and this film-going fan in order of the days that I viewed them. (Note: All images and logos are from the Wisconsin Film Festival website except as noted. All copyrights apply).
Thursday: Results
The festival opener, two fitness instructors and a new client seek to change their lives and in the end test their fitness for romance. A rom com featuring Guy Pierce and Kevin Corrigan who pursue Kat, played by Cobie Smulders. Corrigan was on hand to answer questions following the film.
Friday: Dinner, Drinks, Entertainment
Three crowd-pleasing testimonials to the diverse culture and lifestyle of our beloved state: Little America, Tale of the Spotted Cow, and Old-Fashioned: The Story of the Wisconsin Supper Club. Film-makers were on hand to field questions from the audience. I hope more people get to see these films.
Saturday: Bloomin’ Mud Shuffle, Waiting for August, Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck
Bloomin’ Mud Shuffle
First up on Saturday was a well-written narrative film that took place in Chicago featuring working class characters, looking to find meaning and connection in their lives. The main character struggles with balancing work, family, and a dependency on alcohol, while he explores a meaningful, but one-sided, romantic relationship. Alex Karpovsky of “Girls” plays the lead’s philosophical friend and foil. Karpovsky is extremely watchable and entertaining as always.
Waiting for August
Next up was a documentary chronicling the life of seven Romanian children who fend for themselves under the care of the eldest daughter, 15-year-old Georgiana as their mother worked aboard in Italy. A film about resilience and a family coping with the separation from their parent.
Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck
The evening ended with the loud biopic, Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck, produced by his daughter Frances who gave the film’s director Cobain’s journals, audio, videotape and home movies, ephemera, drawings and carte blanche to tell the tragic story of “the voice of his generation.” It was an intense mix of his music, interviews with loved ones and a Nirvana band mate, and well-executed animation like a graphic novel. The film was so powerful the projector overheated and a 20 minute unscheduled intermission occurred while it cooled down. Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck is scheduled to premier on HBO on May 4th.
Sunday: How to Change the World and Tab Hunter Confidential
How to Change the World
I watched two incredible, but totally different documentaries. The first was How to Change the World, the story of the creation of Greenpeace and the birth of the environmental movement. What intrigued me most about the movie, in addition to the great film footage of the their actions in protest of nuclear tests and efforts to save the whales and prevent the grisly killing of baby seals for their fur, was watching the founding members debate tactics, compete for leadership, and struggle with the each others’ egos as the organization grew internationally. At the end of the film however I was moved by the power of activism for change and the realization that personally I need to do more.
Tab Hunter Confidential
The weekend ended with Tab Hunter Confidential, a portrait of an actor trapped to some degree by his homosexuality (his words) and the closet he lived in most of his life. As he aged and became more comfortable in his own skin and didn’t take fame and persona as a heart throb too seriously, he opened the closet door and revealed an accessible, talented, loving and warm individual.
This is the third film I’ve seen by the director Jeffry Schwarz, all which were featured at one time at the Wisconsin Film Festival including, I Am Divine, Vito and this year’s entry, Tab Hunter Confidential. Each film told a tribute to a gay icon told in an informative, sometimes campy, always affectionate manner. I’m a fan of this director and his subjects. The director was on hand via Skype because he had difficulty with flight connections die to weather and cancelled flights. It was easy to see his affection for his subjects and his desire to tell their stories. One of the film’s producers was Tab Hunters partner of 30 years, Allan Glaser.
Monday: Almost There
This was one of the documentary films I was most eager to see and it turned out to be both compelling and personally challenging. The filmmakers, Dan Rybicky and Aaron Wickenden, meet “outsider” artist Peter Anton at a pierogi festival in Anton’s neighborhood community of East Chicago, IN, just outside of Chicago. Their interest in his work is piqued and when Anton invites them to visit, the real story and adventure begins.
What challenged me personally were the conditions Anton lived in. He was an artist and a recluse with only a small handful of friends, neighbors, and former students who performed in his Talent Club. My sister, who’s now deceased, was a hoarder. When Rybicky and Wickenden enter his home to see his art, they must wear masks to protect themselves from the toxic mold in Anton’s damp, basement home beneath the crumbling first and second floors of the house he grew up in. As they prepare to mount Anton’s first gallery show, they soon realize he needs more help then they initially realized. The audience witnesses the transformation the filmmakers make as they cross that invisible boundary of filmmaker and subject. There’s more to this story I won’t reveal.
From the films synopsis: “As Rybicky and Wickenden struggle with their own family crises and face obstacles in getting Anton more recognition, they learn some surprising things about their subject that place their work and Anton’s work in a whole new light. Unlike Finding Vivian Maier (edited by Wickenden), another documentary about a Midwestern outsider artist, Almost There has the benefit of a living, talking subject and Peter Anton is nothing if not multi-dimensional. The same can be said about this complex and thought-provoking movie.”
Tuesday: The Russian Woodpecker
The film had the most intriguing title and unique story to tell of the films I chose to see this year. From the festival website: “Winner of the Grand Jury Prize in the World Cinema Documentary competition at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, The Russian Woodpecker is a fascinating non-fiction hybrid of character study and investigative journalism. The movie focuses in on Fedor Alexandrovich, a Ukrainian resistant to further Russian encroachment, who, as a child, was a victim of the Chernobyl disaster.
A passionate, demonstrative artist, Fedor obsessively begins investigating a failed Cold War-era experiment known as the Duga: a massive radio tower built near the Chernobyl nuclear reactor that was meant to send out disruptive signals to the western world.”
Both the film’s director, Chad Gracia, a UW film graduate, and Fedor Alexandrovich, the film’s subject fielded questions following the film.
Wednesday: Clarence
In life, if we’re lucky, we are introduced to characters who inspire us and by their very example serve as mentors. Clarence Garret is one of those individuals. Clarence, an 85-year-old African-American WWII veteran, retired diesel engine mechanic and husband and father of four, after working and supporting his family and putting his four children through college, returns to UW-Milwaukee to complete his bachelor’s degree. The filmmaker, Kristin E. Catalano, a screenwriter and UCLA Film School graduate, who knew Clarence growing up in Milwaukee when he worked at her family’s grocery store on their trucks after his retirement, posed the idea to Clarence that if he in fact decided to return to school she thought it would make a good documentary. She flew across country and this film, almost 10 years in the making —and clearly a labor of love —chronicles Clarence’s pursuit of his dream, finishing his education.
Catalano shadows Clarence to his classrooms, visits with his doctor as he deals with the ravages of age and old wounds, ultimately sending him to the hospital for weeks, when we ask, what’s the outcome, will he finish school? Clarence inspires both his fellow students and his Afro-Culture instructors who recognize that he has a wealth of stories and lived experience as a black man to share and mentor youth, particularly the at-risk preteen and teens before they reach college age.
We follow Clarence to the all-you-can-eat buffet with his life-long friend, a former boxer who verbally spars with Clarence teasing him with a running gag that playfully irritates Clarence. We watch interviews with his children and visit the hospital with his wife. Everyone who encounters Clarence has a story to tell, and Catalano captures it lovingly. See this film if you get a chance and if you have children or know young ones, take them with you.
Thursday: Manglehorn
This narrative film directed by David Gordon Green stars Al Pacino in an uncharacteristically subtle and internal performance as A. J. Manglehorn, locksmith and lovelorn curmudgeon grieving his lover from years ago, still writing her letters which are returned unopened and unread. He’s estranged from his high-powered and seemingly successful financier son, played by Chris Messina, and his beloved cat is not eating. The only bright spot in his week is his brief interactions with a teller at his bank played by Holly Hunter. He steps outside of the familiar routine of his life and is forced to confront the realities of his choices and their impact on others around him. Some critics didn’t like the director’s heavy-handed usage of metaphors and magic realism to underline and convey the themes of the film, however, I enjoyed some of the imagery he employed and I found both Pacino’s and Hunter’s performance both sad and hopeful. The film is set to premiere in theaters in June.
Film Festival Factoids, Fan Favorites and 2016 Festival Date:
Factoids:
- 17th year of the festival, over 2000 films shown since its inception.
- 2015 Wisconsin Film Festival attendance: 26,506
- Over 150 films
- 8 days of the best new independent films (feature, documentary and experimental) plus restorations of classic movies.
- The festival generates over $1 million in economic impact for the city.
- Ticket sales are estimated at approximately $150,000.
Fan Favorites:
Steep & Brew Audience Award Winners:
Documentary – Capturing Grace
Narrative – Marie’s Story
Restoration/Rediscovery – Five Corners
2016 Festival Date:
2016 Wisconsin Film Festival – Anchored around the weekend of April 21, 2016 (tentative).
The Film Fandom Continues
She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry
This was the first film that I saw post-festival this past Saturday. I was right at home in one of my favorite festival venues, Sundance 608 (and favorite place to see films any day in Madison). The only difference was it wasn’t a sold-out film with a full theater. Seeing movies at the festival in filled theaters is just one of the many pleasures of attending the annual Wisconsin Film Festival.What made up for it however were all the familiar faces in the audience, friends and feminists, many who participated in the historical events depicted in the film. For me this was a journey to my past. I became active in the women’s movement in the early 1970s when I bought my first issue of Ms. Magazine, joined NOW (The National Organization for Women), became active in Feminist Consciousness-Raising, attending my first groups, became trained as a facilitator and travelled the United States on behalf of NOW training facilitators who in turn founded new groups all over the country. I fought for reproductive freedom, pay equity, displaced homemakers and worked to pass the Equal Rights Amendment, marching with thousands and thousands of Women in Washington D.C. Unfortunately, I was also accused of being a member of the lavender menace, the attempt by more conservative members of NOW to oust the activist-lesbians from the organization.
From the film’s website: “SHE’S BEAUTIFUL WHEN SHE’S ANGRY resurrects the buried history of the outrageous, often brilliant women who founded the modern women’s movement from 1966 to 1971. SHE’S BEAUTIFUL takes us from the founding of NOW, with ladies in hats and gloves, to the emergence of more radical factions of women’s liberation; from intellectuals like Kate Millett to the street theatrics of W.I.T.C.H. (Women’s International Conspiracy from Hell!). Artfully combining dramatizations, performance and archival imagery, the film recounts the stories of women who fought for their own equality, and in the process created a world-wide revolution.
SHE’S BEAUTIFUL does not try to romanticize the early movement, but dramatizes it in its exhilarating, quarrelsome, sometimes heart-wrenching glory. The film does not shy away from the controversies over race, sexual preference and leadership that arose in the women’s movement. SHE’S BEAUTIFUL WHEN SHE’S ANGRY captures the spirit of the time — thrilling, scandalous, and often hilarious.”
While We’re Young
I saw While We’re Young on Tuesday night at the $5 movies, Noah Baumbach’s intergenerational dramedy starring Ben Stiller, Naomi Watts, Adam Driver and Amanda Seyfried. I wanted to see it before it left the theaters. I agree with a critic whose review posited that there were essentially two films, the first half an engaging look at aging and how we view our own lives in comparison to a generation younger than us (and I might add the generation older than us in thinking of Charles Grodin’s character). The second film an expose and treatise on ethical documentary film-making and the filmmaker’s responsibility to tell a story as truthfully as possible. Add in themes and of what makes a person a success and what is a successful life and you are juggling a lot of story line arcs.
I really liked the first half of the film. I found the casting perfect and I’m a huge fan of Charles Grodin and his dry wit and deadpan delivery. I especially like Adam Driver in everything I’ve seen him in including his character in the HBO series Girls and his role in the dysfunctional family dramedy, This Is Where I Leave You and another, unfortunately, little-seen Noah Baumbach film Frances Ha, which features another favorite actor of mine Greta Gerwig (soon to be married to Noah Baumbach). I think the couples were very believable with Naomi Watts playing effectively against Ben Stiller’s nebbish protagonist.
The second half was sort of mean-spirited and though to some degree it was necessary to help Stiller and Watts take another look at their own lives and dreams, I think it could have been achieved with more laughs and less strident animosity.
Reel Love LGBT Film Festival
To cap off a solid two weeks of movie bliss, WUD (the Wisconsin Union Directorate) sponsors its fourth annual LGBT Reel Love Film Festival which began on Thursday, April 23 and continues through Sunday evening, April 26th. All films are free and are show at the University of Wisconsin – Union South Marquee Theater, next to Sundance 608 my next favorite place to see movies.
Reel Love LGBT Film Festival Poster
I’ve seen some of the selections previously including, Love Is Strange, The Case Against 8, Appropriate Behavior, and Pride. I whole-heartedly recommend all of these films. On my list to see this weekend on Saturday and Sunday are 52 Tuesdays, To Be Takei, Something Must Break, and Lilting. To read more about the films visit the WUD Film Directorate, Film Committee page.
It’s a Wrap!
In the end, if I see all the films on my list for this weekend, I will have watched a total of 17 films over the course of 12 days, eleven films during the eight days of the Wisconsin Film Festival, the documentary, She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry this past Sunday, While We’re Young at the Tuesday $5 movies at Marcus Theaters, and finally four free LGBT films at the Reel Love Film Festival.
Let me end this piece by sharing my gratitude as a cinefile in Madison, Wisconsin as I thank the theater owners (a shout out to Robert Redford and Sundance), the filmmakers, University of Wisconsin and the Wisconsin Union Directorate, and all the sponsors and festival producers who support and bring us the Wisconsin Film Festival each year. Lastly, a special thank you to mother, Ethel, who helped instill in me my love for movies and Roger Ebert for his reviews, recommendations and passion for films and filmmaking which he so generously shared throughout his life.