Festival Buzz: Part One of Three
The Big Indies: Narrative Features, Experimental and Animated Shorts
2015 Wisconsin Film Festival, April 9-16; Film Guide at wifilmfest.org»
Film Guide available in Wednesday’s Capital Times (Wisconsin State Journal insert and free distribution sites)
Box Office Opens Saturday, March 14 at 12:00pm: Union South Box Office (Noon-8:00pm); Memorial Union Campus Arts Box Office (Noon-5:30pm); and 2015.wifilmfest.org
Madison Film Forum coverage of the 2015 Wisconsin Film Festival continues with our annual “Big Three” breakdowns of the schedule, which was released today. Be sure to check back for more information about more films this week before tickets go on sale Saturday.
Thursday: The Big Auteurs: International Cinema and Restorations
Friday: The Big Docs: Non-Fiction Features and Shorts
Welcome to the Year of the Deep Cut
In our summary of the 2015 titles and trailers that had been released before today, I suggested that this might be a year for many “deep cuts.” (Urban Dictionary definition of “deep cut”: A song by an artist that only true fans of said artist will enjoy/know.”) Now that the full schedule is out, my colleague Jake and I agree that indeed 2015 is the Year of the Deep Cut at the Wisconsin Film Festival. This mostly affects the revivals and restorations, which Jake will discuss tomorrow. But even with the older titles I discuss below, particularly Roar and The Astrologer, a shift that has been slowly emerging in the last few years has now come to the foreground: the restorations and revivals have become a showcase for the esoteric, rather than established classics. Old School: Laura. New School: Ride the Pink Horse. The former is familiar to the Turner Classic Movie crowd; the latter is familiar to those who really know their noir.
This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it is a difference worth noting and discussing. Re-evaluation and rediscovery is an important part of a healthy film culture. It could turn out to be a very good thing if the Festival audience is game and wants to play along. Jake and I will elaborate on this deep cut theme in our coverage in the coming weeks.
The Old Friends
In addition to the deep cut theme, there also tends to be a good deal of returning to the well in the Wisconsin Film Festival independent feature programming. Again this is not necessarily a bad thing, and we can’t fault some talented filmmakers for being prolific. So in this section you might sense a degree of tension in my remarks: on the one hand I feel like the critics of the early years of the New York Film Festival who wondered aloud why so many Godards had to be featured each year; on the other hand I happen to like most of these filmmakers and appreciate the opportunity to follow their work each year.
Manglehorn | David Gordon Green | USA | 2014 | 97 min»
If you’re already starting to get a sense of déjà vu, that’s because my 2014 Big Indies overview also started with a David Gordon Green film, Joe. Many people thought that Joe was a return to “indie form” for Green after his mainstream hit Pineapple Express and mainstream flop Your Highness. I felt it was two-thirds great, with a pretty clichéd genre-determined third act. The real Green revelation last year was the rare screening of his student short, Will You Lather Up My Roughhouse?, which really clarified for me what makes Green special. He’s great at creating textures and vibrant characters; once he’s asked to follow a conventional plot he’s much less interesting. Still, when he’s good, he’s one of the most interesting filmmakers out there, and many individual scenes in Joe were fantastic.
Manglehorn should be worth the price of admission for the combination of Green with stars Al Pacino and Harmony Korine. Pacino plays a small-town Texas locksmith who lives in the past because of the “girl who got away” from him 20 years ago. He shuts out everyone around him except for his cat. Alonso Duralde at The Wrap observes, “The low-key, dialed-down acting that Green has elicited from the frequently hammy Pacino—on the heels of Nicolas Cage’s sensitive turn in Green’s Joe—establishes the filmmaker as the go-to sponsor for members of Overactors Anonymous.” Much of the negative response to the film so far concerns its “experimental” elements, which actually makes me even more intrigued.
Results | Andrew Bujalski | 2015 | USA | 105 min»
Bujalski visited the Wisconsin Film Festival with his film Computer Chess (2013), with which he overtly tried to shake off that whole “mumblecore” thing by doing a highly stylized period piece about an early 1980s computer conference shot on video technology from that era. As much as I admired Computer Chess, at times it seemed a bit too constrained by its style, and Bujalksi is at his best when his performers are allowed to breathe. Early word seems to indicate that Results is allowed to breathe. Kevin Corrigan stars as a newly divorced man whose trip to the local gym leads to an interesting relationship with the gym owner (Guy Pearce) and trainer (Cobie Smulders). Bilge Ebiri at Vulture concludes that “Results feels so free-form, so liberated from the shackles of genre, that it becomes its own wonderfully alive and unpredictable thing.”
Uncle Kent 2 | Todd Rohal | USA | 2015 | 73 min»
My running joke last year concerned how often Joe Swanberg seems to show up in films at the Wisconsin Film Festival. After my first glance at the 2015 schedule, I was surprised not to see a film directed by him. But, of course, here he is acting in a sequel to a film he directed in 2011. This seems like no ordinary sequel, however. The SXSW festival guide concludes that the film “plays out like an absurdist successor that bends the rules of sequels and the minds of the audience.”
My main interest here, however, is the return to feature filmmaking by Todd Rohal. His short, Rat Pack Rat, was a highlight last year (as was the shorts program he curated to accompany it). Rohal has a great comic sense, and putting him in charge of a meta-sequel to a Joe Swanberg film seems like an inspired idea.
Bloomin Mud Shuffle | Frank V. Ross | USA | 2015 | 75 min»
Many readers might know Ross as Frank from Drinking Buddies by Joe Swanberg (there he is again). But he has been a prolific filmmaker as well. I saw Ross’s feature Tiger Tail in Blue (2012) at the Wisconsin Film Festival, I knew I needed to see it again to make any firm conclusions about it. But you know what? That’s been pretty hard to do. It was ranked number five on Indiewire’s “Best Undistributed Films of 2012.” Now I realize that it is streaming on Fandor, but for the most part it has been difficult to find. One reason I’ve wanted to revisit it is because J.J. Murphy is a fan of Ross and his work. So I hope to catch up with it by the time we look at his new feature, Bloomin Mud Shuffle at the Festival.
That said, I could barely find anything about the new film by my deadline, so like you I will have to pick up today’s Film Guide. The only things I know for sure are that it is produced by Joe Swanberg (!) and stars Natasha Lyonne.
Stinking Heaven | Nathan Silver | USA | 2014 | 70 min»
Nathan Silver might not be familiar to Festival audiences, but his name should be recognized by anyone following recent developments in alternative film exhibition in Madison. The Micro-Wave Cinema Series has shown his films, including Exit Elena and Soft in the Head (which were reviewed here by Jake Smith). In fact, Micro-Wave will be screening Silver’s other 2014 feature, Uncertain Terms, on April 26. Silver might also familiar to readers of The New York Times, who profiled him in 2014.
Silver describes Stinking Heaven as a black comedy inspired by documentaries like Warrendale and Streetwise and the absurdity of Luis Buñuel films. Set in the 1990s, a married couple runs a commune for recovering drug addicts. The relative harmony of the group is disrupted with the arrival of Ann, a recovering addict and an ex-girlfriend of one of the members. Sounds like a perfect date movie.
En Plein Air | Jerzy Rose | USA | 2014 | 8 min»
I just wanted to include a short note about Jerzy Rose’s short En Plein Air, because his feature last year, Crimes Against Humanity, was my favorite film of the Festival and ranked high in my favorite films of 2014. It will screen before Sophie Letourneur’s feature film, Gaby Baby Doll, and based on preliminary reviews I’ve read of the feature, it might be the better of the two films.
We’ll soon follow up on more filmmakers and films that I’m less familiar with like Andrew T. Beltzer’s Young Bodies Heal Quickly (recently reviewed by J.J. Murphy), Britni West’s Tired Moonlight, and Jason Banker’s Felt. Stay tuned!
Experimental / Animated Shorts
While I regret that experimental film does not have a more visible presence in the Festival, there’s some good stuff coming up that we certainly will talk about in more detail in the coming weeks.
Below the Skin: Films by Jennifer Reeder»
While not as well known as the feature filmmakers listed above, Jennifer Reeder is a well established figure in the experimental film scene. In addition to solo and group shows across the country, Jennifer Reeder’s films have been featured in the Venice Biennale and the 2000 Whitney Biennial. Reeder’s A Million Miles Away, (2014) won Best Short at the Chicago Underground Film Festival, and Best Female Filmmaker at the International Short Film Festival in Oberhausen, Germany. Reeder studied filmmaking at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and currently teaches as an Associate Professor in the Department of Art at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She describes her films as personal stories about relationships, trauma, and coping, and her style draws from forms ranging from after school specials, music videos, and magical realism.
Her Wisconsin Film Festival screening will include three recent films: And I Will Rise if Only to Hold You (2011, 25 min); A Million Miles Away (2014, 28 min); and her most recent film, Blood Below the Skin (2015, 33 min).
Worlds of Tomorrow: New Animated Shorts»
Animator Don Hertzfeldt has been a darling of the festival circuit for several years, and rightfully so. Currently the easiest way to see his work is on Netflix, which is streaming his 2012 feature (comprised of three shorts) It’s Such a Beautiful Day. Hertzfeldt’s latest film, Worlds of Tomorrow (2015, 17 min) will headline a program of recent animated shorts. Also in the program will be A Town Called Panic: The Christmas Log (2014, 26 min) by Belgian animators Stéphane Aubier and Vincent Patar, whose feature A Town Called Panic (2007) was the first stop-motion feature to be screened at the Cannes Film Festival. Other filmmakers will include Gerald Guthrie (Without a Doubt); Nate Theis (Driving); John A. May (The Crossing); and Mark Kausler (It’s the Cat and Some Other Cat). Good chance that this will be one of the best shorts programs of the Festival.
From the Archives
Tomorrow Jake will address most of the revivals and restorations, but I thought that a few of the titles might best be discussed here in relation to independent film spirit and history. The first two seem to be Old School revival programming. The second two are New School deep cuts.
Five Corners | Tony Bill | USA | 1987 | 90 min»
Polyester | John Waters | USA | 1981 | 88 min»
Tony Bill’s Five Corners will be interesting to revisit because it came just before the Sundance boom of the early 1990s (sex, lies and videotape was 1989). The Independent Spirit Awards had just begun two years earlier. It would be interesting to know what would have happened to the film if it had arrived just a few years later. Several in the cast were a movie or two away from breaking through to stardom: Tim Robbins (Bull Durham, 1988); John Turturro (Do the Right Thing, 1989). And that same year John Patrick Shanley won the Academy Award, but for a different script: Moonstruck. Would the film’s eccentricity have been more accepted as a higher budget independent film rather than a lower budget studio film? In any case, if nothing else it provides an interesting contrast to the 70-minute micro-budgeted features that dominate the new independent programming this year.
If you’re looking to watch a film with a crowd who’s up for a fun experience, John Waters’s Polyester will be a pretty safe bet. I first saw the film when Waters visited the UW-Madison campus my freshman year (what year? I’ll never tell). He spoke in the Union Theater after showing the short The Diane Linklater Story, but in conjunction with his visit the WUD Film Committee showed Polyester in the Rathskeller that same week. And yes, somehow they had the scratch-and-sniff cards (see picture above for a more recent edition of the cards). At the time they told us that the supply of cards had almost completely run out. But somehow over the years I keep coming across references to screenings with the cards, so somebody still has the chemical formulas to continue printing them. (In his talk, Waters discussed the process of formulating the specific, um, odors.) And yes, my understanding is that the Festival screening will have the cards, so come early and bring a sealable plastic baggie so that you can preserve the card for home use. They literally don’t make films like this anymore, in fact they barely ever did.
Roar | Noel Marshall | USA | 1981 | 102 min»
The Astrologer | Craig Denney | USA | 1975 | 96 min»
As I suggested above and in an earlier post, these picks seem to me to be a little “inside baseball.” Or, a little inside the programmer / festival circuit, where connoisseurs might try to out deep cut each other. These films certainly are not coming out of nowhere, they are part of a concerted effort to promote and circulate cult films (but which comes first, the cult or the circulation?). In the case of Roar, this is another re-release from the good folks at Alamo Drafthouse, who also re-released Miami Connection. In the case of The Astrologer, as I mentioned earlier, the American Genre Film Archive (okay, also the Alamo Drafthouse) used Kickstarter to help raise funds to transfer the one extant print for DCP distribution.
There’s nothing really wrong with this, of course. The films will probably be good fun. (Oh no, have I turned into Bosley Crowther?) I hope to have time to preview them and review them with an open mind, but that will be kind of irrelevant because clearly the crowd experience with them is part of the selling point.
Tomorrow: Jake Smith on The Big Auteurs